Here are 85 books that The Mushroom Hunters fans have personally recommended if you like
The Mushroom Hunters.
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When I was young, I used to ask every new person I met if they believed in magic. No caveats, no explanation of what I meant by that. Their response – generally either an unequivocal no, a tentative what does that mean, or a delighted yes, cemented the direction of our relationship.
One of my favorite quotes is Yeats’ statement that “the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” This conviction fuels my writing and my life. Whatever genre I write is informed first by magic, and there is no higher form of magic than the natural world and the science that explores it.
First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?
This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover.
Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
I had the opportunity to hear Paul Stamets speak at SOMA, a sleep-away camp for mushroom nerds in Northern California. Believe me when I say, it was as if the Beatles had descended when he stepped onstage. Short of screaming and the tearing off of t-shirts, the crowd hung on his every word, not a soul blinking or talking for fear of missing something. The word “visionary” is often used to describe Stamets, and I would add “architect”, for he maps out for the world in Mycelium Running how mushrooms can help save our planet. I used to think he wielded his immense knowledge of the environmental powers of mushrooms like a hammer always seeing a nail, but with time I’ve learned that people are considered visionaries when the majority of people aren’t listening to the truth even when it’s put right in front of them. Paul Stamets 1: World…
Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how.
The basic science goes like this: Microscopic cells called “mycelium”--the fruit of which are mushrooms--recycle carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements as they break down plant and animal debris in the creation of rich new soil. What Stamets has discovered is that we can capitalize on mycelium’s digestive power and target it to decompose toxic wastes and…
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
For starters, what’s not to like with a poetic title and a quirky, nerdy, tux-beclad mushroom expert on the front holding a trumpet (the horn, not the mushroom) and a mushroom haul? David Aurora is the mushroom god’s mushroom god and has cheerfully guided thousands if not millions of fungiphiles on their forest quests in search of both edible and nonedible mushrooms. His larger book Mushrooms Demystified is truly the bible, but this smaller Western guide which easily fits in a back pocket is the one I’ve carried with me for years. It’s where I cut my teeth when I first ventured out as a new forager, but it’s continued to guide me as I learn new mushrooms to add to my basket. Color photos, key features, notes on where to find the mushroom, and notes on edibility are listed for each type of mushroom in the book such as:…
“[All That the Rain Promises and More] is certainly the best guide to fungi, and may in fact be a long lasting masterpiece in guide writing for all subjects.”—Roger McKnight, The New York Times
Mushrooms appeal to all kinds of people—and so will this handy pocket guide, which includes key information for more than 200 Western mushrooms
Over 200 edible and poisonous mushrooms are depicted with simple checklists of their identifying features, as David Arora celebrates the fun in fungi with the same engaging bend of wit and wisdom, fact and fancy, that has made his comprehensive guide, Mushrooms Demystified,…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
Sometimes you just need a coffee table sort of book and though it is paperback, Frédéric Raevens photography in this book is worth the purchase alone. When I’m buying cookbooks I make sure to buy cookbooks written by chefs from other countries as it offers a lovely diversity of ingredients, techniques, and approaches. Emanuelli lives in Brussels and I found their perspective refreshing. The first fifth of the book is full-page mushroom porn in the best possible way. You could stop right there, but there’s so much more; recipes such as Glazed pork belly with truffled honey and Caramelized Belgian endive with black trumpet mushrooms, and Porcini and Chestnut soup. When I decided to write a mushroom cookbook, I was so pleased that my book stayed away from many of the others on the market by simply adding butter and cream to every recipe and calling it good. And then…
This French buy-in is an extremely beautiful guide to buying and cooking mushrooms. More an evocative pleasure-read for mushroom lovers than a straight-up reference book for serious foragers, this book contains more than 120 uniquely French stream-of-consciousness recipes and colour photographs on every spread, with more than 200 photographs throughout.
Writing for children presents an exciting challenge: how can you deliver big ideas, innovative storytelling, and dazzling language using just a few simple words that even the youngest readers can understand? I’m especially drawn to nonfiction because it offers a chance to explore and explain our world. I find it rewarding to help unlock the mystery and wonder of science, nature, history, and other topics—all with the power of words. The books on this list are some of my favorites for telling real-life stories with writing that’s beautiful, spare, and inspiring.
