56 Books Like Your Body's Many Cries for Water

I carry Michael Pollan’s decree close to my heart, and his wise words guide my choices around food, moderation and common sense to this day. 

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Words to live by, if ever there were any, and for this recovering emotional eater, Pollan was a much-needed voice of common sense. A great reminder to avoid industrialised, heavily processed foods, and get back to experiencing pleasure at the dinner table, enjoying whole foods that my grandparents would have recognised.

Pollan’s decree guides my decisions in the supermarket and my kitchen constantly. Another essential book discovered along my healing journey as I reclaimed my health.

This book is not the one-size-fits-all approach of many food books. Naturopath Dr Peter J. D’Adamo has carried on the work of his father to research the effect of various types of lectins, a type of protein found in our body, and found in many foods. One way our unique biology is expressed is in our blood type – O, A, B, or AB. Different types of lectins cause agglutination (the clumping of particles) in different blood types. ‘If you eat a food that contains lectins incompatible with your blood type, those lectins cling or bind themselves to membranes in the digestive tract causing damage such as inflammation.’

Forks Over Knives describes how changing your diet (forks) can be used to good effect to improve health, therefore, avoid the need for surgery (knives). This is a book about the most important advice on healthy eating – guess what? eating a whole-food, plant-based diet. It is full of inspiring success stories of people who have taken charge of their diet and transformed their health, as well as useful recipes. The author advocates entirely plant-based, and although there is a healthy way to eat animal products, the foundational diet for everyone needs to be mostly plants, and most definitely whole foods, meaning not processed or industrially produced.

Eating right involves two very important things- what you need to eat a lot of for health, and what you need to avoid eating because it will make you ill. A very sobering look inside the so-called ‘food industry’ and how it is operating in the modern world, Swallow This educates us as to what ‘food’ labels mean; ‘natural flavourings’, ‘modified starch’ and so on. Once you’ve read it, you will understand completely why I put ‘food’ in inverted commas, and will develop a proper aversion to processed ‘food’, which will save you from a raft of serious health outcomes.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that someone with a name like Miss Mildred Percy, a noted spinster living under her overwhelmingly generous and loving sister’s roof, does not inherit dragons’ eggs. Or bump into helpful and – one can’t help but notice – broad-shouldered, hat-wearing, single vicars. She’d swoon herself into dehydration if she knew what was still to come: raising a baby dragon (named Fitz); a proper Bad Boy villain with little money and relentless motivation (named Belinda); and, perhaps the most difficult, finding her own agency. Agnes Nitt would never. Perdita X Dream, however, might…

Miss Percy is the best book I’ve read in 2021 – it felt as if I inherited a manuscript signed by three of my favourite authors. Couldn’t recommend it more.

A ridiculously fun and eerily prescient folktale, about the rise of a Robin Hood figure and the community that rallies around her in a droughted, post-warming Portland, Oregon, I can basically never not recommend this book. Like Brown Girl in the Ring, this is one of the books that made me want to read and write about speculative community-building and environmental justice. Parzybok's clever, inviting prose makes this substantial novel a deceptively fast and joyful read, and I'm never not sad when it's over.

Awe, beauty, and a satisfying amount of information—The Blue Whale has it all. I love the curious child we follow through the book, as well as the visual comparisons that turn astonishing facts about the world’s largest living creature into subtly humorous images that I can relate to on a more personal level. In the final pages of the book, the child—our surrogate adventurer—falls asleep and dreams, amazed by a world that contains such tremendous creatures. 

Mr. Emoto proved that water also has consciousness.

He exposed water to music, then took pictures of the resulting crystals it formed. The beautiful music would form gorgeous crystals, and then words like retarded or hopeless would form distorted crystals. This is proof that sounds with emotional charges affect how water holds the consciousness of the vibration.

He suggests that intention and language may influence human well-being, given the body’s 80% water. Blending experimental results with spiritual themes, the book emphasizes interconnectedness, personal responsibility, and collective consciousness. If you want a better life, tell your cells!

I heard Emoto speak excitedly about raising the vibration of the planet by using positive words with water. He talked about crossing earthbound spirits so they wouldn’t drag the vibration of the planet down, something I had been working on for a few years. A delightful author with an incredible gift to the world!

As a young reader, I would have slipped into this book and lost myself for hours. While it’s not a picture book by most definitions, these gorgeously illustrated pages overflow with facts, stories, and cheerful art. Like its subject matter, Water: A Deep Dive of Discovery covers a lot of territory—from the many ways water affects the lives of all living creatures, to maps and diagrams, to simple experiments you can try at home. A lovely book that will hold up to repeated readings by curious minds.    

This edited volume provides an insightful collection of successful examples of the wave of re-municipalisations of water around the world.

Overall, there were 235 cases of water remunicipalisation in 37 countries, affecting over 100 million people between 2000 and 2015.

Reviewing the experiences of these instances of taking control of water back into public hands, the book provides a valuable discussion of what is necessary for making water re-municipalisation a success of progressive politics.

It outlines what is possible, but also what the dangers are, which need to be confronted.