Here are 100 books that Soil fans have personally recommended if you like
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I look to my bookshelf and can visit with old friends by the simple and profound act of reading. And by reading, I learn of myself and of others. These books have sharpened my attention to life’s particulars, are places of refuge, fortresses or encampments from which I/we can safely view the harsh realities and impenetrable riddles confronting us. Books create sparks. Sparks build into a fire.
The reasons for loving the books I listed below are many: The characters enchant, infuriate, and humble you. They inhabit your mind in a waking dream. Their story is your story and after reading the book, you know something about yourself which you otherwise would not have known.
Again and again, Terry Tempest Williams shows us we can live in a disaster zone, literal and emotional, and survive.
Refuge, her fourth major book, testifies to the calamities set in motion by the atomic testing that occurred in the Nevada desert during the 1950’s. The book weaves the story of her mother and grandmother’s resultant deaths from cancer and the flooding of the Great Salt Lake that has endangered native bird species.
The loss she records is human and non-human, bringing home a truth we have yet to learn: that sullying the Great Mother, our earth, threatens our own bodies and those of future generations. If Refuge is a record of lamentations, it is also a missive for restoration and regeneration and a document of hope.
In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
The natural world is where I feel at home, and it is also the focus of my work as a writer. In Virginia, where I grew up, I always felt calmest walking footpaths in the mountains. Now I live on a windswept island in Scotland, my little aging caravan a couple of dozen feet from crashing waves. I have always felt curious about how we shape our surroundings and how our surroundings shape us. As a writer and a reader, I probe these questions every day.
In an afterword, Dillard writes that, as she aged, she came to regret the grandeur of the sentences in this book. But I’m grateful that she wrote it—a chronicle of two years in the Shenandoah Valley—exactly as she did.
I carry this book around like a bible, reading its paragraphs like poems.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has continued to change people's lives for over thirty years. A passionate and poetic reflection on the mystery of creation with its beauty on the one hand and cruelty on the other, it has become a modern American literary classic in the tradition of Thoreau. Living in solitude in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia, and observing the changing seasons, the flora and fauna, the author reflects on the nature of creation and of the God who set it in motion. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is memorably beautiful and poetic,…
I grew up on the wild island of Tasmania. I saw the Vietnam War on TV, then went to a farm my father was ‘developing.’ It felt like war. The natural beauty that I’d once played in was destroyed by machines, poisons, and fire. During agricultural college in mainland Australia, I recognized an absence of reverence for Mother Nature. Women were missing from the rural narrative that increasingly held an economics-only mindset when it came to food. I’m a co-founder of Ripple Farm Landscape Healing Hub–a 100-acre farm we’re restoring to natural beauty and producing loved meat and eggs for customers. And I’m a devoted mum, shepherd, and working dog trainer.
Divine, divine, divine! This novel taught me so much about the landscape in Appalachia. The female characters were rich and deep. Running throughout the story was the thread of women standing for farming systems that partner with nature versus male characters who want to dominate or decimate.
It was musical and mystical, and I just adored being transported to the cabin in the woods and the rich gardens of the women who knew how Mama Earth rolls. There was also a wonderful exploration of female desire. It was lush and leafy, and I’m so grateful to Barbara for writing this book
It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I’m a Colorado gal living in Maine, where I make the most of the long winters and gloomy springs by spending as much time as I can outside in our 20 acres of woods and fields. I hiked the Colorado Trail twice, in 1996 with my husband and in 2016 with my husband and three kids. My book tells the story of this second hike, as well as the natural and environmental history of Colorado. I’m a Maine Master Naturalist, and I’m passionate about connecting people to the natural world through nature journaling and nature writing workshops.
After the birth of my second and third children (twins!), I felt further than ever from my dreams of being a nature writer. Even the natural world outside my window seemed impossibly far away while I was indoors, contending with the demands of two babies and a preschooler.
