Want to know what books Charles Foster recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Charles Foster's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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Swimming with Seals
Victoria Whitworth
4.2
Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of temporary escape from a failing marriage, a stifling religious environment and a series of health problems. Over four years, her encounters with the sea and all its weathers, the friendships she made, the wild creatures she encountered, combined to transform her life. This book is a love letter, to the beach where she swims regularly and its microcosmic world, to the ever-changing cold waters where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, and to the seals, her constant companions.
The sea is a soup of the Precambrian, the Jurassic, the early Medieval, benighted modernity, and everything before and in between. Swimming in it connects her with the place, Orkney, which itself of course is an amalgam of all these times, none of which ever passes away. [source]
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Animals Strike Curious Poses
Elena Passarello
3.8
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
The gist of her argument is that animal images crawl and prance and gallop through our ruling subconscious. They contribute importantly to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the wider world. [source]
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Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative experiences and their effects on our bodies, brains and health
Sheldrake is primarily concerned with the effect on various ‘spiritual’ practices on the human head and on the human ability to thrive, a lot of things advocated in the book demand the sort of express, ecstatic communion with the natural world. [source]
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Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago
Patrick Barkham
4.2
Britain is an archipelago made up of two large islands and 6,289 smaller ones. Some, like the Isle of Man, resemble miniature nations, with their own language and tax laws; others, like Ray Island in Essex, are abandoned and mysterious places haunted by myths, ghosts and foxes. There are resurgent islands such as Eigg, which have been liberated from capricious owners to be run by their residents; holy islands like Bardsey, the resting place of 20,000 saints, and still a site of spiritual questing; and deserted islands such as St Kilda, famed for the evacuation of its human population, and now dominated by wild sheep and seabirds. In this evocative and vividly observed book, Patrick Barkham explores some of the most beautiful landscapes in Britain as he travels to ever-smaller islands in search of their special magic. Our small islands are both places of freedom and imprisonment, party destinations and oases of peace, strangely suburban and deeply wild. They are places where the past is unusually present, but they can also offer a vision of an alternative future. Meeting all kinds of islanders, from nuns to puffins, from local legends to rare subspecies of vole, he seeks to discover what it is like to live on a small island, and what it means to be an islander.
Patrick Barkham, who’s a nature writer for the Guardian, visits a number of the islands around the United Kingdom, wondering if there’s anything which makes life on those islands different from the mainland, and if so what it is. [source]
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5
The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers
Kate Boxer (illustrator) Adam Nicolson (author)
4.5
The story of seabirds – the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire from one of our greatest nature writers.
Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed.
Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on a featureless sea, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now too.
In ten chapters, each dedicated to a different bird, and each beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer, The Seabird’s Cry travels the ocean paths along with them, looking at the way their bodies work, the sense of their own individuality, the strategies and tactics needed to survive and thrive in the most demanding environment on earth.
At the heart of the book are the Shiant Isles, a cluster of Hebridean islands in the Minch but Nicolson has pursued the birds much further—across the Atlantic, up the west coast of Ireland, to St Kilda, Orkney, Shetland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Norway; to the eastern seaboard of Maine and to Newfoundland, to the Falklands, South Georgia, the Canaries and the Azores—reaching out across the widths of the world ocean which is the seabirds’ home.
But a global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory.
If we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it. Adam Nicolson’s achievement is to show that these two ways of describing the world to ourselves are complementary rather than antagonistic. [source]
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6
Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It Is Too Late?
Mark Cocker:
4.3
Environmental thought and politics have become parts of mainstream cultural life in Britain. The wish to protect wildlife is now a central goal for our society, but where did these ‘green’ ideas come from? And who created the cherished institutions, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that are now so embedded in public life with millions of members?
From the flatlands of Norfolk to the tundra-like expanse of the Flow Country in northern Scotland, acclaimed writer on nature Mark Cocker sets out on a personal quest through the British countryside to find the answers to these questions.
He explores in intimate detail six special places that embody the history of conservation or whose fortunes allow us to understand why our landscape looks as it does today. We meet key characters who shaped the story of the British countryside – Victorian visionaries like Octavia Hill, founder of the National Trust, as well as brilliant naturalists such as Max Nicholson or Derek Ratcliffe, who helped build the very framework for all environmental effort.
This is a book that looks to the future as well as exploring the past. It asks searching questions like who owns the land and why? And who benefits from green policies? Above all it attempts to solve a puzzle: why do the British seem to love their countryside more than almost any other nation, yet they have come to live amid one of the most denatured landscapes on Earth? Radical, provocative and original, Our Place tackles some of the central issues of our time. Yet most important of all, it tries to map out how this overcrowded island of ours could be a place fit not just for human occupants but also for its billions of wild citizens.
