Another year passes and another list of my favourite books from the past twelve months. I didn’t have quite as many five-star reads as normal, either from the 150 books I read. First up are some honourable mentions that I gave 4.5 stars to:
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness – Alastair Humphreys
Spring Rain – Marc Hamer
Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds – Gareth E. Rees
Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
The New Wild – Fred Pearce
Black Ghosts – Noo Saro-Wiwi
Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation – Hugh Warwick
The Lost Paths: A History Of How We Walk From Here To There – Jack Cornish
Late Light: Finding Home In The West Country – Michael Malay
The Rosewater Redemption – Tade Thompson
And here are my seven five-star reads.
Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You– Nick Hayes (Ed) – 5
In May 2022, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences released a paper that measured fourteen European countries on three factors: biodiversity, wellbeing, and nature connectedness. Britain came last in every single category. The findings are clear. We are suffering, and nature is too.
Enter ‘Wild Service’ – a visionary concept crafted by the pioneers of the Right to Roam campaign, which argues that humanity’s loss and nature’s need are two sides of the same story. Blending science, nature writing and indigenous philosophy, this groundbreaking book calls for mass reconnection to the land and a commitment to its restoration.
In ,i>Wild Service we meet Britain’s new nature defenders: an anarchic cast of guerilla guardians who neither own the places they protect, nor the permission to restore them. Still, they’re doing it anyway. This book is a celebration of their spirit and a call for you to join. So, whether you live in the countryside or the city, want to protect your local river or save our native flora, this is your invitation to rediscover the power in participation – the sacred in your service.
The Notebook: A History Of Thinking On Paper – Ronald Allen – 5
The first history of the notebook, a simple invention that changed the way the world thinks.
We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think?
In this wide-ranging story, Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of medieval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine.
On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world.
In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever.
Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and making us more creative, more productive — and happier.
Tender Maps: Travels in Search of the Emotions of Place – Alice Maddicott – 5
Some travellers are driven by the need to scale a natural wonder, or to see a city’s sights or a place of history. Others, like Alice Maddicott, travel in search of a particular scene, feeling or atmosphere, often inspired by music, literature and art. Taking us deep into our emotional and creative responses to place, this extraordinary book explores the author’s relentless travelling, from the heat of Sicily to the mountains of Japan. With her uniquely lyrical approach to psycho-geography, Maddicott explores the relationship with landscape that is the very essence of human creativity.
From seventeenth-century salons of Paris to the underground culture and crumbling balconies of modern Tbilisi, through writers as diverse as Italo Calvino and L.M. Montgomery and artists like Ana Mendieta and eighteenth-century girls embroidering their lives, Tender Maps is a beautifully evocative book of travel, culture and imagination that transports readers in time and place.
Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain – Corrine Fowler – 5
The countryside is cherished by many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. Where the countryside is celebrated, histories of empire are forgotten. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks, roaming the island with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton.
Empire transformed rural lives for better and for whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities, and the select few who benefited, directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to shape lives across Britain today.
To give an honest account, to offer both affection and criticism, is a matter of we should not knowingly tell half a history. This new knowledge of our island stories, once gained, can only deepen Britons’ relationship with their beloved landscape.
The Heart Of The Woods – Wyl Menmuir – 5
Our lives are intimately intertwined with those of the trees and woodlands around us. For centuries, trees have shaped us and we have shaped them. They have have determined the tools we use, the boats we build, the stories we tell about the world and about ourselves, the songs we sing, and some of our most important rituals.
In The Heart of The Woods, the companion piece to his Roger Deakin Award winning The Draw of The Sea, Wyl Menmuir travels the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland to meet the stories of the people who plant trees, the ecologists who study them, those who shape beautiful objects and tools from from wood, and those who use it to help others.
In heading deep into the woods, Wyl explores what we get out of spending time around trees, the ways in which our relationship with them has changed over time, and the ways in which our future is interconnected with theirs.
Written in close collaboration with makers, crafters, bodgers, and woodsmen and women in order to understand better the woods they know so well, the joys and frustrations of working with a living material, and the stories of their craft and skills, this is also a book about legacies – those a parent leaves to a child, the legacies left by specific trees in specific places, and those a society leaves to the next generation. The Heart of The Woods will delight anyone who enjoys walking among the trees, and anyone who, when lost, has found themselves in the woods.
Seaglass: Essays, Moments and Reflections – Kathryn Tann – 5
On a windswept stretch of the Durham coastline, there’s treasure to be jewels of shining sea glass, swept in by the tide after years at sea. Gathered together in a jar on the windowsill, each seaworn pebble is a moment in time, a glinting archive of unknowable lives.
Seaglass is a collection of such moments; essays blending creative non-fiction with nature writing and memoir, and portraying with powerful observation and moving honesty the journey of a young woman navigating modern adulthood. The stories draw a map of Kathryn’s life, from Manchester to the South Wales coastline and out to the Thousand Islands in Canada’s Saint Lawrence River. Traversing wilderness, natural history, travel and water – rivers, lakes, coastlines and leisure centres – Seaglass explores shared experiences, anxieties, confidence and contentment.
The book above was within a sliver of getting my book of the year, and I think that is because she is the closest to the author that did get my book of the year and this is (Which was also my cover of the year for the first time)
Cairn – Kathleen Jamie – 5
Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers.
For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.
The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie’s intent ‘noticing’ of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature. With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times.
Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie’s calibre could achieve.
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