Nature book series in reading order

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Shannon Hale

62 books• 11 series

Shannon Hale, born Shannon Bryner on January 26, 1974, is an American author mainly of young adult fantasy. Princess Academy (2005) earned a Newbery Honor, and The Goose Girl (2003) opens the catalogue. Austenland (2007), the first novel for adults, became a film in 2013. Hale graduated from the University of Utah and the University of Montana, and has co-written with husband Dean Hale. The catalogue lists 63 titles through The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble (2026), across series including Princess In Black, Books of Bayern, Real Friends and Kitty-Corn.

Rachel Carson

12 books

Marine biology and conservation run through Rachel Carson's writing. Twelve titles are catalogued, opening with Under the Sea Wind (1941) and continuing through The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Silent Spring. Carson lived from 1907 to 1964; later collections, including Something About the Sky, appeared long after. Ocean, seashore ecology and nature study carry the subject tags.

Peter Wohlleben

12 books• 1 series

Peter Wohlleben is a German forester and author who writes about ecology in popular language, and who has argued, controversially, for plant sentience. The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) reached the New York Times bestseller list and appeared in English in 2016. Twelve books are catalogued between 2012 and 2022, from The Weather Detective (2012) to Forest Walking (2022), among them The Inner Life of Animals (2016), The Secret Wisdom of Nature (2017), The Heartbeat of Trees (2019) and The Power of Trees (2021). Mysteries of Nature is the one series catalogued, and trees, forests, symbiosis and food chains are the constants.

Gary Paulsen

181 books• 17 series

Survival and outdoor adventure run through Gary Paulsen's writing for young readers. The catalogue holds 181 books, from Some Birds Don't Fly (1968) to Northwind (2022), at a median length of 105 pages. Brian Robeson, Francis Tucket, Duncan Culpepper, Murphy and the World of Adventure books head the series lines, with non-fiction and picture books alongside. No new Paulsen title has appeared since 2022.

Sy Montgomery

43 books• 3 series

Sy Montgomery, born February 7, 1958, is an American naturalist, author and scriptwriter writing for both children and adults. The catalogue lists 43 books, beginning in 1991 with Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas and The Curious Naturalist. Later titles include The Snake Scientist (1999), Journey of the Pink Dolphins (2000), The Tarantula Scientist (2004) and The Good Good Pig (2006). Oceanic Manta Adventure: Saving the Angels of the Sea (2026) is the newest. Animal behaviour, zoology, birds, apes and women primatologists are recorded subjects.

Farley Mowat

38 books• 1 series

Farley Mowat (1921-2014) was a Canadian writer and environmentalist whose work was translated into 52 languages and sold more than 17 million copies. People of the Deer (1950) opens a catalogue of 38 titles and begins Mowat's writing on the Canadian north, its Inuit peoples and the Arctic. Never Cry Wolf (1963), an account of life among Arctic wolves, was filmed in 1983. Mowat wrote for children as well, taking the Vicky Metcalf Award in 1970, and the catalogue closes at Eastern Passage (2010).

Robert Macfarlane

21 books• 1 series

Robert Macfarlane, born in 1976, is a British non-fiction writer and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Landscape, nature, place, people and language are his subjects, across The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), Landmarks (2015), The Lost Words (2017), Underland (2019) and Is a River Alive? (2025). His 21 catalogued titles start with Magdalen Poets (2000) and reach The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss (2026), taking in Mountains of the Mind (2003), Original Copy (2007), The Wild Places (2007), Holloway (2012) and Silt (2013). Macfarlane collaborates often with musicians, composers and artists. The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the E. M. Forster Award for Literature in 2017, and he was named an outside contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 and 2024.

Richard Adams

22 books• 3 series

Richard Adams (10 May 1920 to 24 December 2016) was an English novelist whose first novel, Watership Down (1972), won international acclaim. Maia, Shardik and The Plague Dogs are among the other works. Adams read Modern History at Worcester College, Oxford, served in the British Army in World War II, joined the British Civil Service, and turned to full-time writing in 1974. The catalogue lists titles such as Shardik (1974), The Plague Dogs (1977) and The Girl in a Swing (1980), with Watership Down and Beklan Empire as series. Rabbits, nature, adventure and fantasy appear in the subject records.

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

Michael Pollan

12 books

Michael Pollan writes non-fiction about plants, food and what people do with both. The catalogue holds 12 titles: Second Nature (1991), A Place of My Own (1997), The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), In Defense of Food and Food Rules (2008), Cooked (2013), How to Change Your Mind (2018), Caffeine (2020) and This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021). Gardening, ethnobotany and food habits are the recurring subjects, and A World Appears is the most recent title.

Katherine Applegate

228 books• 20 series

Katherine Applegate, born October 9, 1956, and sometimes published as K. A. Applegate, is an American author of children's and young adult fiction. Animorphs, Remnants and Everworld are the series most tied to Applegate, and The One and Only Ivan (2012) won the 2013 Newbery Medal. Applegate received the Publishers Weekly Best New Children's Book Series Award in 1997. The catalogue lists 228 books, from Welcome to Junior High! (1990) to The Littlest Elephant (2026), including Girl Talk, Making Out and Roscoe Riley Rules.

