Biblio File

The Natural World: A Reading List from Open Book Night by Elizabeth Waters, AskNYPLJune 3, 2016

City Parks

Books about hiking, evolution, human nature, dogs and cats, city parks and gardens, and classic fiction were among the titles readers recommended at our Open Book Night last month when we suggested the topic “the natural world.” We hope you’ll discover something you’d like to read on our list, and we’d love to read your book recommendations in the comments section below.

Open Book Night meets on the second Friday of the month from 6–7 PM at the Mid-Manhattan Library. Please join us and recommend a book you love to fellow readers! Our next Open Book Night meets next Friday, and the theme is ESCAPISM! What do you like to read to unwind, to get away from bad weather, or to armchair travel? Are there books that feed into your wanderlust or just take you away from it all? Come share your biblio-escape with us on June 10.

 

Alice started us off with a description of The Allure of the Deep Woods: Backpacking the Northville-Placid Trail, a nature memoir by Walt McLaughlin. She appreciated the combination of nature writing and spiritual reflection she found in the book and noted that McLaughlin made her feel like she was there in the deep woods as she read.

Alice also thought that The Allure of the Deep Woods could be used as guide book to hiking the Northville-Placid trail, and noted with approval a minimum of hiking gear discussion. This made us think of the sometimes humorous backpack packing scenes in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Erica described her experience reading Wild, which is about hiking and also not about hiking. Strayed’s memoir of recovery from grief, addiction, and loss generated a lot of interest in the group.

From nonfiction accounts of nature, our next reader Joy illustrated the power of nature by reading a passage from M. R. Carey’s dystopian fantasy The Girl with all the Gifts, in which a teacher transforms a drab classroom and her pupils’ minds with flowers. Here’s the end of the passage our reader selected:

Girl with all the Gifts

 “The children are hypnotised. It’s spring in the classroom. It’s equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone’s finger.
 When everyone has looked at the flowers, and held them, Miss Justineau puts them in bottles and jars all around the classroom, wherever there’s a shelf or a table or a clear surface so that the whole room becomes a meadow.”

 

 

Greatest Show on Earth

Our next reader Joseph took us into more scientific nature writing, recommending naturalist and conservationist John Burrough’s 1905 call to nature writing, Ways of Nature, available as a free e-book through Hathi Trust Digital Library. Joseph’s second recommendation sparked many questions and a lively debate. He described The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins as an accessible, clear explanation of esoteric scientific topics. In The Greatest Show on Earth, published in 2009, the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Dawkins aims to "demonstrate that evolution is an inescapable fact."

 

 

Man Called Ove

From our discussion of evolutionary theory, we moved on to depictions of human nature in fiction. August recommended A Man Called Ove, a black comic novel by Swedish author Fredrik Backman in which the title character, an isolated and grumpy elderly man, finds his life transformed by contact with his new young neighbors. We wondered how to correctly pronounce the name Ove. Click here to hear the Swedish pronunciation on Forvo.

 

 

 

Lord of the FLies

Another reader recommended William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies as one of the best books illustrating human nature she has ever read. Many of us in the group remembered reading this chilling  tale of schoolboys marooned on an island who descend into violence, in junior high or high school, but few of us had revisited it as adult readers. I think I’ll be adding The Lord of the Flies to my ”To Reread” list.

 

 

 

 

No discussion of the natural world would be complete without animals. Cecil shared some of his favorite stories from Chicken Soup for the Cat and Dog Lover’s Soul, edited by Jack Canfield. The owners’ devotion to their animals in stories of pets lost and found impressed Cecil. Special mentions included a dog who helped diagnose cancer patients and Socks, the tuxedo cat who lived in the White House with the Clintons.

 

 

 

NYBG

From animals we segued into parks and gardens. Miriam showed us a beautiful book of photographs, City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts, edited by Catie Marron, which includes essays by notable writers on their beloved parks around the world. We also looked at the recent photographic history of The New York Botanical Garden, published this year to coincide with the Garden’s 125th anniversary.

 

 

Nick Adams Stories

Finally, we returned to fiction as our evening of nature reading recommendations drew to a close. Our last reader described one of his favorite short stories, “Big Two-Hearted River,” one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. The image of a young man fishing in the swamp remained with him as a powerful image of our need to go to troubling places. Our short story reader also recommended O. Henry’s “Memoirs of a Yellow Dog” as a memorable animal story told from the dog’s perspective.

 

 

Thank you to all the readers who joined us at Open Book Night, those who recommended books and those who preferred to listen to the recommendations of fellow readers! If you love to talk about books, we hope to see you soon at one of our Open Book Nights. In the meantime, happy reading!

Upcoming Open Book Nights

Past Open Book Nights

Click to see the list of books discussed.

View all posts by Elizabeth Waters