He starts off by telling us that the natural world we like to rhapsodise about is vanishing. The figures are terrifying: 99% of our flower-rich meadows have been destroyed in the last 70 years or so. Britain is going silent: it’s going grey instead of green. [source]
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A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
Helen Jukes
4.3
'This book has found a special place in my heart. It’s as strange, beautiful and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings, as bees in a hive. I loved it' HELEN MACDONALD, author of H IS FOR HAWK
A fascinating, insightful and inspiring account of a novice beekeeper's year of keeping honeybees, which will appeal to readers of H is For Hawk and The Outrun
Entering her thirties, Helen Jukes feels trapped in an urban grind of office politics and temporary addresses – disconnected, stressed. Struggling to settle into her latest job and home in Oxford, she realises she needs to effect a change if she’s to create a meaningful life for herself, one that can accommodate comfort and labour and love. Then friends give her the gift of a colony of honeybees – according to folklore, bees freely given bring luck – and Helen embarks on her first full year of beekeeping. But what does it mean to ‘keep’ wild creatures? In learning about the bees, what can she learn of herself? And can travelling inside the hive free her outside it?
As Helen grapples with her role in the delicate, awe-inspiring ecosystem of the hive, the very act of keeping seems to open up new perspectives, deepen friendships old and new, and make her world come alive. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is at once a fascinating exploration of the honeybee and the hive, the practices of honey-gathering and the history of our observation of bees; and a beautifully wrought meditation on responsibility and care, on vulnerability and trust, on forging bonds and breaking new ground.
Jukes’ strenuous effort at relationality (her effort to get to know these creatures which are so very different from her) result in her being humanised and personalised. [source]
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The Light in the Dark
Horatio Clare
4.0
As November stubs out the glow of autumn and the days tighten into shorter hours, winter’s occupation begins. Preparing for winter has its own rhythms, as old as our exchanges with the land. Of all the seasons, it draws us together. But winter can be tough.
It is a time of introspection, of looking inwards. Seasonal sadness; winter blues; depression – such feelings are widespread in the darker months. But by looking outwards, by being in and observing nature, we can appreciate its rhythms. Mountains make sense in any weather. The voices of a wood always speak consolation. A brush of frost; subtle colours; days as bright as a magpie’s cackle. We can learn to see and celebrate winter in all its shadows and lights.
In this moving and lyrical evocation of a British winter and the feelings it inspires, Horatio Clare raises a torch against the darkness, illuminating the blackest corners of the season, and delving into memory and myth to explore the powerful hold that winter has on us. By learning to see, we can find the magic, the light that burns bright at the heart of winter: spring will come again.
It’s a book in which he uses depression as a sort of dark light to highlight some desolate questions: Who is he? What is his relationship to the natural world? [source]
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Swifts in a Tower
David Lack
4.3
First published in 1956, Swifts in a Tower still offers astonishing insights into the private lives of swifts, their lifestyles, and the environment they inhabit. Now more than sixty years later, swifts have been studied even more thoroughly, using technology unimaginable in the 1950s. This research has revealed more secrets of these indomitable flyers, which spend virtually their entire lives in flight, and so this new edition, edited by the author’s son Andrew Lack and published in association with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for their Oxford Swift City project, includes a brand-new chapter by Andrew Lack that updates the story of this remarkable bird for the twenty-first century.
The book reads like an 18th century or 19th century naturalist’s potpourri. The poetry rubs shoulders with the figures. He airs speculation, he retells anecdotes. If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and the humility to be a scientist. [source]
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The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence
Neil Ansell
4.2
Neil Ansell's THE ROUGH BOUNDS is a mesmerising book on nature and solitude by a writer who has spent his lifetime taking solitary ventures into the wild. For any readers of the author's previous book, DEEP COUNTRY, Robert Macfarlane's THE OLD WAYS or William Atkins THE MOOR.
'A gem of a book, an extraordinary tale. Ansell's rich prose will transport you to a real life Narnian world that C.S.Lewis would have envied. Find your deepest, most comfortable armchair and get away from it all' Countryfile
The experience of being in nature alone is here set within the context of a series of walks that Neil Ansell takes into the most remote parts of Britain, the rough bounds in the Scottish Highlands. He illustrates the impact of being alone as part of nature, rather than outside it.
As a counterpoint, Neil Ansell also writes of the changes in the landscape, and how his hearing loss affects his relationship with nature as the calls of the birds he knows so well become silent to him.
Its naiveté is disarming, and made me suspend my normal critical instincts. When I did that, something rather wonderful came in. It’s a mournful, wistful, elegiac book, but that elegiac quality isn’t generated by any obvious device. Often the simplest songs are the most moving aren’t they? [source]
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Recommended by Charles Foster.
