Here are 100 books that The Wild Trees fans have personally recommended if you like
The Wild Trees.
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One way I bring lightness and wonder to my life is through the joy of observing something new around me in this world. The new thing might be the forty Heavenly Blue morning glories that bloomed one morning for my father and me, finding an ancient fossil shell in a skirt of fallen shale at the bottom of a cliff or hearing Balinese gamelan music for the first time. But each time one of these wonders lights up my day, I am reminded of how limited our ability to observe is. Each of these books gave me a view into a world I had not even dreamed about.
All my life I’ve loved looking closely at the natural world to see as much as possible: Why is that leaf broken? Was a chipmunk digging here? Is that a different kind of mushroom? But no matter how closely I looked, I was unaware of the overwhelming complexities and sophistication of the fungal world.
Sheldrake shows the interconnections, not metaphysical ones but actual physical and chemical connections, between fungi, plants, and even living, moving animals. If that chapter about ants doesn’t change how you see the world, I don’t know what will. Fungi own the world, and we are just lucky to live in it.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
I have been a lover of all things outdoors since I was a boy. After my father was killed at a young age, my brothers and I took his love for outdoor adventure and made it our own. Fully aware of all that can go wrong, my brothers and I went into our ventures with a keen sense of humor. Camping, fishing, and kayaking all come with their own challenges and requisite hilarious moments. It is these moments of adversity, and personal risk, that are sometimes lightened by a good dose of laughter and levity.
This book minces no words about the difficulties of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Bryson does a brilliant job laying out the reality that despite extensive planning and, in the case of his hiking partner, Steven Katz, differing motives, things can go wrong.
Bryson does an amazing job keeping the story light with side-splitting humor. The blend of humor and adventure play roles as some of the primary inspirations behind my own writing.
From the author of "Notes from a Small Island" and "The Lost Continent" comes this humorous report on his walk along the Appalachian Trail. The Trail covers 14 states and over 2000 miles, and stretches along the east coast of America from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south. It is famous for being the longest continuous footpath in the world. It snakes through some of the wildest and most specactular landscapes in America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas.
I am passionate about the selected books because they have a unique way of broadening one's horizons and inspiring change in life. Their diverse narratives and profound insights invite all of us to discover new perspectives, challenge our beliefs, and deepen our understanding of the world.
I enjoyed this book specifically because it illustrates trees as social creatures, talking and sharing with each other and building relationships. Peter Wohlleben really opened my eyes to the hidden underground network in forests.
The way Peter tells the story of trees' lives makes it so relatable. He tells the story of trees' unique lives in such an approachable and familiar way, describing how they "feel" pain, "taste" chemicals, and "hear" sounds.
I found the way Wohlleben animates complex scientific ideas through captivating prose most appealing. Deepening my personal relationship with nature.
"A paradigm-smashing chronicle of joyous entanglement that will make you acknowledge your own entanglement in the ancient and ever-new web of being."--Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I fell in love with all things Greek around the same time I fell in love with my Greek Cypriot husband about 30 years ago. That was when I started reading books about Greece as well as fiction set in Greece. I also learned to cook Greek food, which made both my man and me happy. I traveled to as many Greek islands, and of course, Cyprus, as time would allow. Eventually, I started writing books set in Greece myself. I went to a Greek Orthodox church and took Greek language evening classes. I feel at this point and have been told by Greek islanders, that I am now essentially Greek.
I love Greece and Greek life, and I love animals and nature, so this book set in Corfu, which is the story of how Gerald Durrell spent his early childhood when his mother decided to move the entire family to Corfu, really hit all the buttons for me.
In my opinion, the book is even better than the television series. Gerald Durrell’s love of fauna and flora possibly began in the White House on Kalami Bay in Corfu. I was so excited when I arranged a holiday in Corfu and actually stayed in Kalami Bay myself. I ran around looking at lizards, birds, and plants, thinking of Durrell as a wild child, swerving away as far as possible from conventional education. What an idyll I found it truly was.
The inspiration behind ITV's hit family drama, The Durrells.
My Family and Other Animals is Gerald Durrell's hilarious account of five years in his childhood spent living with his family on the island of Corfu. With snakes, scorpions, toads, owls and geckos competing for space with one bookworm brother and another who's gun-mad, as well as an obsessive sister, young Gerald has an awful lot of natural history to observe. This richly detailed, informative and riotously funny memoir of eccentric family life is a twentieth-century classic.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics…
One way I bring lightness and wonder to my life is through the joy of observing something new around me in this world. The new thing might be the forty Heavenly Blue morning glories that bloomed one morning for my father and me, finding an ancient fossil shell in a skirt of fallen shale at the bottom of a cliff or hearing Balinese gamelan music for the first time. But each time one of these wonders lights up my day, I am reminded of how limited our ability to observe is. Each of these books gave me a view into a world I had not even dreamed about.
Over and over as I listened to this book, I found myself exclaiming, No way! Whoa! as the real-life adventure unfolded of living entirely with and coming to know an isolated tiny tribe in the South American rainforest.
What I love especially is that the biggest revelations are how people live, think, and interact, as well as the vast differences between those ways and what I know in my life.
This book blew my mind, and I especially recommend the audiobook version with the author reading it so you can hear him—one of the very outsiders in the world to be able to do so—pronounce words in the people’s language.
Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, a life-changing tale set among a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil that offers a riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself.
"Immensely interesting and deeply moving.... One of the best books I have read."—Lucy Dodwell, New Scientist
A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil.
