Books I read in 2016

A list of the books read by me in 2016.

The Living Mountain
by Nan Shepherd
1940s masterpiece of nature writing.

A Sand County Almanac
by Aldo Leopold
American nature classic.

A Walk at the Edge of the World
by Nicholas Bone, Sans façon and Ian Cameron
The script of a play about walking.

The Invention of Nature
by Andrea Wulf
The adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science.

The Outrun
by Amy Liptrot
Recovering from addiction in the far north.

Life, Love and the Archers
by Wendy Cope
Reflections, reviews and other prose.

At Hawthorn Time
by Melissa Harrison
An extraordinary modern rural novel.

Edge of the Orison
by Iain Sinclair
In the Traces of John Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’.

The Edge of the World
by Michael Pye
How the North Sea made us who we are.

Rain
by Melissa Harrison
Four walks in English weather.

The Sense of Style
by Steven Pinker
The thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century.

The Ice Age
by Jamie Woodward
A very short introduction.

The History of Life
by Michael J Benton
A very short introduction.

The Enlightenment
by John Robertson
A very short introduction.

Austerlitz
by WG Sebald
As indescribable as ever.

Reality Hunger
by David Shields
A manifesto.

The Atlantic Ocean
by Andrew O'Hagan
Essays on Britain and America.

Humanism: a very short introduction
by Stephen Law
A very short introduction.

M-Train
by Patti Smith
A re-reading of a fascinating exercise in ‘writing about nothing’.

White Sands
by Geoff Dyer
Experiences from the Outside World.

Inglorious
by Mark Avery
Conflict in the Uplands.

The Fish Ladder
by Katharine Norbury
A journey upstream.

Human Evolution
by Bernard Wood
A very short introduction.

Clay
by Melissa Harrison
A city-nature novel.

Dart
by Alice Oswald
Book-length poem about a Devon river.

The Emigrants
by WG Sebald
Part of my yearly Sebaldian binge.

Vertigo
by WG Sebald
File under Sebaldian.

Findings
by Kathleen Jamie
Re-reading some of my favourite ‘nature writing’.

Sightlines
by Kathleen Jamie
Re-reading some more of my favourite ‘nature writing’.

The Wood for the Trees
by Richard Fortey
The long view of nature from a small wood.

The Rings of Saturn
by WG Sebald
My yearly re-reading of Sebald's masterpiece.

Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit
by Steven Pressfield
Don't bother.

On Writing Well
by William Zinsser
The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.

Keeping On Keeping On
by Alan Bennett
Volume three of his popular diaries (and other stuff).

Estuary
by Rachel Lichtenstein
Out from London to the Sea.

Campo Santo
by WG Sebald
File under Sebaldian.

Love of Country
by Madeleine Bunting
A Hebridean Journey.

Poetry Notebook
by Clive James
Sorting the poetic wheat from chaff.