The Pacific Crest Trail runs 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada. Depending on who you ask that’s plenty of time between walking and resting to get in some good reads. I’m typically a hard-cover flip through the pages type gal, but when you’re on the trail and carrying everything you own on your back each-and-every ounce matters. So, I invested in my first Kindle. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I much prefer the feeling of a good-ol’-fashion book, but the convenience of reading any book I’d like while on trail is really great. So, I’ll buckle for the technology convenience on this one, and because of this convenience, I have a nice long reading list to share with you. Some books I will be reading on my Kindle and others I will be listening to on Audible. I particularly enjoy listening to memoirs when read by their author – more often than not, if you see a memoir on my list I will be listening.
Happy reading!
Braiding Sweetgrass
Author Robin Wall Kimmerer
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. Only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth and learning to give our own gifts in return
The Overstory
Author Richard Powers
There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Mary Jane
Author Jessica Blau
“Almost Famous” meets Daisy Jones and the Six in this funny, wise, and tender novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her strait-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for—who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.
A Life on Our Planet
Author David Attenborough
As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world – but it was an illusion. The tragedy of our time has been happening all around us, barely noticeable from day to day – the loss of our planet’s wild places, its biodiversity.
I have been witness to this decline. A Life on Our Planet is my witness statement and my vision for the future. It is the story of how we came to make this, our greatest mistake – and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.
We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and restore the wonderful world we inherited.
All we need is the will to do so.
Greenlights
Author Mathew McConaughey
“Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights – and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.” – Mathew McConaughey
The River
Author Peter Heller
Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey.
There There
Author Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American – grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths & Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Author Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Within every woman, there is a wild and natural creature, a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and storyteller shows how women’s vitality can be restored through what she calls “psychic archeological digs” into the ruins of the female unconscious. Using multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, Dr. Estes helps women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype.
What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
Author Bruce D. Perry & Oprah Winfrey
“Through this lens, we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.” ―Oprah Winfrey
Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty
Author Nikita Gill
Wild Embers explores the fire that lies within every soul, weaving words around ideas of feeling at home in your own skin, allowing yourself to heal, and learning to embrace your uniqueness with love from the universe.
The Dream of a Common Language
Author Adrienne Rich
“The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody–language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this.”
-Boston Evening Globe
Where the Deer and the Antelope Play
Author Nick Offerman
A humorous and rousing tour of America’s nature spots as well as a mission statement about loving, protecting, and truly experiencing the outdoors, inspired by three journeys undertaken by actor, humorist, and New York Times bestselling author Nick Offerman
Idiots
Author Laura Clery
(I couldn’t get enough of her first novel Idiot)
A fresh, hilarious, and relatable collection of essays about everything from motherhood and marriage to sobriety and work-life balance (or imbalance) from the nationally bestselling author of the “honest, complicated” Idiot.
Abigail
Author Magda Szabó
Abigail is one of my favorite novels of all time. I will definitely be diving back into the breathtaking story of Gina while on trial.
The Art of Leaving
Author Ayelet Tsabari
An unforgettable memoir about a young woman who tries to outrun loss, but eventually finds a way home.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose
Author Eckhart Tolle
“A New Earth” has been written as a traditional narrative, offering anecdotes and philosophies in a way that is accessible to all. Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, “A New Earth” is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life? and for building a better world.
Wilderness Essays
Author John Muir
Here collected are some of his finest wilderness essays, ranging from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the Range of Light– the High Sierra. This series celebrates the tradition of literary naturalists– writers who embrace the natural world as the setting for some of our most euphoric and serious experiences.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Author Suzanne Simard
From the world’s leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest-a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery.
Violeta
Author Isabel Allende
This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.
The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things
Author Peter Wohlleben
In The Secret Wisdom of Nature, master storyteller and international sensation Peter Wohlleben takes readers on a thought-provoking exploration of the vast natural systems that make life on Earth possible. In this tour of an almost unfathomable world, Wohlleben describes the fascinating interplay between animals and plants and answers such questions as: How do they influence each other? Do lifeforms communicate across species boundaries? And what happens when this finely tuned system gets out of sync?
These are just a handful of novels I hope to enjoy while on trial. Between audiobooks and kindle pages I actually hope to dive into a few more than what I’ve shared here, but we’ll see how it goes.
