Granola Girl Summer Reading List
Hi, hello!
I meant to post last week. I’ve been working on an absolutely massive post: a local’s travel guide to our favorite things to do in the Virginia Beach/Norfolk area - a sort of a permanent home for all the text messages and DMs I’ve sent over the years when various friends are looking for inspiration on their vacation and want to avoid the most tourist-y bits of our tourist town. But the thing about covering this area is that to do it fairly, you have to mention a lot. And I want to make certain that everything I’m suggesting is a personal recommendation and not an, “I’ve heard this is good, so then…”
Anyway. When it is finished will it be my magnum opus?
Till then, I got to thinking about making a summer reading list for all of us “granola girls.” That term (if you don’t know yet!) was created by the internet crowd for girls who are down-to-earth, eco-conscious, low-maintenance in their appearance, and love the outdoors. It’s more a general aesthetic than a strict checklist. It’s women who love to be outside and feel restless when cut off from frequent contact with nature. I really like this categorization. Companies like REI and Alder Apparel are working to expand our definitions of who gets to be “outdoorsy.” The category of “granola girl,” to me, leaves room for women who love being outside, are passionate about nature, always down for a hike, but aren’t in the “highly-athletic/thrill-seeker” category. It leaves room for girls who - well - have a really great recipe for granola. And sometimes go to a park to read, rather than run a 5k. And might prefer hiking to look at views, rocks, creatures, and water rather than bolting to the top and coming straight back down again.
I’m a plus-sized woman with great sea-level fitness, but not excellent stamina for rigorous mountain activities (bad knees & no oxygen). I live in an area that is far from any scenic national parks. My home is a city thick with suburbs where public greenspaces that feel any level of “wild” are few and far between. But man, I love the outdoors. So here’s to the outdoorsy people who know every city park, urban fruit tree to forage, and “wilderness” within a two-hour drive of their house. Here’s to the bodies that have every right to enjoy the outdoors as the conventionally athletic-looking ones. Here’s to an endless curiosity about the natural world around us, and an ability to know and name the wild things sharing our turf.
The ten books I picked to share in this list are titles that fit both the tone of summer reads (warm, free-spirited) and granola girl (nature or earth-centric, approachable). I’ve read them all - I would never suggest something I hadn’t thoroughly reviewed myself! - and each of them came out of that read with a 4-star mark or higher. My hope is that through this list you’ll find something new to love this summer - some book that strikes curiosity in your heart, inspires you to dream bigger, and fans your desire to champion this beautiful planet we get to enjoy.
My Granola Girl Summer Reading List:
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home and livelihood is taken away. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey. The Salt Path is an honest and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.
Brave The Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped The Botany of The Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off down the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious expedition leader and three amateur boatmen. With its churning rapids, sheer cliffs, and boat-shattering boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. But for Clover and Jotter, it held a tantalizing appeal: no one had surveyed the Grand Canyon’s plants, and they were determined to be the first. Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their forty-three-day journey, during which they ran rapids, chased a runaway boat, and turned their harshest critic into an ally. Their story is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a little-known corner of the American West at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.
