Nature Study Reading Society
Book Group

The Nature Study Reading Society is devoted to reading and discussing an array of nature books. Book group discussions are generally held on the second Friday every other month from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Reading Room of the Lora M. Robins Library. For more information, or to join the group contact Carissa Elder, Director of Library and Archives, at [email protected] call 804-262-9887 x342.

March 10, 2023

The World Without Us

By Alan Weisman

May 12, 2023

Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World

By Leigh Ann Henion

July 14, 2023

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

By Ed Yong

September 8, 2023

Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants

By Richard Mabey

November 10, 2023

Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains

By Bethany Brookshire

January 12, 2024

Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts

By J. Drew Lanham

March 8, 2024

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

By Merlin Sheldrake

Past Selections

2022

May 13, 2022

Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

By David George Haskell

July 8, 2022

Diary of a Young Naturalist

By Dara McAnulty

Sept. 9, 2022

Saving Wild: Inspiration from 50 Leading Conservationists

Edited by Lori Robinson

Nov. 11, 2022

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

By Dan Flores

Jan. 13, 2023

The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

By Douglas W. Tallamy

March 11, 2022
The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect
by Wendy Williams

Jan. 14, 2022
Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World
by Kathryn Aalto

Erosion: Essays of Undoing
by Terry Tempest Williams
335 pages

Williams sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy.

The Overstory
by Richard Powers
502 pages

The Overstory, the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is an impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a paean to the natural world.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
by Jonathan C. Slaught

Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the Most Amazing Birds
by Olivia Gentile

A frustrated housewife sets out to see more bird species than anyone in history—and ends up risking her life again and again in the wildest places on earth.

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
by Cynthia Barnett

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world’s water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers
by Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution’s roots in interstate river navigation, the origins of the Army Corps of Engineers, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the construction of the Hoover Dam and the TVA during the New Deal, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island
by Earl Swift

Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island’s past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier’s people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich
by Bernd Heinrich

From one of the finest scientist/writers of our time comes an engaging record of a life spent in close observation of the natural world, one that has yielded “marvelous, mind-altering” (Los Angeles Times) insight and discoveries.

Lan dmarks
by Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane explores place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles.

The Sea Around Us
by Rachel Carson

Originally published in 1951, Carson’s book provides a timely reminder of both the fragility and the centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it.