The best environmental books we’ve read in 2024
We published 30 book reviews this year and read many more. And out of all the books we’ve read, here are a handful of our favorites. You’ll find a mix …
Book Publishers
The most popular book reviews and pages of 2024
More than 35,000 people from more than 100 countries visited EcoLit Books this year. And this post shows where they spent most of their time. Here are the top 25 …
Book Review: The Inhuman Empire: Wildlife, Colonialism, Culture
When the British colonized India throughout the 18th century they imported their narrative about the relationships between human and non-human animals. A narrative of violence and cruelty, in which wild …
The Lives of Animals turns 25
In 1997, J.M. Coetzee delivered two lectures at Princeton University in the form of short stories. These stories ended up in the novella The Lives of Animals, which now is …
Book Review: Arroyo Circle
Guest book review by Gene Helfman. In Arroyo Circle, JoeAnn Hart deftly weaves a tale with multiple threads. As the story develops, the different characters become incorporated into the fabric through …
Book Review: Honeymoons in Temporary Locations
What will a post-climate-disaster America look like? In Ashley Shelby’s short story collection, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, the results range from devastating to absurd to all-too-plausible. This trifecta is what makes Shelby’s …
Book Review: The Burning Earth, A History
Reading non-fiction books about climate change has, over the years, come to feel like a form of masochism. Rarely do I come away feeling optimistic about the future of this …
Book Review: Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits of the Rat
We have the pandemic to thank for this eye-opening, empathetic and long-overdue tribute to one of our most misunderstood and widely despised relatives. The rat. And I use relative intentionally …
North Woods, a novel by Daniel Mason
Random House, 2023 “Shivers of lust passed through his elytra as he found her scent grow stronger,” and there we are, in the head of an Elm Bark beetle, one …
Book Review: Wild Chorus: Finding Harmony with Whales, Wolves, and Other Animals
Guest book review by Gene Helfman. “…a woman’s place…is in the wild.” This remarkable book is a memoir, a unique lesson in natural history, a love poem to the wild, …
Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals
A toad can kill just by belching, and the lust of the octopus is blamed for its short lifespan. To produce a mule, the horse owner must give the mare a bad haircut to shame her into having sex with a donkey. The hedgehog is considered a spiteful animal because it urinates on itself when caught, unlike the lynx, who hides its urine until it forms a gem stone.
Such are a few of the many nuggets of animal lore recorded in Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals, a translation of De Natura Animalium by the third century Roman writer Claudius Aelianus, better know as Aelian.