My year in nature books
The very best of the nature books I read this year.
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I read and recommend nature books. Thanks for reading!
What I read this year
In news that will surprise no one who writes for a living, I read much more than I write about what I read. Although writers become writers because they love writing, often the last thing I want to do after a long day at the coalface, hacking out words, is get home and fire up the laptop for a second round. Writing is work; delicious and satisfying work, mostly, but still work.
Reading, though - reading is my relaxation.
So here’s a round-up of the nature books I loved the most this year. Obviously this is coming far too late to qualify as a gift guide, but I hope perhaps it can serve as a prompt for nature-themed reading in 2024.
Best-loved nature books I read in 2023
Erin Hortle, The Octopus and I
Delightfully strange and assured novel from a first-time author who lives in Tasmania. A breast-cancer survivor bonds with an octopus - some lovely passages from the point of view of the octopus. (This is a thing in nature writing at the moment, by the way - decentralising the human. I like it!)
Jonathan Raban, Coasting
Read this in January, prompted by the death of the venerable travel writer. He wrote this book about a year spent single-handedly sailing around the British coast. The actual year is significant: 1982, the year of the Falklands War. So this is a travelogue, a memoir, a state-of-the-nation book, but all rendered in (suitably) fluid, funny, perfect prose.
Rebecca Lowe, The Slow Road to Tehran
Another travelogue, this time a bicycle ride from London to Tehran through the breathtaking landscapes and complex history of the Middle East. Again, undertaken in troubled times: 2015, when the Syrian War was being waged. Again, funny, beautiful, enriching.
Matthew Green, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain
A town sunk beneath the sea; a Neolithic settlement drifted over by sand; a medieval village deserted after being ravaged by the Black Death: historian Matthew Green travels the length of the UK finding lost places. Gripping, haunting.
Philip Hoare, Albert and the Whale
Eh, this one’s a stretch to categorise as nature writing, honestly, but it’s fabulous: Hoare tells the story of Albrecht Dürer, the 15th-century German painter and printmaker. But Hoare is a spectacular nature writer and this book shows off his skills.
Judy Cotton, Swimming Home
Shimmering fragments of memoir by an 80-year-old debut author who’s spent her life as a journalist, artist - and wife of Liberal senator Robert Cotton. She moves to America, but: “Australia is still my inner landscape that lets me in and shuts me out.”
Ruth Adam, A House in the Country
Gently funny account of the trials of a group of friends, all desperate to get out of London after World War II, who buy a tumbledown country manor. None of the keen but clueless city slickers has the skills - or the funds - to keep the grand old lady running, and though defeat is inevitable, there’s delight along the way.
Laura Shaine Cunningham, A Place in the Country
Memoir of a rootless child growing into an adult relentlessly searching for a countryside home. Hmm, this one hasn’t stayed with me so well as the others, but I did like it!
Nona Fernàndez, Voyager: The Constellations of Memory
It can’t have been easy for Fernàndez to weave together these two stories. One is of caring for her ageing mother, whose neurons, as seen in a hospital MRI scanner, recall the sparking stars of the night sky. The other is of Fernàndez’s trip to an observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert to attend the ceremony of naming stars for victims of Pinochet’s brutal regime. But she’s done it with grace, heart, beauty - and total mastery.
Amy Jeffs, Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain
Old stories embedded in old landscapes get new tellings. Even if they’re new to you, these tales form the bedrock of British cultural life - if you squint, you’ll see them everywhere.
William Atkins, The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places
I did write about this one!
Patrick Barkham, The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin
Complex emotions about this one! It’s a biography of Roger Deakin, the nature writer, but told in the first person, which I described in my reading notes as “a slightly awkward act of ventriloquism”. And then there’s also an oral history element, which brings in the comments and stories of Deakin’s friends and family. Barkham says in his introduction that he wrote 90,000 words of a conventional biography, which he then junked as unworthy of the complicated man Deakin was. Part of me wants to read that biography instead, even while I loved the sidelights and humour of the chorus of voices. I have a LOT more to say about this one - coming next year. But a fascinating treatment of the life of an often awful, often brilliant man.
Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
So then of course I had to go back to the source. Walnut Tree Farm is a magical spot in Suffolk that Deakin restored from a tumbledown ruin into an artistic hub and much-loved home. This book was compiled from his daily diary-style notes and sometimes you can tell - it could have done with a more rigorous edit. But it shows his absolute devotion to the countryside he lived in, his deep knowledge of it, and his consummate skill at evoking it in words.
Roger Deakin, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain
This was the only book Deakin actually published during his lifetime (he died tragically early, at 63, in 2006), and it’s the one that made him, and Walnut Tree Farm, famous. It’s very beautiful, and a nature-writing classic.
Amy Liptrot, The Instant
Again I’m stretching the nature-writing category a little here, but Liptrot’s first memoir, The Outrun (soon to be a film starring Saoirse Ronan) fitted squarely into it, as do her columns for the nature journal Caught by the River, so I’m counting this too. Evoking the madness of love affairs and mapping it onto the phases of the moon, this is original and engaging.
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
For a year, a poet writes almost daily paeans to tiny joys he finds in the natural world. Delicious, uplifting.
Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
Remote and rugged, this part of the Danish coast is the catalyst for a book typifying my favourite genre, a blend of memoir with history and nature writing.
Melissa Harrison, The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature Diary
Harrison writes nature columns for the UK Times, as well as novels. This tells the story of her move from London to Suffolk, where she settles into a new way of noticing the world around her.
I hope at least a few of those pique your interest. Looking at the list, I can see plenty of glaring omissions, so I’ll try to rectify some of those next year.
Happy reading, and happy holidays!
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Love, love, love this!
This is such a wonderful list, thank you! And that’s the second time this week Notes From Walnut Tree Farm has popped up on my radar ❤️