Books That Rewired How I See the Natural World
My friend gave me a lovely compliment one time. She said, “you are full of contradictions; you love nature but hate the outdoors.” It’s true. I love nature, but I’m Goldilocks when it comes to the weather - can’t be too hot, can’t be too cold. Can’t be too sunny, can’t be too cloudy. Can’t be too wet, or too dry. Everything needs to be juuuuussst right. In the last couple of years, I’ve been on a nature-writing kick. The genre has a reputation for being earnest in the wrong way, for sentences that try so hard to be beautiful that they forget to be true. The best nature writing is something else entirely. It's science and grief and gratitude and close attention, all working together in the same paragraph.
The books on this list are the ones that changed how I actually look at things. Not metaphorically. I mean that after reading Entangled Life, I spent twenty minutes staring at a mushroom in my yard and felt genuinely moved by what I knew was happening underneath it. That's what good nature writing does. It gives you new eyes for the world you're already living in.
If you track your reading at BeguiledByBooks.app, this is the kind of list that's worth building into a dedicated nature shelf. Membership is $12/month or $99/year, and it's how I keep track of every book that shifts something in me. Here are the ones that shifted the most.
Books That Rewired How I See the Natural World
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
There is no book I have recommended more times in the last five years. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Braiding Sweetgrass braids together (hehe, see what I did there) Indigenous plant knowledge, Western botanical science, and personal memoir in a way that feels fresh & new. The core argument of the book is that plants are not resources but relatives, and by the time Kimmerer is done making that argument, you believe her. Five stars. I gave it five stars in 2021 before I stopped rating books with stars and I would give it five stars every year for the rest of my life if I could.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer's shorter 2024 book focuses on a single tree and uses it to build an entire philosophy of giving and receiving. The Serviceberry is around 100 pages, costs you nothing and gives you everything. The central idea, that the serviceberry tree gives its fruit freely and that this generosity is the foundation of the forest economy, becomes by the end of the book an argument for how human economies might work differently. I think it's one of the most quietly radical books I've read in years. Read Braiding Sweetgrass first if you can, but this one also stands entirely on its own.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
THIS BOOK! Merlin Sheldrake is a mycologist who writes about fungi the way a poet writes about the person they love, with deep knowledge and barely contained wonder. Entangled Life covers the underground fungal networks that connect forests, the way fungi communicate, the psychedelic compounds some produce, and the ways human civilization has depended on fungal relationships for millennia. It is genuinely thrilling in the way that science writing is rarely thrilling. By the end you will never walk through a forest the same way again. I don’t even eat mushrooms anymore after this book.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard is the scientist who discovered that trees communicate and share resources through underground fungal networks. This is her memoir about making that discovery, fighting to get it taken seriously in a male-dominated field, and what it cost her personally. Finding the Mother Tree is as much a book about scientific institutions and gender as it is about forests, and it's better for it. The science is extraordinary. The human story around the science is just as compelling.
Birding to Change the World: A Memoir by Trish O'Kane
Trish O'Kane was a war correspondent who burned out, moved to New Orleans, survived Hurricane Katrina, and started birding. That sentence sounds like a lot, and the book reflects every bit of it. Birding to Change the World is about what birds gave back to a person who had seen too much, and then about how she used that recovery to teach environmental justice through birding in underserved communities after moving to Madison, Wisconsin. One of the most moving books I read in 2024. You do not need to care about birds before you read this. You will care about birds after.
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl
Renkl spent a year paying close attention to her Nashville backyard and writing about what she found there. The result is a meditation on seasons, mortality, small creatures, and what it means to witness something carefully. The Comfort of Crows is the nature writing book for people who think they don't have access to nature, which is a thought most of us who live in cities or suburbs have had. You don't need wilderness. You need attention. Renkl demonstrates this beautifully, in short chapters that feel like letters from a particularly thoughtful friend.
Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
This one is harder to categorize than the others. Kerri ni Dochartaigh is an Irish writer who grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Cacophony of Bone is her second memoir, a year-long exploration of a particular stretch of Irish landscape and what it holds. It's more lyrical than scientific, closer to poetry than natural history, and I gave it four stars for the quality of her sentences alone. If you loved Braiding Sweetgrass for its spiritual dimension and want something that pushes further into elegy and grief, this is the book.
Why Nature Writing Matters Right Now
I didn't expect to become someone who reads nature writing. I was a fantasy reader and a sci-fi reader and a memoir reader. Then the world started feeling very loud and very urgent in the way that leaves you needing to look at something quiet and real. These books were that thing for me. Not as an escape, exactly. More like a recalibration. What all of these books share is close attention. Not grand statements about the planet (though some of them have those too), but the patient act of looking at one thing until you understand it differently. That's a skill. These books teach it by example.
If this list made you want to build a nature reading shelf, or if you're already reading in this genre and want to track your favorites in one place, BeguiledByBooks.app is where I keep all of mine. Membership starts at $12/month, and your reading life is worth organizing.