Eric Carle

165 books• 6 series

Eric Carle (25 June 1929 to 23 May 2021) was an American author, designer and illustrator of children's books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a picture book first published in 1969, has sold more than 55 million copies in over 70 languages. Carle illustrated more than 70 children's books and wrote most of them, and sales across the Carle books exceed 170 million copies. Catalogued titles begin with 1, 2, 3 to the Zoo (1968), followed by The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969), Pancakes, Pancakes! (1970), The Tiny Seed (1970) and Do You Want to Be My Friend? (1971). Subjects include board books, counting, color, animals and caterpillars.

John Angus McPhee, born on 8 March 1931, is an American writer regarded as a pioneer of creative nonfiction. McPhee was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction four times and won in 1999 for Annals of the Former World, a collection of five books. The George Polk Career Award followed in 2008, and McPhee has held the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University since 1974. The catalogue lists 45 McPhee books, from A Sense of Where You Are (1965) to They're in the River (2025), including Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1967) and Encounters with the Archdruid (1971). Subjects include geology, essays and travel.

Jim Harrison

46 books• 4 series

Jim Harrison (December 11, 1937 - March 26, 2016) was an American poet, novelist and essayist who published across poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature and memoir. Harrison also wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism and essays on food, travel and sport, and said poetry mattered most among the work. Harrison published 24 novellas. The catalogue holds 46 books from Plain Song (1965) to The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015 (2022), including Wolf (1971), Farmer (1976) and Legends of the Fall (1979). Dalva and Detective Sunderson are named series.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet whose subject was the natural world. The Pulitzer Prize came to Oliver in 1984, and the National Book Award followed in 1992. The catalogue holds 37 titles dated 1972 to 2026, from The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems to Goldfinches, taking in American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990) and A Poetry Handbook (1994). The volumes are short, around 80 pages at the median, and essay collections sit beside the poetry.

Amy Stewart writes non-fiction about the natural world and the Kopp Sisters historical mysteries. Stewart's New York Times bestsellers include Flower Confidential, Wicked Plants, Wicked Bugs and The Drunken Botanist. Girl Waits With Gun is a novel based on a true story. The catalogue holds 17 books from From the Ground Up (2000) to The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession (2024), including Lady Cop Makes Trouble (2016). Stewart lives in Eureka, California, where Stewart and husband Scott Brown, a rare book dealer, own Eureka Books.

Gerald Durrell

40 books• 3 series

Gerald Durrell was a British naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist and television presenter who wrote about collecting and keeping animals. Durrell's first animal-collecting trip to the British Cameroons was funded by an inheritance, and his wife Jacquie pressed him to write an account of it. The catalogue opens with The Overloaded Ark (1953) and holds 40 books to 1993, across autobiographical volumes, the Corfu Trilogy and the Puppy Tales for children. My Family and Other Animals (1956) and A Zoo in My Luggage (1962) are among them. Zoology, natural history, animal behaviour and travel are the recurring subjects.

Edward Abbey

27 books

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was an American novelist and essayist known for advocacy on environmental issues, criticism of public land policies and anarchist politics. His best known books are the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the nonfiction Desert Solitaire (1968). The catalogue holds 27 titles from Jonathan Troy (1954) to Postcards from Ed (2006), with the deserts and wilderness of the southwestern states recurring throughout.

Jean Craighead George

100 books• 11 series

Julie of the Wolves won Jean Craighead George the Newbery Medal, and My Side of the Mountain (1959) earned a Newbery Honor. George, born July 2, 1919, and died May 15, 2012, was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, with the environment and the natural world as recurring themes. George also wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and an autobiography, Journey Inward, and was the U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1964. The catalogue lists 100 books from Vulpes, the Red Fox (1948) to Crowbar: The Smartest Bird in the World (2015). Series include 13 Moons, Ecological Mysteries, American Woodland Tales and One Day in the..., and subjects name wolves, owls, falcons and ecology.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 - November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, among them The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947), both with illustrations by Clement Hurd. Brown has been called the laureate of the nursery. Brown also published as Golden MacDonald for Doubleday, as Timothy Hay for Harper & Brothers, and, with Edith Thacher Hurd, as Juniper Sage for William R. Scott. The catalogue lists 166 books, opening with When the Wind Blew (1937), then I Like Bugs and The Steam Roller (1938). Stories in rhyme, rabbits, bedtime and sound recur in the subjects.

Richard Dawkins

29 books• 2 series

Richard Dawkins, born 26 March 1941, is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, author and noted atheist. Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, serving from 1995 to 2008. Dawkins sits on the advisory board of the University of Austin, and awards include the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Catalogued books include River Out of Eden (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (2000), A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024). Evolution, natural selection, genetics and philosophy lead the subject tags.

Vaclav Smil

44 books• 2 series

Vaclav Smil, born December 9, 1943, is a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst and Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the University of Manitoba's Faculty of Environment in Winnipeg. Smil studies energy, environment, food, population, economics, history and public policy, and applies that work to China. The 44 books in the catalogue start with Energy In The Developing World: The Real Energy Crisis (1980) and include The Bad Earth (1984) and Energy In World History (1994). How to Feed the World (2025) is the newest.

Robert Frost

32 books• 4 series

Robert Frost (1874–1963) was an American poet known for realistic pictures of rural New England life and for a command of American colloquial speech, both used to open out social and philosophical questions. Frost is the only poet to have received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1958, took the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 and was named poet laureate of Vermont in 1961. Thirty books are catalogued, from A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) through Mountain Interval and The Road Not Taken (1916) to New Hampshire (1923) and the collected editions.