100 books like Pet Projects

This is one of my favorite books ever. Horwitz’s project was to follow famous travelers, and Blue Latitudes follows Captain Cook on a voyage that Cook himself characterized as having gone “farther than any other man has been before.” (Trekkies take note: Cook/Kirk, “farther than any other man has been  before”/”boldly go where no man has been before.” Who knew?) 

Star Trek aside, Horwitz, accompanied by his hard-drinking sidekick Roger, boldly goes where Cook went, exploring history, culture, and the legacies of European colonialism on their way. In between bouts of laughter, we learn a lot about the South Pacific, then and now, and about Cook and his men themselves—not to speak of Horwitz and Roger. It’s a rollicking voyage through time and space that holds your attention throughout.

This is a first book, covering Aiyar’s years in China as a political correspondent for the Indian Express and The Hindu. Because she is Indian, Aiyar’s perspective differs from Americans’ viewpoints, which drew me, as I’ve been to both India and China. Aiyar tracks the impact of rapid growth on her informants’ sense of self and place—and then compares China’s growth to India’s. It’s a fast-paced, lively book featuring lots of interaction between Aiyar and her students, their families, and other informants—a thoughtful portrait of a culture shifting from tradition into an unknowable future, written by a journalist constantly aware of the radical differences between Indian and “new Chinese” values and sensibilities.  

Lose Your Mother is the story of Hartman’s investigation into the African side of the slave trade, an effort to understand the past as prelude to the present. Heading to Ghana, from which thousands of captive Africans were shipped into slavery in the Americas, Hartman spends a year immersing herself in Ghanian life and culture, or at least as much of it as she can access as an American. What she learns is as much about herself as about history, and what we learn is about how people construe local histories in order to understand their own place in the world.

In An End to Suffering, Mishra records his efforts to understand the Buddha’s relevance to today’s world. Like Aiyar, he is conscious of the differences between India and the West and the liminal world of individuals who, like him, live between them. Unlike her, he delves deeply into history, crisscrossing centuries, countries, and eastern and western literatures and philosophies, through which—over several decades—he moves and matures. Mishra confronts the writers and philosophers he studies, asking how their precepts affect him and the world in which he lives, and he doesn’t mind letting us know that his responses changed over time. I resonate with this book because it is a spiritual journey, written out of Mishra’s thoughtful, learned, search for stability in a world of unceasing change.

So simple and yet so poetic (both visually and lyrically), We All Play is a catalog of human and more-than-human animals delighting in movement and sound in the outdoors.

This book is great for a younger (baby and toddler) readership, and highlights our connection with all living beings. It also peppers in some Cree language words, which are fun to explore. I love the adorable drawings of animals and children that Flett created with the ochres and umbers of her earthy palette. 

There’s this rumor that poets look longer and harder at the ornaments of the world than do anyone else.  They keep looking, and looking, and looking, after most everyone else has long ago looked away, moved on. Here, in the wonderful world of poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book of nonfiction, whimsy and reverence twine like the DNA helices of the flora and fauna she examines. In her essay on the firefly, I adore the part when the insects “…lose their light rhythm for a few minutes after a single car’s headlights pass. Sometimes it takes hours for them to recalibrate their blinking patterns.”

Human progress is often bad for wildlife. Our roads, housing developments, and stores often disrupt wildlife migration corridors. We are the problem, but Meeg Pincus writes an uplifting book about how we are also the solution.

Make Way for Animals! is a book about coexisting with wildlife. When we put our heads together there is always a way to meet our needs and the needs of the creatures with whom we share this planet.

Kids get more excited than adults about the shift from fall to winter – new boots and coats and mittens before they are lost!

I like to share in the library the way animals prepare for winter, too. Some sleep, some change color, some fly south. The spare lyrical text makes this a good read aloud supporting themes and units for preschool and Kindergarten of winter, snow, and solstice.

In addition circles details on each page explain more about the approach to winter for children to explore later.

When it comes to animal photography, National Geographic set the standard for excellence – and when one pairs 200 of their best photographs with poetry from some of the country's finest poets, you end up with a beautiful, coffee table book that deserves to be in every house.

From classic poets like Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Rudyard Kipling to contemporary writers including Naomi Shihab Nye, Jack Prelutsky, and Jane Yolen (and even a few from anthologist and former U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis) this is a book you will want to take time to peruse read, and ponder.

After writing 14 children’s books about art appreciation, I decided to try my hand at children’s poetry. When I read this collection of haiku by Jack Prelutsky, it was a revelation. Each poem is a first-person description of an animal, full of rich, unexpected language. By writing in first-person, Prelutsky broke one of haiku’s cardinal rules. But it worked—and inspired me to write my own collection in the first person as well. Here’s one of my favorites poems in his book:

Raucously we caw.
Your straw men do not fool us.
We burgle your corn.