Distractions

Over the month of October, we lose almost an hour of daily sunlight. The weather is getting cooler. The race calendar is starting to wind down for the season. All good reasons to add reading a good book to your list of activities. This month’s selection ranges from hyperlocal ecology to history, natural science, philosophy and an in-depth examination of snakes. Fortunately, any snakes in the Midwest have gone underground by now.

Clouds: How to Identify Nature’s Most Fleeting Forms

Edward Graham

This book shows you how to use meteorological techniques to identify the elusive and transmutable shapes of clouds. It curates, classifies, and measures every species—including those recently discovered—considering the height, size, texture, arrangement, modifications, and movement of their many shifting forms. Explains the physics of clouds, from the basic constituents of Earth’s atmosphere to cloud formation and dissipation, the colors and shades of clouds, the development of precipitation, and the timescale evolution of clouds.

Slither

Stephen S. Hall

For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and modern culture. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence.

Slither presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yet magnetic creatures. In each chapter, Hall explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration.

Writing Wild

Tina Welling

There’s pleasure in reading about nature, but consider taking a deeper personal journey by collecting your thoughts and experiences. In Writing Wild, Welling details a three-step “Spirit Walk” process for inviting nature to enliven and inspire our creativity.

The Lost Trees of Wilson Avenue

Mike Tidwell

In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. Tidwell explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of “geoengineering” as a last-ditch way to save the world’s trees – and human communities everywhere. No book has told the story of climate change this way: hyper-local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in a single neighborhood.

The Explorer’s Gene

Alex Hutchinson

The book presents a fresh, provocative investigation into how exploration, uncertainty, and risk shape our behavior and help us find meaning.

Humans are wired to explore. More than just a need to get outside, the search for the unknown is a primal urge that has shaped the history of our species and continues to mold our behavior in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Alex Hutchinson challenges the myth that, in our fully mapped digital world, the age of exploration is dead. Instead, the itch to discover new things persists in all of us, expressed not just on the slopes of Everest but in the ways we work, play, and live. The Explorer’s Gene combines riveting stories of exploration with cutting-edge insights from behavioral psychology and neuroscience, making a powerful case that our lives are better—more productive, more meaningful, and more fun—when we break our habits and chart a new path.

The Beast in the Clouds

Nathalia Holt

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology. Beast in the Clouds brings alive these extraordinary events in a potent nonfiction thriller featuring the legendary Roosevelt family.