100 books like Wild

I love that Basso can take me so far inside someone's mind that I can begin to understand not just what they think and feel but how and why they think and feel it.

This book contains the very systems and processes that we use to make knowledge and meaning, and I love learning about a way of knowing and making meaning that is very different from mine—entirely logical, purposeful, valid, and different from mine. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and the oldest, with its origins lost in the mists of time.

It contains a dramatic account of the Great Flood, upon which the much later Noah’s Ark tale was based. The Epic was current for some 3,000 years and entered the literature of many ancient cultures including those of Sumer, where it originated, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite.

The Epic has been reconstructed from many thousands of clay tablets unearthed from Middle Eastern archaeological sites. The cultures through which it passed moulded their own flesh upon its venerable bones and this I have also done. 

A beautiful and touching account of the author’s travels in early 11th century Japan. Lady Sarashina is deep in sorrow from the death of her husband and searches for solace in nature and place on pilgrimage routes and at temples along the way. This is a profound weaving of mind, journey, and place, as she travels across the 72 seasons of Japan’s year. Emotions link land and mind. She is acutely attentive to cuckoo calls and cherry blossom, the rain pattering on bamboo at night, the cool water in the stone well. “Even as I wander on my journey,” she writes, “It always stays above me in the sky, this moon at dawn, this moon I gazed on in the capital.”

In one of the finest pieces of world literature, Robert Bringhurst recounts stories of the Haida mythtellers. The isles of Haida Gwaii are 160 km into the Pacific, drenched in rain, mist, and wind. Here was one of the world's richest traditions of story, place, and nature, where myths thought themselves into people. We have the extraordinary sagas of Raven Travelling, Goose Food, and the Qquana Cycle, some individual oral sagas more than 5,000 lines long. “Wealth has big eyes,” said one storyteller. Raven is the trickster of the North, is ingenious, ever-watchful from high spruce and red cedar. “Bring us good luck,” people called out. Says one, “He always fools everybody, so he gets by easy.” Yet many of the Haida people died on contact with colonial invaders, and the coastal villages and rows of totem house poles stand abandoned.

In my favorite book of poems, Daniel Ladinsky has compiled three hundred poems from twelve of the great mystical poets across time: Rumi, Hafiz, St. Francis of Assisi, Kabir, Mira, St. John of the Cross, Tukaram, Rabia, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Teresa of Avila Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas. While the voices are different, every one of them reveals the true nature of the Divine. Filled with humor and ecstasy, these poems never fail to uplift and inspire me.

This is a great chapter book series for younger readers with competition at its heart. This first book takes place in the Amazon rainforest, and teams have to navigate survival challenges and brain puzzles to win. The main character also has to deal with changing friendships as he worries his friends (who are on a different team) may be cheating. Overall a fun, fast-paced adventure!

I loved this book as I live near one of the ‘lost’ rainforests Guy Shrubsole talks about, and I was able to learn more about it, and understand why the wood is such a special place, not just to me personally, but on an ecological level too.

I had heard a rumour that my local woodland is a temperate rainforest, but I had no idea what the basis was for that idea.

In the book Guy Shrubsole explains how to spot a temperate rainforest (a place where there are epiphytes present – plants growing on plants growing on plants) as well as exploring some of the mythology we humans create to explain the presence of these places in nature. It goes a lovely balance between scientific fact and storytelling.

"When you step into a jungle, unless you have been conditioned against it, you start to breathe, perhaps for the first time in your life.” This classic 1965 book will make you see the jungles as you never have.

When I started writing my adventure series, the setting came naturally to me. It had to be about forests and wildlife. What I needed though, other than my own experience of the wild and imagination, was a lot of information about the actual characteristics of the rainforests. This book bubbled up in my memory from my father’s excellent collection of books on wildlife and natural history. As I reveled in the accounts of the explorer and naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, it helped me greatly to shape Iora’s enchanting rainforest, which is an amalgamation of all the rainforests of the world.

I first came across this book in a communal library at a guest house I was staying at on Easter Island. The island is one of the most profoundly affecting places I have ever visited: even today the sense of remoteness is palpable: it’s four hours’ flight from the nearest airport, the island and its population are small, essential supplies such as mineral water and toilet paper come only once a month. And yet centuries ago a small group of would-be settlers from elsewhere in the Pacific landed and established a remarkable community, famous for its mo’ai (statues). They survived, and thrived, for a time, but it was always a precarious existence, and the natural environment has been altered forever as a result. The question of the extent to which the community is sustainable seems, to me, still to be there. It led me to think deeply about human beings… show more.

This book is so squarely in my wheelhouse, it could have been written for me. It’s a world-jumping, rip-roaring adventure that is literally breathtaking in its scope and its tempo. The protagonists have a real feel to them (very human failings) but it never feels forced, you’re just scooped up and flown along at a breakneck pace. The action scenes are heart-stopping (Kristine used to be a stunt woman!) but that’s never at the expense of the characters. Stunning, action-packed, sci-fi book.