Robert Macfarlane's Top Book Recommendations

Robert Macfarlane

@josephQED @abinadi Quammen’s is a great book. [source]

Barbara Kiser

Quammen is one of the great science journalists, and this is a monument of a book—a masterful retelling of how the ‘tree of life’ was recast in the twentieth century by a band of original thinkers. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

@srijanapiya17 @GhoshAmitav It’s a brilliant book. One I have both read and taught here in Cambridge. [source]

Cassie Knight

I selected this book because it is set in the Sundarbans in Bangladesh, which is the mangrove coastal area that is prone to cyclones. It contains a vivid description of a cyclone. Just last week I was visiting the cyclone-hit area of the Sundarbans and to have an image of what it is like makes it so much more real. Even though I have spoken to people who have lived through a cyclone, I sometimes find that fiction can make me understand things more fully. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

It’s wild in the astonishing indifference of the desert landscape to human practice – McCarthy evokes this more purely than any other writer. [source]

Jocko Willink

Founder/Echelon Front

The other book that I've read multiple times is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. [source]

Aleksandar Hemon

It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

Abbey is full of passion, fury and contempt – a fiery fighter to shake up the sometimes over-tranquil atmosphere of nature writing. [source]

Hari Kunzru

He has a deep love for this place and he’s amusing to read because he’s such a strong personality. His writing is extraordinary. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

Baker turned his bulging set of ornithological field journals into a 120-page prose poem. It’s astonishingly energy-filled. [source]

Jeremy Mynott

It’s the story of this pursuit of the bird and how he came to feel a kind of affinity with it, and how he uses the bird as a symbol for the things he feels, or wants to feel, about the natural world. [source]

William Fiennes

It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast with U and I, although it was written by another Baker. My book The Snow Geese had a lot to do with birds and the non-human world around us, but I didn’t read this book until I’d finished. I wish I’d read it earlier than I did. The way he describes the world outside him, particularly birds, is so electric. It avoids all the traps of rhapsody and the sort of nature writing that Evelyn Waugh satirises in Scoop. You remember William Boot the protagonist of Scoop? He writes a nature column that’s a terrible, sub-poetic kind of purple-word haze. But The Peregrine is far removed from that. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

This book changed my life and really made me become a writer, if any one book did. I remember finding a very battered secondhand copy of it in a bookshop in Vancouver while I was out climbing in the Rockies, in my early twenties. [source]

Kate Marvel

this book doesn’t directly address climate change. That’s one of the things I love about it. We so often hear about the Arctic in the context of threats: it’s disappearing, it’s changing, we’ll never see it again. I think it’s useful, though, to stop thinking of the Arctic only as a symbol of climate change and to remember it’s a real place. If we appreciate the Arctic for itself, maybe that makes it harder to write it off as an inevitable casualty of climate change………..I included Arctic Dreams on my list because it’s the only ‘science’ book I’ve read that’s really got close to my experience of doing science. It’s meandering and there’s no real structure; there are seriously pages and pages describing how ice melts in great detail. And then a meditation on musk oxen, and then some more ice melting. It’s all a bit of a mess, but there’s a real sense of wonder and gratitude and beauty that permeate the book. [source]

Sara Wheeler

Barry Lopez is an American man and in Arctic Dreams he describes the clarity of the landscape that has such a profound effect on the human spirit. Everyone says it has a profound effect.He’s a proper nature writer and it’s a brilliant book. He wrote it 25 years ago, I think, and it’s very lyrical and uplifting………..It takes you outside your normal existence and sets you loose from your spiritual moorings. Everywhere in the Antarctic is like that and in the Arctic you feel it when you get away from the settlements. [source]

Robert Macfarlane

This book is a geo-philosophical meditation on the Cairngorm landscape in particular, but more generally on how mind and place interpenetrate, as Shepherd puts it. It’s a sensual and, well, erotic text. Shepherd talks about tasting the landscape, and describes walking barefoot, sleeping out. It’s the record of a long-term and full-body immersion in a place. [source]

Cal Flyn

This slim work of nature writing, an account of gentle and repeated interaction with those same mountains in all seasons, requires total immersion. [source]