Compared to previous 2017, 2018 was a good year of reading for me. This was for a variety of reasons, but I’d say first and foremost it was because this I dived deep into the literatures of nature writing and environmental politics. You won’t find any fiction on this year’s top five. Rest assured, though, there are plenty of narrative treasures here that’ll make even the biggest fiction diehard’s heart sing.
Because of my coursework during my spring 2018
semester, I was tasked with reading not one, not two, but four ethnographies, so it makes sense for at least one of them to
make this list. And while it at times comes off as overly-academic, Emergent Ecologies is the most
approachable ethnography I have ever read, and one that I think will forever be
near-and-dear to me because of its groundbreaking multispecies perspective.
Plus, it has a whole chapter dedicated to my favorite insect: ants. While I’m
not sure it’s something I’d recommend to the average reader, I believe it’s a must-have for any interested in ecocriticism.
4.
The Portable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey Cramer
It’d be disingenuous of me to not put any Thoreau on
the top five list of a year where Thoreau was read. This anthology of Thoreau’s
work—over 600 pages long—offers a great starting-point for those new to
Thoreau, alongside some more obscure works that even longtime scholars will
find novel. It’s the complete package: Walden
and Civil Disobedience in their
entirety, followed by snippets of A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and a multitude of journal entries,
poems, and standalone essays. Better yet, the introduction to the anthology,
some 30 pages long, manages to give a fantastic primer on Thoreau’s life and
works without being dry. Rather, Cramer seems at least half the wordsmith that
Thoreau was, which is a compliment of course.
I believe everyone should read Walden at least once in their life, and likewise I believe that this
anthology is where it’s at: Offering just that and then more.
3.
Becoming Animal, by David Abram
Seldom are my underlying beliefs so shaken by a book.
That isn’t to say that books have never changed my perception of things, but
I’m used to books working subtly in this department: illuminating new pathways
here and there, adding one more torch to help in lighting the darkness of the
unknown.
That’s what I’m used to, but that’s not what this book
does. Becoming Animal is an exploding
bottle rocket, casting the whole of the world in a blinding new light of
knowledge. Furthermore, using the platonic for analogy, it shows that what I thought
were forms in and of themselves are no more than mere shadows. Abram’s nature
in this book isn’t a lump of thing:
it is a fully living organism that exists as one, as all, and everything in
between. We find ourselves enmeshed within the folds of this living world, which
is equally entwined with our minds. By “becoming animal” we can realize the
truth of this interconnectivity.
Transcendentalist almost, this book seems to take
Emerson’s concept of the Over-Soul and tweak it for the 21st
century. It’s more complex than that, of course, but you’ll have to read it
yourself (and read carefully) to get it
all.
2.
Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey
Before this year I didn’t know about nature writing. I
knew Thoreau, and I’d a faint idea that Muir was an author that I’d enjoy
reading, but I didn’t know that there
existed an entire tradition of nature writings in American literature. That’s
something I only learned in a class I took that spring, a class aptly titled
“Human Place in Nature.”
Desert
Solitaire was the last book in the class that we read in its
entirety, and the first piece of nature writing we read coming straight from
the counterculture movement. But don’t be fooled: Abbey bears no resemblance to the archetypal
hippie. He’s too angry but down to earth to be a flowerchild. Instead, Abbey can
be likened to an old anarchist, more likely to pick up a Molotov than a protest
sign. And its exactly this sort of disposition that makes Desert Solitaire so engaging: Abbey isn’t afraid to be coarse,
isn’t afraid to offend. His is a language rough-written, with the point bare
and there and often devoid of any flowery language.
And don’t even get me started on the actual
philosophical content of the book. Tucked away in these pages Abbey puts forth
ideas about us and nature so radical that even now, 50 years later, they would
be certain to turn heads.
1.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
If I remember correctly, it took me all of three days
to read this—the shortest book I read this year. Unlike most nonfiction I read,
I bought it on impulse. I didn’t expect much from it, but I got it because it
was short, it looked fun, and I like snails.
Upon turning that last page, I found myself humbled. No
book had ever had the same deep emotional impact on me that this one did, especially
not one so short.
The
Sound of a Wild Snail Eating blends biology with
memoir, becoming both a treatise on the nature of snails and one woman’s
recovery from illness. Maybe it’s because of my mom’s own experience with
chronic illness, but reading this I felt as if I knew Bailey personally. Yes,
it’s a book about snails, but it’s a book about the author, and in that caliber
she succeeds at delivering with a voice more intimate than any other. All of
the books on this list discuss nature in some capacity, but it’s only here that
we get to see the relationship between us and the natural world so personally.
Plus, there’s a chapter about snail mating habits.
