GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT
A gifted naturalist/author can carry you into her or his chosen corner of Nature to reveal unimagined marvels and mysteries. An ecology of the mind is created, populated with fantastic (but possibly very common) organisms and ecosystems. You see things from the worm's point of view, from beneath the leaf, from sky high through the glint of a hawk's eye, from inside a cloud of drifting magnolia-blossom perfume. And this feels good.
FINDING GENERAL NATURE BOOKS
Dazzling books about many aspects of Nature can be found in local libraries and bookstores. Often you can "borrow" books online, if you have a library card. However, you need to know some naturalist-writers to look for. Important ones are profiled on Wikipedia's Nature Writing page.
Many of the great classics of nature writing can be downloaded or read online for free at the Project Gutenberg website. At the right is part of Project Gutenberg's download page for Jack London's The Call of the Wild. To go to that page, click on the image. Project Gutenberg offers ebooks published so long ago (100 years and more) that they're no longer copyright protected. Here are some Nature-writing classics available at Project Gutenberg:
- Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle
- Henry David Thoreau's Walden
- John Muir's Steep Trails
- Jack London's The Call of the Wild and many other books and short stories mostly about the Far North
- Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Year 1799-1804 -- Volume 1