The vast majority of the books I read are fiction—I tend to get enough non-fiction in my day job, running the four websites listed in that black bar up top. But since the pandemic hit, I’ve been on something of a nature kick. I’ve been taking lots of walks in parks, photographing birds, gathering delicious mushrooms, and collecting native seeds to plant in my backyard. It’s been good for both my soul and my mental health. And it’s had me wanting to learn more about the natural world around me. Fortunately, there are some great recent books for that.
Collectively my mind has been blown by these deep dives into microorganisms, fungi, plants, insects, and birds—and especially how all of these organisms (and us) affect the others. If you love nature—and, I dunno, maybe want to get your mind off other things right now—I think you’ll love all five of these books.
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger (2024)
Communicating the latest advances in biology is often left to the scientists, but Zoë Schlanger proves that a good storyteller can make all those peer-reviewed papers and monotonous lab studies come alive for an interested reader. An environmental reporter by trade, she tackles a seemingly oxymoronic subject—plant intelligence—and completely changes the way you’ll look at our oxygen-producing, carbon-sequestering green friends.
However we define intelligence—communication, awareness of environment, memory, adaptability—Schlanger offers examples that we’re only beginning to understand, while still carefully resisting the temptation to anthropomorphize the Kingdom Plantae. Beautifully written and unexpectedly provocative, Schlanger’s book deserves all its accolades.
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Young (2016)
The debut book from Atlantic reporter Ed Yong takes us on a Fantastic Voyage inside the human body, where bacteria and other microorganisms outnumber human cells. We are more than just our DNA, he argues—we are a multi-species ecosystem, a symphony of organisms working in both harmony and conflict with microbiomes in constant flux.
Pulling examples from animals across the globe, 3.7 billion years of evolution, and the latest experiments in microbiology, Yong covers both the basics of symbiosis and the potential promise of a microbiologically focused future.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Future by Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
In 2020, tropical ecologist Merlin Sheldrake gave us an expansive overview into the trippy world of fungi, from the underground networks of the “Wood Wide Web” that shuttle nutrients and information across the forest floor to the psychedelics that have altered human—and animal—minds for millennia.
The stories contained in Entangled Life are mind-altering in their own right, full of surprising anecdotes and information. I’ve just begun foraging for mushrooms on my own, and this book gave me a much deeper appreciation for an overlooked kingdom in the natural world.
Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas W. Tallamy (2007, updated and expanded 2009)
Doug Tallamy’s 2007 tome is the Bible for the growing native-plant community and has converted me into the faithful. I’m currently in the process of ripping out all the invasive privet, ivy, and other plants that evolved on other continents and essentially create food deserts for wildlife, and I’m replacing them with overlooked species that our local insects love.
Bringing Nature Home is a stark look at the ways humans have caused a decline in wildlife populations and how each of us can make a real difference in our own yards.
What It’s Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds are Doing, and Why by David Allen Sibley (2020)
I didn’t read this coffee table book front-to-back, but I continue to pull it out and learn more about birds I often see like herons (“A six pound heron can swallow a one-pound fish. That’s like a one-hundred-pound person swallowing a seventeen-pound fish. Whole.”) and kinglets (“This tiny species can survive winters in the far north, but this requires a lot of food. The equivalent amount for us would be at least twenty-seven large pizzas every day. Do you eat like a bird?”) Apparently, I like bird food facts.
Sibley is the world’s preeminent avian illustrator and the book is unsurprisingly gorgeous. But that attention to detail in his drawings has given him a curiosity about why birds are built the way they are and why they behave the way they do. This book offers many of the answers from a wide range of examples.
Josh Jackson the founder and president of Paste Media Group. You can follow him on Blueskey and see his bird photography on Instagram, @atl_birds.
This post was originally published on here