When those babies were about two years old, I discovered, by accident, this book, and my life changed. In its pages, Louise Erdrich showed that careful attention to and contemplation of the natural world was not only possible for mothers of small children but that motherhood itself can make us more attuned to nature, more empathetic, and more clear-eyed and fierce.
New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s moving meditation on the experience of motherhood—the first nonfiction work by one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.
Louise Erdrich’s first major work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay’s Dance, brilliantly and poignantly examines the joys and frustrations, the compromises and insights, and the difficult struggles and profound emotional satisfactions the acclaimed author experienced in the course of one twelve-month period—from a winter pregnancy through a spring and summer of new motherhood to her return to writing in the fall. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Erdrich illuminates afresh the large and…
At a time when loneliness feels so widespread and divisions are sharper than ever, I am drawn to books that celebrate unlikely friendships. I grew up in South Africa, where division and unfairness used to be entrenched in the law. And yet, I would look around and see ordinary people from different backgrounds, who owed each other nothing, still choose to offer support and compassion to one another. The stories I’ve chosen remind me that even in a world torn apart by division, there is hope that genuine connection can still exist, and even catch us by surprise, if we take the time to see past surface differences.
They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but when I saw this one, it was love at first sight: the blue waters, the orange octopus, and the little pink fish swimming along the yellow-sprayed page edges.
However, the story matches the promise of the cover. The friendship between a widow working the night shift at the aquarium and an incredibly smart octopus reminded me that connection can be found in the most unlikely places.
Van Pelt’s genius is how she uses the scientifically proven fact that octopuses are bright. In the story, Marcellus, the octopus, sees patterns, secrets, and emotional undercurrents the humans overlook. The octopus chapters work like a lens that reveals what people hide from themselves. It’s just brilliant.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK 'Full of heart and humour . . . I loved it.' Ruth Hogan 'Will stay with you for a long time.' Anstey Harris 'I defy you to put it down once you've started' Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who…
My seven novels all celebrate the natural world—while, I hope, telling a good story. Nature has always been my solace and delight. I’ve also had the honor of developing and directing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, one of the few nationwide programs to focus on cutting-edge environmental writing. While I mainly write novels, I’m the author of two nonfiction books and one play and the editor of three environmental anthologies. When not writing or teaching, I can be found sauntering around the West, especially in my home state of Colorado. I love travel and adventuring, and I like looking at birds, stars, clouds, and sea glass.
Another of my favorite authors, Erdrich, also has a big social and environmental justice theme throughout her works. There’s a delightful premise—a ghost haunts a bookstore in Minneapolis, and a mystery must be solved!—but it also takes on very serious subjects.
Set in 2019-2020, it covers the race riots, pandemic stress, and social justice issues. One thing I love is a book that has a seriousness of purpose but is still truly joyful and fun to read.
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
As a writer who can never seem to tell a simple chronological, beginning/middle/end story in the books I write, I want to make a case for fictional works that fall somewhere between novels and traditional short story collections: shape-shifting novels. A shape-shifting novel allows for an expansiveness of time—for exploring the lives of generations within a single family, or occupying a single place, without having to account for every person, every moment, every year. Big, long Victorian novels, remember, were typically serialized and so written, and read, in smaller installments. The shape-shifting novel allows for that range between the covers of a single, and often shorter, book.
I knew little about North Woods when I started reading it, except that it chronicled the lives of different inhabitants of a farmhouse in western New England—a region I love—and featured an intriguing image of what I assumed was a bobcat on the cover.
North Woods brings its setting vividly to life; while there are fascinating characters—including a colonial-era English soldier who abandons the war to cultivate an apple orchard on the farmhouse property—the flora and fauna of the farm and its surrounding woodlands play equally important roles.
I’m grateful to my daughter, the same sensitive reader who cried when she finished Homegoing, for posting a photo of her copy of North Woods along with her lunch one day and piquing my curiosity.
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” (The Washington Post) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier.
