Recommendations from our site
“I love reading books and read loads of them. But to be honest, quite often they tend to go in one ear and out the other. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when I was cycling through Siberia in the middle of winter, 20 years ago, and it’s one of the few books that’s completely stuck with me. She lives in a little cottage somewhere near this little creek called Tinker Creek, and she goes out and walks down by the river, over a period of time and comes home, and is astonished about it. It’s borderline theological. She’s wondering a lot about God and where we fit in with creation. There’s overlap between not religion exactly, but spirituality and science. And she writes very beautifully. She just writes about the awe and the terror and the brutality of the universe, but also the incredible beauty and gentleness of it all. There’s a scene in there — I think it was a dragonfly eating its mate’s head or something. I can’t remember the details, but it viscerally stuck with me. She’s just calling on everyone to throw themselves down on their knees and be astonished.” Read more...
The best books on Local Adventures
Alastair Humphreys, Travel Writer
“This book taught me that careful attention to the living world could be celebrated and explored with rich, sensual language. After sipping for the first two decades of my life on watered-down wine, here was a glass overflowing with blood-red delight. Each taste revealed new layers. I truly got drunk on her writing. After reading this book, there was no going back for me.” Read more...
The best books on Natural History
David George Haskell, Biologist
“She’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life.” Read more...
The Best Henry David Thoreau Books
Laura Dassow Walls, Biographer
“This book, which won the Pulitzer prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. Dillard spent quite a long time in this small area in a particular valley called Tinker Creek in Virginia, America. She just recorded what she saw and what she thought about it, and this book is a collection of her observations. It’s a very lovely book because it takes on the ferocity of nature and is very unsentimental, while at the same time being very beautiful.” Read more...
Sara Maitland, Novelist