Daniel Everett arrived among the Pirahã with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly…
As a leader of mountaineering and field science programs, I learned that Mother Earth knows a thing or two about magic. When I see the magic of nature under attack, I have the same response as when witnessing a helpless person being bullied: I want to join the fight. As a writer, my most powerful weapons are my words. And the best use of my words is in the telling of riveting stories—that both entertain and educate—in defense of the wild.
Abby’s best novel is the primer, the bible, the fountainhead of fiction addressing the destruction of nature for profit. In this case, damming the Colorado River. In fact, “monkeywrenching,” as a verb defining an action in defense of nature, has a much broader current applicability thanks to Abbey’s novel.
'Revolutionary ... An extravagant, finely written tale of ecological sabotage' The New York Times
Audacious, controversial and hilarious, The Monkey Wrench Gang is Edward Abbey's masterpiece - a big, boisterous and unforgettable novel about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames of environmental activism.
Throughout the vast American West, nature is being vicitimized by a Big Government / Big Business conspiracy of bridges, dams and concrete. But a motley gang of individuals has decided that enough is enough. A burnt-out veteran, a mad doctor and a polygamist join forces in a noble cause: to dismantle the machinery of progress through…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’m pretty well qualified to provide you with a list of five great books about men at war because, frankly, I’ve spent half my life reading them and the other half trying to write them (you be the judge!). My degree in Military Studies was focused on the question of what makes men endure the lunacy of war (whether they be ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’), and it was in fiction that I found some of the clearest answers–clue: it’s often less about country and duty and more about the love of the men alongside the soldier. In learning how to write, I also learned how to recognize great–enjoy!
O’Brien performed some sort of alchemy in turning a previously dry and underpopulated section of the historical fiction genre into literary gold, at once gripping and supremely well-written. One follows the adventures of a Royal Navy Commander and his Irish doctor friend–a man with a secret life–through the war at sea in the Napoleonic era, and I found the balance between naval exploits–Jack Aubrey being a swashbuckler of renown–and period history made for fascinating counter-points.
Over and above that, I loved the way O’Brien built an ensemble cast and proceeded to draw the reader into their lives, making the death of any one of them a personal loss. I know that I benefitted from learning this writing trick and used it myself in my Empire series, and I know at least one other Roman author who did much the same. Wonderful stories that kept me coming back, and this is…
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
I started my academic life with two passions: listening to those I was researching and writing in ways that were accessible to all readers. I wasn’t willing to bow down to orthodoxies that would stifle my capacity to think and to write and make my way into new and emergent ideas and practices. Questions of ethics threaded their way through it all, not the kind of rule-based nonsense of university ethics committees, but ethics that enabled me to consider how matter matters and to re-think what we are in relation to each other and to the Earth.
There are novels based on this book, which are also enthralling. Having been an academic all my life, I was immediately captured by Simard’s daring struggle to tell the truth that goes against the established scientific order. She took me on her own adventure to understand the sociality of trees. I read it during the COVID pandemic when pretty much the only beings I related to were trees in my nearby Botanic Garden.
There was an oak tree I talked to every day, and lying in its shelter, I was protected by it. Later, I came to love an Angophora costata, who loved me right back. Simard gave me insights into the possibility of such relationality and its vital importance to the world’s future.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery
“Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. [The book] carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears--and of a human being listening in on the conversation. The interplay of personal narrative, scientific insights and the amazing revelations about the life of the forest make a compelling story.”—Robin Wall…
I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
Pyle is a leading butterfly expert and a brilliant natural history writer. And he happens to be bigfoot-curious. As am I. The past few years have seen Sasquatch—at least images of the mythical-or-not-mythical beast—cropping up widely in this region, usually to try to sell something. Pyle takes it more seriously, without being boring or sensationalist. In this telling, Pyle packs his rig with camping gear (and plenty of IPA) and—with his expansive knowledge of nature, his keen skills of observation (of all species, us included), and his humor—heads into southwest Washington’s Dark Divide to try to clear up what, exactly, he heard decades earlier on a camping trip in this remote corner of Cascadia. As to what he finds, you be the judge.
The inspiration for the film The Dark Divide starring David Cross and Debra Messing, one of America’s most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot―and finds the wildness within ourselves.
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Yale-trained ecologist Dr. Robert Pyle treks into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovers both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. On the trail of what he thought was legend, he searches out Indians who tell him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully…
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
I love the quirky, restless Pacific Northwest, also known as Cascadia, my home bioregion. Nonfiction is my jam, but I enjoy stories both unreal and real (stealing and tweaking Oregon author Ursula Le Guin’s use of the terms). I’m also an avid hiker. I’ve often wondered how I could provide folks heading here to hike the 400-mile Oregon Coast Trail (another passion of mine) with my personal book list introducing them to this landscape and its history, human and natural. Here is a start.
This biography from a small academic publisher takes readers to a place in-between: the Oregon Coast at the turn of the 19th century, as native people and their culture were being displaced by white settlers. It tells the story of Annie Miner Peterson, a Miluk Coos Indian woman who became a minor celebrity among anthropologists and linguists. She was born in the days when “the passage of time was marked by fish and leaves;" upon her death in 1939, “the Miluk language became extinct.” It’s a sensitive and unflinching portrait of a memorable woman navigating her fraught era.
She's Tricky Like Coyote is the story of Annie Miner Peterson, who was born in an Indian village on a tidal slough along the southern Oregon Coast in 1860.
Annie lived a full and fascinating seventy-nine years. In the 1930s, she dictated her story, in Miluk Coos, to anthropologist Melville Jacobs, who translated the account into English. Although only a few pages long, the autobiography reveals a bright, outspoken, and independent woman who was raised as a traditional Indian and married five Indian men but whose adult life was spent in the white world. Supplementing the account with anthropologists' field…
