The Best Books of 2023: Nature!

Just as in recent years, so too in 2023: reading books about the wonder and plenitude of the natural world felt not only anachronistic but almost illicit. Here were dozens and dozens of books every month chronicling the joys of that natural world, the oddity and grandeur of its inhabitants, from the invisible to the commonplace to the most grand and gaudy – all being lovingly described and celebrated on the page at the same time that they and their habitats are being bulldozed and burned out in the real world. The disjunction makes reading these books border on the dirty pleasure of reading cheaply entertaining science fiction, and yet both the marvels and the dangers in these books are very. These were the best of the books:

10 Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future by Danielle Clode (WW Norton)

We begin our list with one of the principal delights of nature-writing: a friendly, readable popular natural history, in this case that of one of the most doomed animals in the world: Australia's charismatic koala. Clode touches on every aspect of the lives of these strange, endearing little creatures.

9 Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility by Martha Nussbaum (Simon & Schuster)

We move from a light-hearted entry to one of the most somber and serious entry of the year: this searching and uncompromising call for a new and long-overdue rethinking of what humans owe morally to all the non-human animals living on the planet humans conquered and are despoiling makes for darkly thrilling reading.

8 Alfie & Me by Carl Safina (WW Norton)

The time-honored sub-genre of humans taking in a wild bird and getting to know it well enough to write a book about the experience gets an utterly delightful new addition with this charming and surprisingly emotional book by the author of The View From Lazy Point. Safina comes to rehabilitate and know the tiny owl he adopts, and he renders the experience in his usual wonderful prose.

7 The Killer Whale Journals: Our Love and Fear of Orcas by Hanne Strager (Johns Hopkins University Press)

The author of this tremendously evocative book signs on to crew a research vessel in Norway and goes on to experience orcas in all their magnificence, in their own world rather than imprisoned in human jails and forced to do circus tricks for the applauding audience. It makes for highly personalized revelatory reading.

6 Thunder without Rain by Thomas McIntyre (Skyhorse)

McIntyre describes in vivid prose not only the natural history, distribution, and environmental status of all the various species of African buffalo but also many of the ways these buffalo crop up in myth, history, and – to far too great an extent, alas – the hunting memoirs of people whose main connection with these incredible animals was to shoot them dead for entertainment.

5 What An Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman (Penguin Press)

The always-reliable Ackerman adds to her shelf of terrific books on birds with this natural history of owls, and readers of those earlier books will find the author writing at the top of her form in these pages, colorfully conveying the variety and intricacy of owl evolution, biology, and cognition. Like all the best popular natural histories, this book is at heart a celebration.

4 Kings of Their Own Ocean by Karen Pinchin (Dutton)

Pinchin's unlikely bestseller about tuna is in large part about the people who brave the ocean in order to hunt and harvest these magnificent creatures, but even so, the tuna themselves manage to emerge as more than just the raw material of an industry – and the human stories are so fascinatingly done that I kept happily reading just the same.

3 Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery (Mariner Books)

Montgomery's angle here for writing about her subject is to look at turtles through the lens of their worse moments – she spends time at a turtle rehabilitation facility and learns the story of individual injured turtles while at the same time relating a good deal of turtle lore and natural history, and it all works just as all the best popular nature-writing should, filling the reader's imagination with wonder and new appreciation.

2 The Lives of Beetles: A Natural History of Coleoptera by Arthur Evans (Princeton University Press)

No list like this would be complete without an oversized and gloriously-illustrated species-by-species guidebook, and in a year with no shortage of such books (a good many of them from this publisher), this wonderfully geeky and eye-popping book by Evans wonderfully fills out that category. After paging through this book, you'll never overlook a beetle again.

1 Planta Sapiens by Paco Calvo (translated by Natalie Lawrence) (WW Norton)

This book, by far the best nature book of the year, is also by far the most thought-provoking and disturbing. Calvo synthesizes a great deal of recent research about what plants know, how they learn it, how they communicate it, and even how they remember it all. For many readers (certainly for this one), the book opens up an entirely new world, one in which the plants we farm and harvest and eat every day might be people who'd prefer we didn't. It's quietly seismic stuff.