My Top Nature Books of 2020

A round-up with mini reviews of some of my favourite nature books that I read last year, both fiction and non-fiction.

FICTION

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I started reading this around March last year—quite an intense book to be reading during a pandemic, so I had to intersperse it with some more light-hearted reading, but I'm glad I persevered. I thought this was a fascinating look at what could happen to the planet if we don't look after it. Sure, it's worst-case scenario but so many elements of it are relevant even today—I hope we won't see quite the same complete apocalypse but it's quite likely we will all face food shortages in the near future, for example, as many people in the world already are. As well as its relevance in environmental terms, I found the portrayal of the father-son relationship incredibly powerful.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

A really beautifully written book (as you might expect, given it won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), The Overstory features the stories of nine people and their relationships to five trees, the central focal points of the book. The characters have wildly different backgrounds, and relate to trees in very different ways but ultimately all come to appreciate and respect them. In its complex relationships between different characters it reminded me a little of Cloud Atlas but each character in The Overstory is more developed, and the interweaving of their stories is more subtle. More than a book about nature, this is about humanity's interactions with it, but that's not to say that there aren't also some wonderful dendrological observations.

Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

While explicitly a coming-of-age story with a little bit of murder mystery, this book is more than anything about the marsh that a young girl lives in by herself from the age of 6, and her non-human neighbours. The plot is gripping, and I finished this book in a matter of days, but I found the nature writing so beautiful that it was quite compelling enough even without the twist and turns of the plot. This book is Delia Owens' first novel, but her previous life as a research scientist in the Kalahari goes a long way to explaining the beautiful detailed observations in Where The Crawdads Sing.

MEMOIR

The Salt Path and The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

Although The Salt Path was published in 2018, I somehow only discovered it last year, but this meant at least that I was able to read its sequel, The Wild Silence, immediately afterwards. These were probably my favourite books that I read last year—incredibly moving, and tragic, but demonstrating the most remarkable perseverance and strength of character in the face of devastation. At the beginning of The Salt Path, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose both their home and income in a court ruling following a bad business investment, and just a few days afterwards Moth is diagnosed with a terminal disease. Faced with waiting for an indeterminate length of time for a council house, they instead decide to walk the South West Coast Path. The Wild Silence then continues their journey at the end of the path, including how Raynor Winn ended up writing The Salt Path book.

Although both these books are yet again as much about people as they are about nature, I included them because they show how much we need a close connection with nature. Both Raynor and Moth gain strength from being outside, breathing fresh air, facing the elements, and possibly even just from being around plants (a particularly interesting segment in The Wild Silence). I think it particularly hit home for me reading these books last year, when I was finding it hard not being able to go walking wherever and whenever I wanted. It was reassuring to have someone else point out just how important it is, and to feel understood in how much not being able to do so can affect us.

SCIENCE

Animal Languages by Eva Meijer

This was my first book of 2020 (an excellent Christmas present), and what a book to start on! Animal Languages: The Secret Conversations of the Living World is a zoological book written by a philosopher and was completely eye-opening for me. I have read a lot of scientific papers on animal cognition, and books on particular animals (like the Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young, or Alex & Me by Irene Pepperberg, both of which I highly recommend), but the philosophical angle and broad reach of this really helped to tie other ideas I'd come across together, as well as providing lots more interesting examples.

Wildling by Isabella Tree

I struggled to decide which of my slightly arbitrary categories to put Wilding in. It is perhaps technically a memoir, but absolutely packed with facts around the science of rewilding, and although I read it one go, I think it would benefit from chapter-by-chapter reading with some time in between to mull things over. It charts the progress of a large country estate from failing farm to nature haven, explaining in detail all the research and theory behind it along the way. I have read quite a lot of books by farmers, from multi-generational Lake District fell farmers to city dwellers who upped sticks to start sheep farming in Wales, but this was completely unlike anything I'd read before. I learnt so much from this book that I feel I ought to reread it every year to add context to everything else I read in future.

Wilding, both the book and the concept, is at the fascinating intersection of agriculture and conservation. Isabella Tree and her husband have experience of the former but are aiming for the latter, and the book shows that they don't have to be mutually exclusive. I think what is really special about this book is that it doesn't just teach you about how you would rewild a farm if you had one, but it has heaps of information about how we can all consume better, what to look for if you eat meat, etc. It is because of this, I think, that even though I just said Raynor Winn's books were my favourites, if I had to choose one from this list that I wish everyone would read, it would be this.

What nature books did you read and love in 2020? First on my list for 2021 is English Pastoral by James Rebanks...