Robert Michael Pyle is a beloved nature writer who has written numerous books, including Sky Time in Gray's River and Chasing Monarchs. We are thrilled to have him contribute to our blog and even more thrilled to have him back to the store on Friday, December 7, 7pm for his latest book, The Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion.
It is almost as hard picking my top five nature books as it would be to pick my five favorite butterflies, or the five prettiest places, or the five most interesting people. Especially because, by my lights, "nature books" = "books"--since I know nothing else to write about besides nature (in which humans and their affairs are--or had darned well better be--included. As Robinson Jeffers said, "not man apart.") But if we are talking about books in which the more-than-human predominates or at least plays a large part, I guess I can pull some faves. If you asked me tomorrow, I might make five completely different choices.
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
This book was not only a complete game-changer for the human intellect, but it was also the virtual operating manual for the non-virtual world: the first schema to make sense of the whole living pageant, through the brilliant combination of immense research and observation with Wallace and Darwin's original epiphany of how it all works, through natural selection. It is also written with extraordinary grace. My new book, The Tangled Bank, takes its title from the first sentence in the final paragraph of this wunderbuch, which I first began to read at 14.
A tie between An Otter's Story by Emil Lars and Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
I had the former on more or less permanent checkout from the Peoria Elementary library, and the latter sustained me in more mature years. Both books manage to show, through exciting and beautiful prose and rich detail, what it might be like to be a sleek water-animal living by an entirely different set of senses than those we rely upon.
Beyond the Aspen Grove by Ann Zwinger
The great Colorado nature writer's first book is a lovely celebration of home and place, portrayed in crisp, precise prose and exquisite pencil drawings. It not only grows out of the very mountains and delicious habitats that I roamed as a boy, but it was also the first modern book I read that gave me to believe that books such as I wanted to write could still be published and read.
Selected Poems by Pattian Rogers
No other poet I know brings together such keen observation of the world with language of such scintillating motion, play, wit, and just plain sensual wallow, as Pattiann does. A lot of her best poems, about hummingbird courtship, the love of toads in the rain, mysterious night visitors that could be bats or incubi, the drumming of the heartbeat of the world and all its great, scrambling family, may be found in this treasure book.
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
I just finished it today! I always love my current book, but in this case it really belongs high up the list. It's a novel, as engaging as any of Barbara's fictions, but its territory ranges beyond the human heart into the surprising response of migratory monarch butterflies to climate change. By paying close attention to the science of monarchs and climate, and to the southern Appalachians where she lives, the author has realized a plausible scenario and a wonderful work where, in Nabokov's fine phrase, "the mountainside of scientific knowledge meets the opposite slope of artistic imagination."
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