Reading for nature lovers

As a lifelong reader, English literature scholar, secondary school librarian and writer, I’m unsurprisingly evangelical about books’ power to enrich our lives. Reading can be an escape, a comfort and a solace. It can be time-and-place travel, a challenge and an affirmation, as well as a source of knowledge, empathy and understanding. You might know this instinctively; you might also wonder why I’m writing about it here.

When it’s not possible to be outside – when our lives, work, situations or access to nature simply don’t allow it – reading about nature isn’t just the next best thing; it enhances and grows our experience of nature, and it’s good for us at the same time.

Nicola Chester explains why reading about nature is good for our soul. Video: @RSPBVideo

Statistics show that reading regularly can make us more relaxed, happier and kinder, with improved levels of self-esteem and a greater ability to cope with difficulty. Read regularly and you can build better mental and emotional wellbeing as well as social and creative skills. We read as individuals, blending mental simulations with our own imaginations, memories and experiences, stimulating neural pathways and creating something new.

If much of the above sounds familiar, it may be because so many of those benefits are also experienced by spending time in nature.

Reading about nature brings the wild world beyond our situation right into our hands, heads and hearts (and ears, if we’re listening), wherever we are. I can be Windswept on Annie Worsley’s Scottish coastal croft while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, marvel and laugh at the extraordinary unlikeliness of creatures Taking Flight with Lev Parikian or feel moved by Charles Foster’s extraordinary Cry of the Wild. I can connect 20 years of my own nature-watching with Kathleen Jamie’s books – I too watched birds “between the laundry and the fetching kids from school”, as she did in Findings. And I see how my “life’s arc [becomes] visible” against the backdrop of the wildlife and climate crisis, just like in Cairn.

I can go back to the (relatively) rich floriferous meadows of my youth in Watership Down and get rabbit-eye level with once-common flowers, reminding myself that these plants were plentiful and can become so again. I can read Jessica J Lee’s beautiful Dispersals on how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants, or Polly Atkin’s revelatory Some of Us Just Fall on wildness and illness.

The world comes to us in our staff canteens, on our sofas or propped up against our pillows at night. And we know more, feel more, connect more. Dreaming, plotting, mapping: in reading about nature, we share joy, despair and hope. We know we are not alone in the world and are often compelled to act, to save what we love – even if what we love was only witnessed in our minds’ eye.

And by recreating or interpreting nature ourselves, through writing, drawing or diarising, we deepen that connection further still. The imagination is a powerful ally between us and nature.