Recommended Reading

You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as many bodies of water as possible, often diving into places that hadn’t seen a human swimmer in years. From lochs to ponds, from rivers to the sea, through farm runoff and past alarmed beach guards, Deakin stroked and kicked. Part amphibious adventure memoir and part right to roam manifesto, beneath Waterlog’s delightful quirk lies a serious treatise on public access and the belief that swimming is intrinsically transformative, for “when you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens.” First published in 1999, this book has been a word-of-mouth bestseller with a fervent fan club, and the new Tin House edition with a foreword by Bonnie Tsui is sublimely subversive reading of the highest order.

At their population height, an estimated fifty thousand grizzly bears lived in the Lower 48 states, ambling from Alaska to Mexico and the Great Plains to California’s coast. Over the nineteenth century, humans hunted Ursus arctos horriblis to extinction in most states, and by 1980 only a few hundred remained, mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks. Endangered Species Act protection gave the bears a chance to claw back from the brink, and now more than two thousand grizzlies hang their hats in the American West, rubbing shoulders with the region’s dominant species, Homo sapiens, sometimes with deadly consequences. Informed by a lifetime of residing, reporting, and hiking in grizzly country, Montana journalist Robert Chaney investigates the growing clash in his broadly researched The Grizzly in the Driveway. With perspectives from mountain bikers, tribal leaders, biologists, technology experts, and North America’s strongest animal, Chaney offers a wholehearted, big-thinking primer on the dilemma of coexistence and the control of nature.

Best known for fearless novels and essays on colonial legacies and social classes, West Indies-born Jamaica Kincaid was rumored to be a contender for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Thus, a travel memoir on Himalayan flora might seem an odd fit, but Kincaid has long loved the outdoors, especially gardening, geology, and classic stories of mountaineering. Among Flowers is her account of venturing to Nepal’s Kanchenjunga with a botanist friend on a seed-gathering trek, and her descriptions of night skies and thirty-foot rhododendrons evoke wonder and awe, like all good odyssey tales. Yet she also writes honestly, at times disruptively, about the trials and tribulations of knee pain and rustic latrines, as well as on the serious threats of Maoist rebels. As a narrator, Kincaid is often overwhelmed and oh so real, forgoing the well-trodden path of grandiose expedition writing. Among Flowers is an immersive journey into the essence of travel itself through the eyes of one of America’s finest cultural observers.

On the Run is yet another hardcover, stitch-bound delight from Berlin-based publisher Gestalten, a book that feels as good to hold as it is to read, though no one’s judging if you just want to look at the photos. Inside are runners from a wide range of backgrounds and abilities, including profiles of Mimi Anderson, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of three who holds world records in endurance running; Justin Gallegos, the first professional athlete with cerebral palsy; and Brazil’s Ghetto Run Crew, an urban club taking back Rio de Janeiro’s dangerous streets one step at a time. Adding to the stoke are daydream-worthy descriptions of twenty-five marathons and trail runs, from Greece’s Athens Authentic Marathon to California’s Badwater 135 in Death Valley. Spanning the individual and universal in radiant images and stories, On the Run is two-hundred-and-fifty-some pages of runner’s sweet, sweet high, a celebration of how much putting one foot in front of the other can do for the human spirit.