Dark and miraculous, an array of mushrooms awakens overnight: “Delicate umbrellas open, red octopus arms rise from the ground. Cupped eggs with nests appear ... a spooky green glows under a starlit sky.” I love how this gorgeous book finds poetry in the world of mushrooms while also being highly informative.
Through lyrical language, we learn about mushroom life cycles, how mushrooms interact with the ecosystem, and how they are used by animals and people. The illustrations shrink the reader down to a mouse’s eye level to explore this world of towering, mysterious mushrooms. This book is the perfect example of how nonfiction children’s writing can combine facts and beauty!
What can smell like bubble gum, glow neon green at night, be poisonous and yet still eaten by humans, and even help create rain? The answer is mushrooms! From their hidden networks underground to the fruiting body above, mushrooms can do incredible things. But don't call them plants--mushrooms are fungi. They're more closely related to animals like you! Through lyrical text and colorful, detailed artwork, the wonderful, mysterious, and sometimes bizarre world of mushrooms is explored. Back matter includes a glossary, additional mushroom facts, and a science activity.
Microorganisms have bewitched me since childhood when I remember seeing floating dust particles glinting in sunbeams and wondering what they were and if they were alive. Decades later, my research has included experiments on the amazing mechanisms that shoot fungal spores into the air to form part of that dust, which is one of several odd coincidences in my life. As an educator (Miami University in Ohio) and science writer my interests in biology go beyond the fungi, but I never stray too far from my obsession with the smallest organisms. Microbes are everywhere and will outlive us by an eternity.
Viruses and bacteria attract all the attention from microbiologists and fungi are given short shrift in most textbooks. This needs to change because fungi are bona fide microbes that grow as budding yeast cells and colonies of slender threads and spin the planet’s carbon cycle. There are plenty of popular books on fungal biology, but John Ramsbottom’s Mushrooms and Toadstools, first published in 1953, has not been bettered. It captivates the reader with a succession of marvelous stories without losing grip on the science. This book is a great place to begin a lifetime of learning about fungi.
Britain's neglect of fungi as table delicacies has perhaps been responsible for our surprising ignorance of the natural history of such fascinating plants. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.com
Britain's neglect of fungi as table delicacies has perhaps been responsible for our surprising ignorance of the natural history of such fascinating plants. Puff-balls, more than a foot in diameter; mouls in jam-pots; dry rot; truffles; these are examples of the wide range of the Group, comprising over 100,000 species.
Many are of economic importance - for example, the rusts that attack wheat and other crops, and the yeasts which ferment…
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…
I arrived in Epping Forest when I was four and quickly came to love its trees and ponds. I saw Churchill speak in Loughton in 1945. We were taken on fishing expeditions to the Forest Ponds, and I got into my next school by writing an essay on ‘Newts’. When older I regularly walked to look at the two ponds on Strawberry Hill. Later still I brought my children to the Forest. My two sons were baptised in the church in the Forest, Holy Innocents. I am a woodlander through and through with an instinctive love of the Tudor aspects of the Forest when Fairmead was Henry VIII’s deer park.
This is a guide to Epping Forest at the end of the First World War, and covers its history, topography (many routes through the Forest), wildlife, and geology of the Forest, with maps. It is fascinating to see what parts of Epping Forest looked like a hundred years ago, and what birds and wildlife could be seen then.
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. This text has been…
Growing up in Los Angeles, I am well familiar with strange, grotesque, illogical, and wonderful cities. My love of fantasy has always been for the odd ones out, less the bucolic farmlands and forest, more for those that present a twisted mirror of modern urban life. As an amateur lover of history, I love to study the evolution, mutation, and decay of cities. I find most interesting cities, in both real life and fantasy, to be those shaped by not one single culture, but by many over history and space.
If dragons and elves are the mainstays of traditional fantasy, then mushrooms and squids are the mainstays of weird fantasy. And there’s no city with more squids or mushrooms than Vandermeer’s Ambergris. A haphazard port town infested by fungi and built on ancient ruins holding dark secrets, there’s nothing quite like Ambergris.
