Top 5 Books of 2018

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.

5. Emergent Ecologies, by Eben Kirksey

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 21^st 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.