Hey,

SpringAThon is finally upon us, folks! This is a reading event hosted by Natalie @curiousreaderr and Emma @emmawright174 on Booktube, where they encourage us to read more nature writing books. The event will take place from May 4th to 17th, and they have created a set of prompts to inspire us:

• Bird (on the cover, in the title, or about)
• Water (on the cover, in the title, or about)
• Animal (on the cover, in the title, or about)
• Plant (on the cover, in the title, or about)
• Travel/Destination (on the cover, in the title, or about)

On Bookstagram, Natalie @curiousreaderr and I @blankgarden will be hosting the #springathonchallenge, where we encourage you to post a photo a day, showing us your nature-inspired reads:

Day 01

Today we are talking about our TBR’s for the event. Here is my pile of reading possibilities for the first half of May:

• Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1795)
• Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, by Margaret Fuller (1844)
• Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper (1850)
• Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys, by Amelia B. Edwards (1873)
• The Grasmere (1800-1803) and Alfoxden (1798) Journals, by Dorothy Wordsworth (1897)
• The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt (1900-1903. Published in English in 1987, tr. Nina de Voogd)
• Illyrian Spring, by Ann Bridge (1935)
• The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories, by Marjorie Barnard (1943)
• The White Bird Passes, by Jessie Kesson (1958)
• Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton (1973)
• Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda (1986. Published in English in 2009, tr. Martha Tennent)
• Findings, by Kathleen Jamie (2005)
• The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden, by Katherine Swift (2008)
• Corvus: A Life with Birds, by Esther Woolfson (2008)
• A Book Of Silence, by Sara Maitland (2008)
• To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, by Olivia Laing (2011)
• What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, by Robert Hass (2011)
• H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald (2014)
• Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain, by Lucy Jones (2016)
• Upstream: Selected Essays, by Mary Oliver (2016)
• The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, by Richard Mabey (2016)
• Bird Cottage, by Eva Meijer (2016. Published in English in 2018, tr. Antoinette Fawcett)
• Fox, by Dubravka Ugrešić (2017. Published in English in 2018, tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams)
• English Animals, by Laura Kaye (2017)
• Life in the Garden, by Penelope Lively (2017)
• Turning, by Jessica J. Lee (2017)
• Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery, by Alys Fowler (2017)
• Birds Art Life Death: A Field Guide to the Small and Significant, by Kyo Maclear (2017)
• Waterfalls of Stars: My Ten Years on the Island of Skomer, by Rosanne Alexander (2017)
• The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn (2018)
• Spring, by Ali Smith (2019)
• Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, by Olivia Laing (2020)

That’s all for now, folks. Which book should I pick first? And what are you going to read in May?

Yours truly,

J.