Books on Nature and the Landscape
Discover the best books on nature and landscape, from Edward Abbey's *Desert Solitaire* to Joan Didion's *Play It As It Lays*. Explore curated reads on environmental change, place, and the human connection to the land—perfect for nature lovers and literary explorers.
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Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
One Navajo family, on a New Mexico reservation, struggles to survive in a world no longer theirs in the years just before and after World War II.
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Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey
“Rough, tough, combative . . . a passionately felt, deeply poetic book.”—Edwin Way Teale, The New York Times Book Review “This is not primarily a book about the desert,” writes Edward Abbey in his introduction. “In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desertis a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite. If a man knew enough he could write a whole book about the juniper tree. Not juniper trees in general but that one particular juniper tree which grows from a ledge of naked sandstone near the old entrance to Arches National Monument. What I have tried to do then is something a bit different. Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as medium than as material. Not imitation but evocation has been the goal.”
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Field Notes from a Catastrophe
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Explores the issue of global warming from every angle, incorporating interviews with researchers and environmentalists, explaining the science and the studies, and presenting the personal tales of those who are being affected most.
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Timothy
by Verlyn Klinkenborg
Timothy, a tortoise who lived in the garden of eighteenth-century curate Gilbert White, speaks out on his life in the garden, his nine-day adventure outside the gate, his observations of the curious habits and habitations of humans, and the natural world around him. 30,000 first printing.
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The Meadow
by James Galvin
Tells the hundred-year story of a meadow in the mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border and the people who are possessed by this terrain.
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In the Heart of the Valley of Love
by Cynthia Kadohata
This novel explores human relationships in a Los Angeles of the future, where rich and poor are deeply polarized and where water, food, gas and education cannot be taken for granted.
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Play It As It Lays
by Joan Didion
A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, "Play It As It Lays" captures the mood of an entire generation. Joan Didion chose Hollywood to serve as her microcosm of contemporary society and exposed a culture characterized by emptiness and ennui.
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Borderlands
by Gloria Anzaldúa
Explores life along the Mexican-American border and the experience of being caught between two cultures.