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Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Charles Foster recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Charles Foster's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Neil Ansell's THE ROUGH BOUNDS is a mesmerising book on nature and solitude by a writer who has spent his lifetime taking solitary ventures into the wild. For any readers of the author's previous book, DEEP COUNTRY, Robert Macfarlane's THE OLD WAYS or William Atkins THE MOOR.

'A gem of a book, an extraordinary tale. Ansell's rich prose will transport you to a real life Narnian world that C.S.Lewis would have envied. Find your deepest, most comfortable armchair and get away from it all' Countryfile


The experience of being in...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterIts naiveté is disarming, and made me suspend my normal critical instincts. When I did that, something rather wonderful came in. It’s a mournful, wistful, elegiac book, but that elegiac quality isn’t generated by any obvious device. Often the simplest songs are the most moving aren’t they? (Source)

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2

Swifts in a Tower

First published in 1956, Swifts in a Tower still offers astonishing insights into the private lives of swifts, their lifestyles, and the environment they inhabit. Now more than sixty years later, swifts have been studied even more thoroughly, using technology unimaginable in the 1950s. This research has revealed more secrets of these indomitable flyers, which spend virtually their entire lives in flight, and so this new edition, edited by the author’s son Andrew Lack and published in association with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for their Oxford Swift City project,... more
Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterThe book reads like an 18th century or 19th century naturalist’s potpourri. The poetry rubs shoulders with the figures. He airs speculation, he retells anecdotes. If a scientist doesn’t write like that, he lacks the curiosity, the ambition and the humility to be a scientist. (Source)

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3

The Light in the Dark

As November stubs out the glow of autumn and the days tighten into shorter hours, winter’s occupation begins. Preparing for winter has its own rhythms, as old as our exchanges with the land. Of all the seasons, it draws us together. But winter can be tough.

It is a time of introspection, of looking inwards. Seasonal sadness; winter blues; depression – such feelings are widespread in the darker months. But by looking outwards, by being in and observing nature, we can appreciate its rhythms. Mountains make sense in any weather. The voices of a wood always speak consolation. A brush...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterIt’s a book in which he uses depression as a sort of dark light to highlight some desolate questions: Who is he? What is his relationship to the natural world? (Source)

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4

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

'This book has found a special place in my heart. It’s as strange, beautiful and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings, as bees in a hive. I loved itHELEN MACDONALD, author of H IS FOR HAWK

A fascinating, insightful and inspiring account of a novice beekeeper's year of keeping honeybees, which will appeal to readers of H is For Hawk and The Outrun

Entering her thirties, Helen Jukes feels trapped in an urban grind of office politics and temporary addresses – disconnected, stressed. Struggling to settle into...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterJukes’ strenuous effort at relationality (her effort to get to know these creatures which are so very different from her) result in her being humanised and personalised. (Source)

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5
Environmental thought and politics have become parts of mainstream cultural life in Britain. The wish to protect wildlife is now a central goal for our society, but where did these ‘green’ ideas come from? And who created the cherished institutions, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, that are now so embedded in public life with millions of members?

From the flatlands of Norfolk to the tundra-like expanse of the Flow Country in northern Scotland, acclaimed writer on nature Mark Cocker sets out on a personal quest through the British...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterHe starts off by telling us that the natural world we like to rhapsodise about is vanishing. The figures are terrifying: 99% of our flower-rich meadows have been destroyed in the last 70 years or so. Britain is going silent: it’s going grey instead of green. (Source)

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6
The story of seabirds – the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire from one of our greatest nature writers.


Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed.


Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand them: their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterIf we try to understand the world just by intuiting it, we will just be amorphous. If we try to understand the world just by dissecting it, we will kill it. Adam Nicolson’s achievement is to show that these two ways of describing the world to ourselves are complementary rather than antagonistic. (Source)

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7
Britain is an archipelago made up of two large islands and 6,289 smaller ones. Some, like the Isle of Man, resemble miniature nations, with their own language and tax laws; others, like Ray Island in Essex, are abandoned and mysterious places haunted by myths, ghosts and foxes. There are resurgent islands such as Eigg, which have been liberated from capricious owners to be run by their residents; holy islands like Bardsey, the resting place of 20,000 saints, and still a site of spiritual questing; and deserted islands such as St Kilda, famed for the evacuation of its human population, and now... more
Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterPatrick Barkham, who’s a nature writer for the Guardian, visits a number of the islands around the United Kingdom, wondering if there’s anything which makes life on those islands different from the mainland, and if so what it is. (Source)

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8
Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterSheldrake is primarily concerned with the effect on various ‘spiritual’ practices on the human head and on the human ability to thrive, a lot of things advocated in the book demand the sort of express, ecstatic communion with the natural world. (Source)

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9

Animals Strike Curious Poses

Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.

Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat, won...
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Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterThe gist of her argument is that animal images crawl and prance and gallop through our ruling subconscious. They contribute importantly to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about the wider world. (Source)

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10

Swimming with Seals

Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of temporary escape from a failing marriage, a stifling religious environment and a series of health problems. Over four years, her encounters with the sea and all its weathers, the friendships she made, the wild creatures she encountered, combined to transform her life. This book is a love letter, to the beach where she swims regularly and its microcosmic world, to the ever-changing cold waters where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, and to the seals, her constant companions. less
Recommended by Charles Foster, and 1 others.

Charles FosterThe sea is a soup of the Precambrian, the Jurassic, the early Medieval, benighted modernity, and everything before and in between. Swimming in it connects her with the place, Orkney, which itself of course is an amalgam of all these times, none of which ever passes away. (Source)

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