Crow Talk by Eileen Garvin (fiction)
From Goodreads: Nationally bestselling author of The Music of Bees Eileen Garvin returns with a moving story of hope, healing, and unexpected friendship set amidst the wild natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Frankie O’Neill and Anne Ryan would seem to have nothing in common. Frankie is a lonely ornithologist struggling to salvage her dissertation on the spotted owl following a rift with her advisor. Anne is an Irish musician far from home and family, raising her five-year-old, Aiden, who refuses to speak. At Beauty Bay, a community of summer homes nestled on the shores of June Lake, in the remote foothills of Mount Adams, it’s off-season with most houses shuttered for the fall. But Frankie, adrift, returns to the rundown caretaker’s cottage that has been in the hardworking O'Neill family for generations—a beloved place and a constant reminder of the family she has lost. And Anne, in the wake of a tragedy that has disrupted her career and silenced her music, has fled to the neighboring house, a showy summer home owned by her husband's wealthy family. When Frankie finds an injured baby crow in the forest, little does she realize that the charming bird will bring all three lost souls—Frankie, Anne, and Aiden—together on a journey toward hope, healing, and rediscovering joy. Crow Talk is an achingly beautiful story of love, grief, friendship, and the healing power of nature in the darkest of times.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben shares his deep love of woods and forests and explains the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in the woodland and the amazing scientific processes behind the wonders of which we are blissfully unaware. Much like human families, tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, and support them as they grow, sharing nutrients with those who are sick or struggling and creating an ecosystem that mitigates the impact of extremes of heat and cold for the whole group. As a result of such interactions, trees in a family or community are protected and can live to be very old. In contrast, solitary trees, like street kids, have a tough time of it and in most cases die much earlier than those in a group. Drawing on groundbreaking new discoveries, Wohlleben presents the science behind the secret and previously unknown life of trees and their communication abilities; he describes how these discoveries have informed his own practices in the forest around him. As he says, a happy forest is a healthy forest, and he believes that eco-friendly practices not only are economically sustainable but also benefit the health of our planet and the mental and physical health of all who live on Earth.
Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons—a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.
Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (fiction)
From Goodreads: For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet fishing village. Kya Clark is barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when the popular Chase Andrews is found dead, locals immediately suspect her.
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.
In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.
Wayward: Just Another Life To Live by Vashti Bunyan (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: In 1968, Vashti Bunyan gave up everything and everybody she knew in London to take to the road with a horse, wagon, dog, guitar and her then partner. They made the long journey up to the Outer Hebrides in an odyssey of discovery and heartbreak, full of the joy of freedom and the trudge of everyday reality, sleeping in the woods, fighting freezing winters and homelessness. Along the way, Vashti wrote the songs that would lead to the recording of her 1970's album Just Another Diamond Day, the lilting lyrics and guitar conveying innocent wonder at the world around her, whilst disguising a deeper turmoil under the surface. From an unconventional childhood in post-war London to a fledgling career in mid-sixties pop - recording a single written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards - to the despair and failure to make any headway with her own songs, she rejected the music world altogether and left it all behind. After retreating to a musical wilderness for thirty years, the rediscovery of her recordings in 2000 brought Vashti a second chance to write, record and perform once more. One of the great hippie myths of the 1960s, Wayward: Just Another Life to Live, rewrites the narrative of a barefoot girl on the road to describe a life lived at full tilt from the first, revealing what it means to change course and her emotional struggle, learning to take back control of her own life.
Devotions, The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (poetry)
From Goodreads: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.
Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival And Obsession In The West by Nate Blakeslee (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: The enthralling story of the rise and reign of O-Six, the celebrated Yellowstone wolf, and the people who loved or feared her.
Before humans ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West.
With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth. Uncommonly powerful, with gray fur and faint black ovals around each eye, O-Six is a kind and merciful leader, a fiercely intelligent fighter, and a doting mother. She is beloved by wolf watchers, particularly renowned naturalist Rick McIntyre, and becomes something of a social media star, with followers around the world.
But as she raises her pups and protects her pack, O-Six is challenged on all fronts: by hunters, who compete with wolves for the elk they both prize; by cattle ranchers who are losing livestock and have the ear of politicians; and by other Yellowstone wolves who are vying for control of the park’s stunningly beautiful Lamar Valley.
These forces collide in American Wolf, a riveting multi-generational saga of hardship and triumph that tells a larger story about the ongoing cultural clash in the West—between those fighting for a vanishing way of life and those committed to restoring one of the country’s most iconic landscapes.
Vesper Flights by Helen McDonald (nonfiction)
From Goodreads: Animals don't exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
All right. Happy reading, friends! There is a lot of nonfiction in this category but don’t let that scare you. You are capable of loving nonfiction. In fact, many of the those titles outrank the novels on this list in my personal rankings. Let me know which book you’ll choose, or any titles you’d add to this “Granola-Girl Summer Reading List!” And happy outdoorsy-summer to us all!