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Jessica J. Lee's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Jessica J. Lee recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Jessica J. Lee's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Grassling

'A subtle, moving celebration of place and connectedness . . . The Grassling brings the sounds, smells and sights of the countryside alive like few other books. Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice' PD Smith, Guardian


What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing.

Spurred on by...
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Recommended by Jessica J. Lee, and 1 others.

Jessica J. LeeIt’s sort of a memoir. It’s a sort of a book of poetry. It’s sort of a book of history, and an interrogation of place. Even stylistically, chapter to chapter, the form changes multiple times, so there are sections of straight prose, sections of poetry, sections that are quite experimental. I think that’s what I love about it. I wish I was that brave. I wish I even knew how to pull something like... (Source)

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2
A writer’s search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this meditation on creativity and life – a field guide to things small and significant.

In 2012, Kyo Maclear met a musician with a passion for birds. Curious about what had prompted a young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature she decided to follow him for a year to find out.

Observing two artists through seasonal shifts and migrations, Birds Art Life celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in a big city, and explores what happens when the principles of...
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Recommended by Jessica J. Lee, and 1 others.

Jessica J. LeeShe scatters this great nature book with these lovely observations that are so familiar, so everyday to city dwellers. That’s powerful because there’s a real sense of identification, relatability, a sense that ‘I could be looking for nature anywhere.’ And she does. She looks at birds in her garden. She looks at birds on the sidewalk. (Source)

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3

Out of the Woods

A fierce, poignant and highly original memoir about sexuality, shame and the lure of the trees

'A brave and beautiful book, electrifying on sex and nature, religion and love. No one is writing quite like this. I'm so glad Luke Turner exists' OLIVIA LAING, author of THE LONELY CITY and CRUDO

'Refreshing, frank, edifying, courageous . . . I was quite emotional by the end. Luke Turner is a serious thinker and a unique and important new voice' AMY LIPTROT, author of THE OUTRUN

After the disintegration of the most significant relationship of his life, the demons...
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Recommended by Jessica J. Lee, and 1 others.

Jessica J. LeeIn his writing, the forest and the city bleed together. There isn’t this nature/culture divide in his work. He rejects this idea of the forest as rural idyll, and gives us these stories of the forest as a place of work. He talks about how ancient woodlands are managed landscapes over time. He talks a lot about crime, of sexuality, of dead bodies in the forests. (Source)

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4

Significant Other

Shortlisted for the 2020 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2019 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month March 2019. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019. In her first book of poems, Isabel Galleymore takes a sustained look at the ‘eight million differently constructed hearts’ of species currently said to inhabit Earth. These are part of the significant other of her title; so too are the intimacies – loving, fraught, stalked by loss and extinction – that make up a life. The habit of foisting human... more
Recommended by Jessica J. Lee, and 1 others.

Jessica J. LeeI think it’s incredibly powerful in the way it slips between the kinds of affection and care that we can offer to other species. So there’s sexual desire; there’s just observation. There are moments in the poetry where she really unpacks the anthropocentric idea of the natural world. She’s very resistant to the idea of reading other species through our lens. (Source)

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5

The Way Through the Woods

Of Mushrooms and Mourning

A grieving widow feeling disconnected from life discovers a most unexpected obsession--hunting for mushrooms--in a story of healing and purpose.
Long Litt Woon moved to Norway from Malaysia as a nineteen-year-old exchange student. Soon after her arrival, she met Eiolf. He became the love of her life. After thirty-two years together, Eiolf's sudden death left Woon struggling to imagine a life without the man who had been soulmate and best friend. Adrift in her grief, Woon signs up for a beginner's course on mushrooming. She finds, to her surprise, that the hunt for mushrooms and mushroom...
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Recommended by Jessica J. Lee, and 1 others.

Jessica J. LeeIt’s a light-touch memoir-meets-nature book about the period after the death of the writer’s husband, when she decides in her grief to go to an introduction to mushroom foraging workshop that she and her husband had booked before his death. This workshop draws her into a completely different world and, in a way, out of her grief, or through her grief. It’s an incredibly powerful story. (Source)

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