Chloe Dalton's Recommended Reading
By Canongate
Chloe Dalton's Recommended Reading
By Canongate
The author shares the books that inspired her, during the experience which led her to write Raising Hare.
Raising Hare is about the experience of caring for a newborn leveret that had been chased by a dog, and living alongside it as it grew to maturity and had leverets of its own in my house and garden. When the little creature came into my life, I could barely have told you the difference between hares and rabbits. I read every book that I could get my hands on to help me better understand these extraordinary animals. I also became fascinated by the question of what makes an animal ‘wild’, since hares have never been domesticated. Here is a small sample of the many books I read during this time, and which I think any lover of nature - or hares - might enjoy.
The Year of the Hare
Arto Paasilinna
£9.99 £9.49A story about a man who walks away from his mundane life into a series of bizarre adventures and state of greater freedom because of a hare. It has a vivid, captivating and deceptively simple style, and evokes the powerful effect that hares have on humans.
The Way of the Hare
Marianne Taylor
£11.99 £11.39I read this during lockdown with the leveret perched above my shoulder, nibbling the pages. It is a trove of information about hares and the special place they occupy in literature, folklore and the collective imagination. The hare’s gentle, calm and peaceful behaviour made a complete contrast with common depictions of hares as crazy and cowardly creatures, stirring the curiosity that inspired me to write Raising Hare.
???: Wolf Totem
Rong JIANG
£25.95lyrical and startling, this is a story of the wolves of Mongolia and the disastrous consequences of eradicating them from the steppes. Set during China’s Cultural Revolution, it depicts the human tendency to fail to grasp the long-term consequences of our actions upon the environment, and the part predators play in nature’s balance.
Incredible Journeys: Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year 2019
David Barrie
£10.99 £10.44a mind-enlarging account of the science of animal navigation in all its ‘glorious strangeness’, from ants and fish to bumble bees and birds. The book describes the myriad ways animals find their way across burning deserts and vast oceans, without maps. As I observed the hare’s apparent ability to keep time and to find its way back across the landscape this book helped me to understand how little we still know about the animal senses, and how in many cases they often exceed our own.
To Build a Fire
Jack London
£3.33. A fierce, unforgettable tale of a man who sets out on a journey in the deep snows of the Yukon, with his dog, with disastrous consequences. This short story is about man’s frailty and the incomprehensible power of raw nature: what Jack London calls man’s tendency to understand ’the things of life…but not the significances’. It has a gripping ending and doesn’t pull its punches.
The Peace of Wild Things: And Other Poems
Wendell Berry
£8.99 £8.54This collection of limpid, accessible and stirring poems movingly evokes everything that we have lost in nature as a result of our compulsion to build and enclose; the ‘wideness…and delight’ of all that still remains to us; and the possibility of restoring nature, to ‘make a place for birds to sing’.
Rebirding: Restoring Britain's Wildlife
Benedict Macdonald
£10.99 £10.44Living in the city, I took for granted the near absence of birdsong in my daily life. This book paints a devastating picture of the precipitous decline in the bird population in the country at large as a result of human activity, and what we can do about it. I found myself thinking, as I read it, ‘how did I not know this before’?
Barkskins: Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017
Annie Proulx
£14.99 £14.24This tale of the great forests of north America and Canada and their fate after the arrival of settlers with axes made me mourn for majestic trees that I will never get to see, and understand that it is never too late to plant in our own times.
Wind, Sand and Stars
Antoine Saint-Exupery
£8.99 £8.54A stirring memoir that evokes the adventure and glamour of the early days of aviation - navigating ‘the sea of clouds’ at ‘the frontier between the known and the unknowable’ - and the peace and perspective to be found in contemplating the immensity of nature. The book’s account combines sheer courage with poetic descriptions of ‘night flight with its hundred thousand stars’ and a consoling meditation on human existence. ‘You’ll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog and snow’, Saint-Exupéry writes, quoting a fellow pilot. ‘When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they can do, I can do’.
Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship
Catherine Raven and LLC Spiegal & Grau
£16.99 £16.14I stumbled across this in a bookshop in America during the writing of my book, and relished its celebration of ‘animals that are free living and independent’ and the value of ‘wild lands and quiet spaces’, told from the perspective of a scientist. ‘When you spend time with your pets, they become more like you‘, Raven writes. ‘When I spent time with Fox, I became more like him’. I found a parallel with my experience with the hare: I never domesticated her, but she changed me.