100 Books Like The Treeline

Barry Lopez was a nature writer and environmentalist.

He died on Christmas day 2020, and although we are fortunate to have his valedictory book Horizon, published when his traveling days were pretty well behind him, Arctic Dreams is the real deal, with Lopez as raconteur, but practitioner too, thoroughly in his element.

Lopez writes about exploration and the aurora, animals and the weather, ice and myth and survival and joy. He’s effortless. You’ll learn more than you knew there was to know about the high north, and the pleasure is in the learning.

If you must cut to the chase with these five books, Arctic Dreams is the book, because Barry Lopez got things right.

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.

Iceland is one of the first off-the-beaten-track places I visited as an aspiring young travel writer and I arrived with the onset of the first Gulf War - the one against Saddam Hussein.

I visited with three other people. We immediately met a man in Reykjavik who introduced us to his diplomat friend, and before it was all said and done we spent most of that trip with the Icelander and the Frenchman in front of a much more rudimentary CNN, watching the war.

While I’ve been back to Iceland a number of times since, that first trip, the instant friendships, and the very odd experience of watching war in the desert from up at the Arctic Circle, sealed the deal for me about visiting the far north, and indirectly led to my own later book.

Halldor Laxness is the greatest of Icelandic authors and Independent People is very nearly… show more.

“Helsinki, 10:30 a.m., November 30, 1939. Soviet bombers drop from a cloud bank to unload their bombs on the capital city of Finland.

In the weeks to come the world will watch admiringly as the tiny army of a small Baltic republic wages the kind of war that inspires legends against the invading military might of the Soviet Union.”  

The Winter War between Finland and Russia flies under the radar of most general readers mainly because Finland, alone up in a cold, dark corner of Europe, got almost no help, so that its five million people had to face the mighty Red Army on its own.

It was a different kind of war, with undermanned Finnish soldiers on skis using unorthodox guerrilla tactics on in unimaginably difficult Arctic fighting conditions.

Trotter overlays a  thorough understanding of the conflict on the hard realities of the far north for a description that takes the reader… show more.

A visionary book that sees trees and humankind working together for mutual benefit. Steering clear of both the romanticized image of untouched nature as well as greedy exploitation of natural resources it impressively demonstrates how humans and forests have always thrived from each other. It was this highly positive concept of coexistence with nature that really inspires me to this day.

This book is so evocative, a marriage of poetic words and nuanced illustrations so successful that when I first read it, it immediately took me back decades to my childhood and the old barn on my parents’ property. I could almost smell the pine trees through the barn boards, hear the birds nested in the rafters, and feel the summer sun on my face. 

We think the forest is made up of trees, but this book shows us how some trees are connected underground by mycorrhizal fungi. I love trees, but we have to give the little guys some credit too, and sometimes ‘the little guys,’ i.e., underground fungi, are not so little. Fungi to the rescue!

I like how this book shows that in the case of Douglas fir trees and some other species, nutrients can travel between trees and support new tree seedlings as they grow in the shadow of giant neighboring trees, waiting for their turn to soak up the sunlight. I think of this book as a children’s version of Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. 

This is a wonderful book to expand our compassion regarding less charismatic but highly important and magnificent beings – the trees.

I was really captivated by all the interesting facts that I had no idea about, and the gorgeous watercolor illustrations made it even more entertaining. Now, when I go to the forest, I think about the roots being highly connected underneath, about Mother Trees nurturing their young and exchanging nutrients and information with other trees.

Having all this new knowledge makes the forest feel even more alive to me. It also reminded me that even if we are not aware of it, humans are part of the infinite natural web of connections. Our actions affect the forests as much as the lack of forests affects our psychology and behavior. 

This story, with wonderful illustrations, is a different way to believe in yourself. A girl wants a pet for her birthday—a tree! Her parents reluctantly give in. She finds a little tree, names it Fido, puts it in a pot and takes it everywhere in her wagon. A neighbor kid says his cat is a real pet. When the tree is too big for her wagon, her dad helps her plant it in her yard. Now she has a tree she can climb, sit in and read books, surrounded by birds! She says, “A tree is everyone’s friend.” 

Like me, when he was a kid, Paul was told he couldn’t write. He got an F, with the note: “Get a tutor.”

This is a young readers’ version of Peter Wollebhen’s book The Hidden Life of Trees and it’s packed full of pictures and short blocks of text that are quick and easy to read. It’s non-fiction and yes… there is still much about trees and how they interrelate with one another that we don’t yet fully understand and not everyone agrees on the science, but fostering curiosity to learn more is just what we need to do. Also, The Hidden Life of Trees was a source of deep inspiration for me when writing my book and I absolutely loved it. This is a great one for adults or teachers to share with younger readers too and inspire conversation as well as shared activities.