“With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction (Cloud Atlas), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”—San Francisco Chronicle
I’m a Colorado gal living in Maine, where I make the most of the long winters and gloomy springs by spending as much time as I can outside in our 20 acres of woods and fields. I hiked the Colorado Trail twice, in 1996 with my husband and in 2016 with my husband and three kids. My book tells the story of this second hike, as well as the natural and environmental history of Colorado. I’m a Maine Master Naturalist, and I’m passionate about connecting people to the natural world through nature journaling and nature writing workshops.
A friend gave me a copy of this book when my kids were small, and it was my first indication that there is life after kids, my first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Over the course of the book and several years of their lives, Ross, her husband, and their two kids hiked the Continental Divide Trail, beginning with the Colorado Trail portion when the kids were one and three years old.
Reading this book planted the first seed in my mind that, one day, my husband and I would revisit the Colorado Trail, which we’d hiked five years before our first son was born, with our three kids in tow. It took us until they were 11 and 15, but we did it!
Beginning when their children were one and three years old - barely old enough to walk across their living room rug - Cindy Ross and her husband spent five extraordinary summers hiking the length of the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico. Ross undertook the challenge to teach her children that any worthwhile experience comes with its own set of challenges. Scraping Heaven is a revealing, touching account of one family's metamorphosis - an appealing adventure in a setting few will ever encounter. It is both an entertaining narrative of the trek and a heartfelt record of one…
I’ve always enjoyed both gardening and children. As a former Virginia Master Gardener and Homeschool mom, and a current Lancaster National Wildlife Federation Habitat Steward, I now find myself encouraging others to look at gardening in a new light – not only as a way to decorate their yards, but also as a means to provide habitat for our diminishing wildlife population. I try to show how you can have both beauty and function at the same time and how much fun it is to engage children in this essential activity. I love books that show what a difference one person – even a young child – can make in the world.
I am inspired by this lovely story! When Lydia Grace finds herself going to the city to live with her grumpy uncle during hard times, she seeks to find a way to make him smile. Having had a few ‘challenging people’ in my own life who I tried to cajole out of their funky moods, I love how her indomitable spirit and love of gardening cheers those around her, all while she makes a wonderful surprise out of the very little that she has. It shows that beauty can be found – or planted – in the most unexpected places.
The Gardener is a 1997 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year and a 1998 Caldecott Honor Book.
From the author-and-illustrator team of the bestselling The Library.
Lydia Grace Finch brings a suitcase full of seeds to the big gray city, where she goes to stay with her Uncle Jim, a cantankerous baker. There she initiates a gradual transformation, bit by bit brightening the shop and bringing smiles to customers' faces with the flowers she grows. But it is in a secret place that Lydia Grace works on her masterpiece -- an ambitious rooftop garden --…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a gardening instructor and designer, I've been recommending these five books for years. They were the core texts of the Fundamentals of Gardening course I've been teaching at the New York Botanical Garden for over a decade. Since the publication of The New Gardener’s Handbook, which covers all these topics in a more abbreviated way, I still recommend these five books to my students if they want to dig deeper. These books are what I call “keeper texts.” I own fewer and fewer actual gardening books these days, but it's a fact that a copy of each of these excellent resources resides on my office bookshelf where I refer to them frequently.
I’ve been recommending Brian Capon’s Botany for Gardenersto my gardening students for years. Unlike your typical botany textbook, it’s written expressly for gardeners, which means it presents all you need to know about botany if you are a gardener, not a scientist or a botany student. The presentation is clear, concise, and conversational, so it feels like learning about botany from a friend…a really smart friend! This book will either take you as far as you need to go in botany, or it will open you up to the world of botany and inspire you to learn more.
For two decades readers around the world have been fascinated by Brian Capon's crystal-clear descriptions of how plants work. What happens inside a seed after it is planted? How do plants use each other - and animals - to survive? How do they reproduce, and how do they transform nutrients into growth? "Botany for Gardeners" is the most complete, compact, and accessible introduction to the world of botany available. The new edition has been expanded with dazzling scanning electron microscope photographs and even more amazing facts about plants. Especially timely are new essays on food plants: what makes plants edible,…
