Books like Walking Through Spring — picked by fans

This is a hero’s journey, right out of Joseph Campbell: a young man goes to sea, circumnavigates the globe, and experiences marvel after marvel of nature. What he learns on his journey matures into a kind of wisdom that transforms the world.

Darwin’s adventures keep me on the edge of my seat; his descriptions seduce me; his ideas inspire me. I want to be there with him as he recoils from the horrors of slavery in Brazil or observes the aftermath of a Chilean earthquake. And I feel I truly am with him, collecting birds and lizards on the islands of the Galapagos, as he begins to divine the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the world.

The mere thought of this book makes me smile – I enjoyed its style, which was charming and nicely wacky. 

Environmental expert and nature writer Gerald Durrell details his extremely unusual upbringing, when his mother transported her four (untamed, wilful, contrasting, more than lively) children from England to Corfu – and this was decades ago, when few people did daring things like that. They plunged into a culture clash adventure – filled with much alarming wildlife in the house!

I loved how it was continually surprising. I don’t see how his mother put up with all of them. It’s all valiantly shambolic and funny. 

My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creatures—surprisingly unfamiliar—unlike anything alive today.

This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.

It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adult—now old enough to understand it—it immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remains… show more.

Mankell’s troubled hero, Kurt Wallender, hits new depths in this final novel. Things have not been well. His handgun left on the seat of his car was to be picked up by a child. Past conversations with his artist father, who paints the same landscape 7000 times while his memory deteriorates. Wallender now has to face the realization that he, too, is losing his memory. I felt for him on this difficult journey.

But there is still a last case to be solved. The father of his daughter’s fiancé goes missing on his morning walk. Dark secrets from Sweden’s Cold War past threaten to resurface. Wallender has to battle with deteriorating health to solve the mystery, fearing the truth may not be welcome. For me, his integrity shines through.

I will read anything by Parke Godwin. His command of language and his talent for bringing history to life won me over from the first book. In Sherwood, he takes on Robin Hood, whose legend is compiled of stories collected over a 200-year period. Godwin sets the story a hundred years prior to the legend, in the time of William the Conqueror. Sherwood gives us the life of a brash young Saxon landholder, displaced by the conquerors, who leads a guerrilla resistance from Sherwood Forest. It also paints a sympathetic young sheriff of Nottingham, who starts as Robin’s foe but grows to admire the outlaw—and falls in love with his wife Marian.

One of the key characters in the Arthur legends is Guenevere, and nowhere does she become more real than in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile. In post-Roman Britain, after Arthur’s defeat by the Saxons, a mature and bereft Guenevere is taken captive by a Saxon thane. Keeping her identity secret, she struggles through life as a slave in her enemy’s household. Yet, in her soul, she is still a queen and cannot bear to see her nation torn by treachery and internal conflict. She becomes attached to the Saxon family she now serves and discovers that, in order to preserve Arthur’s legacy, she must make allies of her enemies.

This is perhaps my favorite historical novel ever, not only because of Godwin’s evocative prose (“Half a baby in a ditch.” Brrr!), but because it contains an extended section on the “little people,” the mound dwellers who predated the Celts in Britain. These people became the fairies, elves, and gnomes of legend, but in Firelord they are the last of a dying culture, trying desperately to survive in a changed world. They capture a wounded Arthur, and as they take him underground, the author’s voice alters radically. It brilliantly captures the alien nature of the mound dwellers and their hypnotic effect on Arthur. Only after Arthur leaves them behind does it return, like Arthur, to something familiar.

I love cheese, and I love how British cheeses have reinvented themselves as dairy farmers have been forced to diversify in order to keep in business.

This fascinating book has taken me on a journey around the British Isles and in time and place from the Stone Age and the Roman era, the influence of Monasteries, the post-war industrial boom, to right now, and the renaissance of traditional farmhouse artisan cheesemaking.

I love this book because it does not just outline British cheeses; it is also the human story of the people who handcrafted them. Best of all, I can actually find and purchase some of these cheeses to enjoy while reading the book!

John Morris was an ancient historian specializing in the later Roman Empire who late in life turned his attention to Dark Age Britain. I only met him very briefly at a conference in the mid-1970s, by which time he was already very ill. He wrote by far his best-known work while presiding over the translation of a host of source materials for early medieval Britain and their publication by Phillimore, all the time fighting his own battle against cancer. He didn’t just accept Arthur as a real historical figure but made him the pivotal figure of British history in the decades around 500, accepting as authoritative all sorts of stories written many hundreds of years later. In so doing he was largely responsible for bringing the Arthurian Period of British history into existence and certainly gave it enormous popular appeal. Rarely has one writer had such an impact on a… show more.

This mammoth book leaves no stone unturned in investigating how and why claims arose regarding the alleged murder of King James VI and I in 1625. It reads as part dossier or evidence and part detective story–and thus, it is never boring.

The authors are canny enough to make no definitive claims about James’s death–but their methodical investigation into why people at the time and afterward suspected foul play will leave readers in little doubt about what probably happened…