100 Books Like Arctic Dreams

This book has been stuck in my heart for more than 40 years. While I don’t remember much of its details—I read it as part of a middle school book club—I can still feel this book.

When I was a kid, our family was never able to travel. Abbey’s book instilled in me the deep desire to one day explore our national parks and varied natural spaces, especially desert terrain. And ever since I reached adulthood, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

This book is unlike anything I’d ever read, but I desperately needed it. As the title suggests, the book flows with deep wisdom from within oceans. As a long-time resident of a landlocked state, I’ve always approached large bodies of water with a sense of awe (and, quite honestly, fear).

This creative nonfiction tells the story of possibility, kinship, and collective kindness available in the depths. The book itself is a technology for living well with others and ourselves.

To read Trace is to go on a mesmerizing journey with the wisest of guides. Savoy searches for American identities, and her own multifaceted ones, in the history and memory of landscapes across the continent. Every turn reveals tragic histories and surprising connections and omissions with the most beautiful language. Savoy excavates the palimpsest of stories embedded in landscapes’ histories in a helpful reminder that “nature” is always entangled with the richness and complexity of human life. With each careful word, Savoy deepened my appreciation for how landscape absorbs and reflects its history—and my admiration for her unbelievable gifts as a writer. Trace is one of those books you can read each year and your respect for it grows and the insights from it enlarge your life every time.

Any discussion of how people and nature relate to each other in the twenty-first century will come up against the issue of climate change. And there are so many good books to read on the topic – Elizabeth Rush’s Rising comes right to mind, or the collection All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson. What Tale of Two Planets offers is a global perspective on rising seas, changing seasons, and damaging weather through genres from poetry to prose to fiction. Each author brings clarity to the science and politics of climate change, but the sections here are also portraits of love for place and community. If you’ve never read a book on climate change before, it’s a great start; if you’ve read them all, there’s something new and beautiful here.

Aldo Leopold was a Forest Service ranger stationed in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest when he first began advocating for a new approach to managing national forests. Leopold’s visionary thinking and diligent advocacy resulted in the first-ever Wilderness Area in the U.S.—the Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1922—more than 40 years before the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964. A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s best-known work and follows his efforts to restore a patch of cut-over farmland in Wisconsin while also articulating his vision of a land ethic where humans and nature are intertwined and care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. His beautiful writing resonated strongly with me when I first read A Sand County Almanac more than two decades ago, and his vision remains as important now as ever.

This is through and through simply a gorgeous little book.

I enjoyed rereading it for this article. The largest body of fresh water on earth is Lake Baikal, not far east of Irkutsk in Siberia.

(If you’ve never heard of Baikal, that’s a measure of the variety of wonders to be found in the high north. Baikal holds so much water because it’s so deep: the world’s deepest at more than 5300 feet). If you ever have the opportunity you must visit.

My wife and I have traveled together a good bit, and I don’t feel we’re cloistered in any way, but to turn up in the ramshackle town of Listvyanka, Russia, at the beginning of this century, and then to charter a small boat to cross Baikal made me feel, I don’t know, maybe like Dorothy in the Emerald City.

I was just a total alien in a place… show more.

I read this book on a 2-week river trip down the Colorado, which made the read all the more gripping. The Grand Canyon is awe-inspiring even if you’re only gazing into its beguiling depths from a vista point—moreso if you’re accompanying seasoned river runner Kenton Grua in his attempt to smash a speed record riding a storm-swollen, raging Colorado in a wooden dory.

The drama of Grua’s determination and daring kept me turning pages, but I also loved learning about the history of the Canyon, its great river, and its dedicated and colorful tribe of river runners. My copy is tattered from being stuffed in my dry bag, but the book’s imagery and energy don’t fade.

In the 19th century, it was believed that if a way could be found through North America’s ice barrier, beyond lay an open sea offering ships a shortcut to the Pacific.  The quest to find it became a litany of disaster, suffering, human spirit stretched to breaking point and heroic survival. Canada’s greatest historian, Pierre Burton, turns factual accounts into a riveting read, ‘a cliff-hanger with colorful characters’ as Newsweek described it. This is another book I hate to lend for fear I’ll never get it back.

Scotsman John Rae was the greatest explorer of the Canadian Arctic that ever lived. Yet he was vilified in the press, his reputation sullied. For ten years he was denied the £10,000 reward that was rightfully his for discovering the fate of the Franklin expedition and the knighthood awarded to lesser achievers was cruelly withheld. Why?  Because he ‘went native’ and adopted Inuit survival techniques considered ‘uncivilised’ in Victorian Britain - but above all because he discovered, and had the temerity to announce, that the Franklin survivors had resorted to cannibalism. This book is an enthralling account of Rae’s life. I had actually set out to write a biography myself, unable to believe that such a story had not been written up, when McGoogan’s book appeared. I have nothing but reverence for his work, and imagine ‘Sir’ John Rae as I believe he will one day be, would be equally… show more.