The Best Books of 2019: Nature!

For the first time in recorded history, the annual Stevereads year-end Götterdämerung has needed to split the “Science and Nature” category into two separate lists, such was the bounty of titles this year in both areas. This year, the industry’s new releases dealing with non-human animals and the natural world (on a less formal and more anecdotal basis) congregate on a list of their own, and these were the very best:

10) Wildhood by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz & Kathryn Bowers (Scribner) - The authors ascend to a great conceptual height in order to provide an intriguingly Big Picture view of the general patterns of adolescence in the animal kingdom, humans very much included. 

9) Deep Creek by Pam Houston (WW Norton) - Pam Houston so beautifully captures the sights and textures of her ranch in the Colorado Rockies that readers will feel as though they’ve paid a long and very therapeutic visit in person.

8 Underland by Robert MacFarlane (WW Norton) - Even readers already familiar with the wonderful, unpredictable ways this author can render his deep contemplations of seemingly self-evident subjects will be freshly amazed by this book about all the ways humans have conceived of what lies under the ground. 

7 Horizon by Barry Lopez (Knopf) - The Grand Master of nature-writing here offers readers a generous and mesmerizing collection of travel-stories from one of the most perceptive observers of the world around us. 

6 No Beast So Fierce by Dane Huckelbridge (Morrow) - The story of the Champawat tiger - a maneater responsible for a staggering 436 human deaths in the first decade of the 20th century - has never had a smarter or more effectively dramatic retelling than this new book by Dane Huckelbridge.

5 Slime by Ruth Kassinger (HMH) - Only in the weird, weird book world would it even be possible to conceive a sentence as downright strange as “Algae were waiting for their champion,” but here this wonderful, endlessly nerdy book is anyway, energetically sharing the evolution, natural history, and environmental importance of ooze.

4 Our Dogs, Ourselves by Alexandra Horowitz (Scribner) - Alexandra Horowitz proved in her bestselling Inside of a Dog that she could write with remarkable empathy about dogs, taking readers as far inside their very alien perspectives as any published writer on the subject. This new book brilliantly continues that endeavor.

3 In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond by John Zada (Atlantic Monthly Press) - John Zada travels to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia to meet the hardy humans who’ve made the area their home, to encounter the dramatic animals species who live in the vast ecosystem, and maybe, just maybe, to catch a glimpse of the region’s most famous undocumented alien: the sasquatch. The book that results is an oddly lovely quest narrative unlike anything else written this year.

2 Saving Jemima by Julie Zickefoose (HMH) - The author takes in a scrappy, opinionated blue jay in this latest example of the thriving sub-genre of nature-writing in which compassionate humans adopt wayward birds. Readers of that sub-genre (The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar, Arnie the Darling Starling, and hundreds more) will already be expecting charming and moving stories, and Zickefoose provides sterling examples of both.

1 Allowed to Grow Old by Isa Leshko (University of Chicago Press) - The best Nature-related book of 2019 is also the single most viscerally powerful book of the year, something that could only have been accomplished through photography as breathtaking as Isa Leshko’s. In this book, on page after page, readers see gorgeous photos of farm animals who are not worked to death or slaughtered in their second year of life. The cumulative result is nothing short of astonishing.