100 books like Mrs Moreau's Warbler

I love this series of three short novels enough to have read it more times than I can count. The language of the novel is simple and evocative. I love the main character, a young wizard who starts out as proud, angry and arrogant, but becomes deeply compassionate when his hubris leads him to make a tragic and evil use of magic.

I could feel myself grabbed by the world of the novel, a world of men and dragons, of islands dotted in an endless sea, of powerful mages who interfere at their peril with the precarious balance of the world between good and evil. 

I loved the Alice books as a child and even more as an adult. As a child, I loved their absurdist humor; the situations Alice gets into are ridiculous, and the ways she gets out are even more so. As an adult, I love that the absurdist humor asks really interesting questions about language and naming and self, our ideas of time and space, and social conventions and who’s in charge of them.

All this with hilariously eccentric characters and nonsense poetry that isn’t quite nonsense! To top it off, reading Alice as an adult is a trip because so many books, movies, songs, and other creative pieces have referenced events or language from the Alice books. What fun!

I’ll admit that I’m fiercely jealous of this book’s title, which is clever and à propos (but now, thanks to Wright, it’s taken). But the book is also delightful.

It’s a history of scientific naming, more or less, but Wright has a ton of fun with that. He asks how plants were named in ancient Assyria and Greece, winds his way through the Middle Ages, and continues to the present day. Does that sound dry? It isn’t—I chortled at the discussion of rude Latin names (Geastrum fornicatum, anyone?), and giggled at Wright’s appropriately disrespectful take on the modern profusion of “species concepts” (“You will be delighted to hear that I will not be describing the remaining twenty-five concepts.”).

I learned a bunch and had fun doing it, and that’s a big win.

I love Bill Bryson’s dry and wry sense of humor, his sharp eye for the preposterous, and his fascination with detail. In his better-known books, it’s travel, but this fits my fascination with language and naming because it tells the story of English.

Well, stories of English, anyway—it’s not a scholarly history (which I’d also enjoy) but more a collection of anecdotes to illustrate some of the quirks of the language. It’s fun and easy reading, and some things piqued my curiosity enough that I dug in further with more authoritative books. 

October lives in the woods with her father where their lives are surrounded by peace and nature. October’s life sees a drastic change after her father has an accident and needs to go to the hospital.  Suddenly, October finds herself living with her mum in the city. Katya Balen is the most beautiful writer and this book is a literary feast for the soul. 

In my living room, I have a shelf of discarded birds’ nests, and my sofa is a beachy aqua colour. It’s no wonder then, that I was initially drawn to this book’s cover. The story itself was a pleasant surprise. I can best describe this novel as a nature meditation because, when I started reading, Inga Simpson’s prose seemed to slow time. I became less interested in achieving my daily tasks and paid minute attention to the birds and trees outside my window. Although a story of loss and heartache is weaved through this Nest, it is less important than the gaps between the plot. I am convinced this delightful novel about an art teacher and her garden added a year or two to my life! 

This is a wonderful book. The iconic song of the blackbird takes the author into a series of exciting reflections that complicate a whole range of concepts often applied to birds, such as dance, space, and territory. I was repeatedly struck by her insights into the lives of birds.

I am amazed by the way she brings bird biographies into focus. At a time when birds (and other animals) are still often seen either as empty categories or simply good to think with, such a perspective feels like a fresh wind. As Despret observes, bird songs are in the process of vanishing. I am inclined to think of her powerful book, with its metaphoric uses of the song of the blackbird, as echoes from Rachel Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring.

This is another delight that we found in our local library. The illustrations and design of Little Bird’s Day are exquisite – the background colours of the page change as the story moves through the day and at night the page is covered in stars except for the outline of a bird as it dreams about flying across the sky. The story is beautiful and the artwork by Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr is outstanding. It is no surprise that this book was nominated for several book awards in 2020. It should have won all the prizes. Another excellent Indigenous author and illustrator that I hope more people will read and share with their families.

The Book of British Birds is one of several comprehensive reference books produced around half a century ago for the Reader’s Digest. They were written without jargon and have become classics. The illustrations in this bird volume are excellent, with bird-by-bird descriptions, followed by a range of fascinating topics, such as how birds care for their plumage, camouflage, how they sleep, and courtship displays. Some information is now itself history – who would have thought (for example) that the ubiquitous starling is now on the Red List of UK birds?

True to form, Montgomery advances our understanding of birds through stories and adventures from the field. An accessible book from a celebrated writer whose love of animals is infectious.