100 books like North Country

Tove Jansson was one of my favourite authors as a child, thanks to her magical Moomin series.

Her fiction for adults, too (The Summer Book, Art in Nature) is wonderful. However, I have gone for one of her lesser-known books, Notes from an Island, which is simply a short journal with brief and starkly beautiful diary entries concerning the times she spent with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, on a barren and otherwise uninhabited island in the Gulf of Finland.

The book is a collaboration - Pietilä supplied stark, minimalist illustrations - and it also includes sections of a journal contributed by Brunström, the gruff mariner who helped the couple with their trips to and from the island.

Jansson’s writing style is as sparse as the island itself, reflecting the tough conditions, which nevertheless, did not preclude a life of artistic fulfillment for both her and Pietilä. This… show more.

This book – a history of the act of trespass – explores our relationship with the natural world in a provocative and highly original way.

Starting with the statistic that the public are excluded from 92% of the land of England, Hayes combines history with a meditation on the implications of excluding large swathes of the population from what is, at the end of the day, their own country.

However, this is not a dry political tract but a lyrical and passionately argued text enlivened by the author’s own exploits, trespassing on land across the country and visiting everything from migrant camps in Calais to music festivals to explore the various uses and abuses of shared land. 

The book is angry and defiant, and – because it has helped spark debate – I see it as something fundamentally hopeful.

This book really is the full package – an anthology of nature writing encompassing both fiction and non-fiction and travelling across the centuries to provide a vivid and kaleidoscopic celebration of the British Isles.

The book is divided into themes (for example, Woods; Swimming and Moors, Heaths and Mountains) and is not shy of combining classics such as excerpts from W H Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life with pieces from breakthrough writers such as On Class and the Countryside by Anita Sethi.

For me, personally, part of the joy of this was the mix of the familiar, well-loved tales (and who growing up in Britain in the ’70s and ’80s didn’t love A Kestrel for a Knave) and the newer discoveries (such as Isabella Tree’s Wilding). The book is almost as rich and diverse as British wildlife itself.

I have chosen this book because of the idea behind it.

After recovering from a blackout, author Torbjørn Ekelund was told he had developed epilepsy and would not be allowed to drive. As a consequence, Ekelund decided not to be held back by this and instead began to walk everywhere – through urban areas and countryside – looking for any path however obvious or hidden.

In the book that resulted from this new approach to life, Ekelund has not only written about his own experiences but tied them in to a wider meditation on pathways, from the physical to the metaphorical to the spiritual. 

A mix of history, philosophy and travelogue, what I liked about all this is the author’s choice to turn the trauma of an epileptic fit into an opportunity to walk, think, observe and feel more than ever.

When European colonists settled North America, they began to significantly alter the landscape in ways that were deeply ignorant of ecological health. Now, over 400 years later, that impact has not lessened. However, over that time, there have been significant ebbs and flows in the landscape relative to how it’s used (or not used). This fascinating book follows that trajectory as it explores the environmental history of New England. Even for those not familiar with this particular region, this book offers a unique window into how dynamic and fluid landscapes and ecosystems can be over the course of time.  

There are many general introductions to American environmental history. This one, by a pioneering leader in the field, is excellent. The comprehensive narrative provides a good mix of facts and interpretation, and Merchant provides as well a list of agencies, concepts, laws, and people, in addition to resource guides to print, film, video, archival, and electronic sources, plus bibliographies and essays on a variety of topics

Islands of Abandonment shares extraordinary examples of nature’s ability to reclaim – and restore – land abused by humans.

In startling vignettes, the author visits numerous abandoned sites, uninhabited by humans for different reasons: from Chernobyl to a no man's land on the island of Cyprus, to factories simply rendered obsolete leaving the surrounding neighborhoods blighted, dangerous and often empty.

I found this book to be, if not hopeful, then cautiously optimistic in its affirmation of nature’s resilience, even in the wake of massive destruction. Cal Flyn’s writing is enviably good: keenly observant, capturing intimate details about these landscapes and the non-human beings who inhabit them in vivid detail.

Unforgettable and illuminating. This is nature writing and investigative journalism at its best.

This is a great book to take along on a road trip in the U.S. West. In fact, I’ve used this book multiple times on geography field courses, in which students and I camp our way across the Southwest. Wyckoff includes 100 different landscape features, including both physical and cultural landscapes. Think everything from “Cacti and Joshua Trees” to “Spanish Colonial Revival Architecture” to “Edge Cities,” and you have a little taste of the book. Wyckoff’s “Tips for Navigating Western Landscapes” are especially useful and will help even the most experienced traveler to see and understand cultural and physical landscapes in new ways. 

No one writes quite like Simon Schama. This is a sprawling epic of a book, global in its sweep. 

It ranges from the Polish-Lithuanian forests, where bison roam oblivious of centuries of human conflict and suffering, to the Orinoco, in Walter Raleigh’s doomed and bloody footsteps, to the grandeur (or hubris?) of Mount Rushmore. Much of it, however, concerns the tangled threads of myth and collective memory that haunt the English landscape. 

As someone born in Nottingham and brought up on Robin Hood, I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the medieval greenwood. Schama’s erudition and range of examples are dazzling. Throughout, he argues that Western civilization, far from being fundamentally antagonistic to nature as some have claimed, is permeated with rich, powerful and persistent myths of nature and landscape. 

This is an engrossing tour of public lands from Terry Tempest Williams, a poet and essayist who is an American treasure. From this beautiful and vivid book, I realized spiritual connections between human beings and nature, between past and future, between the soul and the earth.

"Our national parks are blood," she writes.