What I love so much about Vandermeer’s trilogy is that the city evolves and changes. City of Saints and Madmen is an excellent short story collection that introduces the setting in peacetime, and by the end of Finch it has seen so much conflict and upheaval that Ambergris evolves into a completely different and yet equally fascinating city.
From the author of Annihilation, now a major motion picture on Netflix.
From Jeff VanderMeer, an author praised by writers such as Laren Beukes, China Mieville and Michael Moorcock, City of Saints and Madmen is by turns sensuous and terrifying. This collection of four linked novellas is the perfect introduction to VanderMeer's vividly imagined world.
In the city of Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he's…
Plants in science fiction really grew on me while I was finishing my doctorate in literature from the University of Iowa. Stumbling on fin de siècle stories about monstrous plants, I fell down the rabbit hole and was hooked; however, I started truly digging into speculative vegetation after moving to the verdant island of Kyushu, Japan to teach literature at a small liberal arts college. Soon, I was speaking and publishing widely on topics ranging from vegetal time and arboreal horror to plant-centric communication – all of which gravitate around the idea of turning the leaves of our world to try to see things in a different way.
This is a great gateway collection. In fact, this was one of the first anthologies of plant-related speculative stories that I read after falling in love with science-fictional plants. I jumped at it when I saw that it includes authors such as H. G. Wells and Algernon Blackwood and am glad I did. I have written about a number of the stories I met in this collection. Awesome extra: there are two other volumes in this series.
Flora Curiosa compiles classic botanical (and mycological) short stories from science fiction and fantasy. Stories include Rappaccini's Daughter (Hawthorne), The American's Tale (Doyle), The Man-Eating Tree (Robinson), The Balloon Tree (Mitchell), The Flowering of the Strange Orchid (H. G. Wells), The Treasure in the Forest (H. G. Wells), The Purple Pileus (H. G. Wells), The Purple Terror (White), A Vine on a House (Bierce), Professor Jonkin's Cannibal Plant (Garis), The Willows (Blackwood), The Voice in the Night (Hodgson), The Orchid Horror (Blunt), The Man Whom the Trees Loved (Blackwood), The Pavilion (Nesbit), The Sumach (Daubeny), and The Green Death (McNeile).
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’m a biomedical anthropologist/epidemiologist with a post-doctoral studies in Human Genetics. I learned about pharmacology and medicinal chemistry at a large Swiss pharmaceutical company. There, we developed some of the first precision medicines in oncology—treating tumors with a specific protein signature. We took the next step to personalize prescription medicine, which is in its infancy. The goal is to prescribe the right drug, the first time—prescribing drugs that work with patient genes. As VP, Global Research Strategy and SVP, Global Pharmaceutical Strategy, this has been my vision for decades, and why I wrote The Goldilocks Genome to introduce personalized medicine to the lay public in a compelling read.
There is nothing that worries me more than when I hear that someone has been transferred to the intensive care unit with an infectious disease.
There are reasonable, not perfect, treatments and approaches to treat bacterial infections—although they are becoming fewer and fewer. Rarely discussed is the threat of fungal infection with Candida auris in hospitals—a treatment-resistant and hearty strain that is infecting and taking the lives of immunocompromised or weakened patients in the hospital. Unlike bacteria and viruses, fungi are resilient and can remain dormant in many environments. It is not just hospitals where fungi are dangerous; they can infect the lungs of desert dwellers and cause destruction in forests.
I suggest this book to my friends who want to be aware and take precautions (as much as possible) and encourage pharma and biotech to develop new tools/medicines to control deadly hospital infections.
Fungi are everywhere. Most are harmless, some are helpful. A few are killers. Collectively, infectious fungi are the most devastating agents of disease on Earth, and a fungus that can persist in the environment without its host is here for the long haul. In gripping, accessible prose, Emily Monosson documents how changing climate, trade and travel are making us all more vulnerable to invasion. Populations of bats, frogs and salamanders face extinction, and scientists don't have a cure. The American Northwest's beloved National Parks are covered with the spindly corpses of white bark pines. Food crops are under siege, threatening…
