Books like The Life of the Bee
A naturalist's meditation on the year of a beehive, from the swarm and the founding of a city to the nuptial flight and the massacre of the males, and on what the hive suggests about human life.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Life of the Bee
The Peregrine
A man's decade-long pursuit of peregrine falcons in the Essex countryside, rendered in ecstatic prose.
Stray Birds
Several hundred short poems and aphorisms, many only a line or two, on nature, love, God and the passing world.
H Is for Hawk
After her father's sudden death, a Cambridge historian buys a goshawk and withdraws into training it, alongside a reading of T. H. White's own failed attempt.
Autobiographies
Yeats's own account of his childhood in Sligo and London, his youth among the artists and occultists of the 1890s, and the Irish literary revival.
The Celtic Twilight
Yeats's gathering of the fairy lore, ghost stories and visionary encounters he heard from country people in Sligo and Galway.
Walden
Henry David Thoreau builds a cabin by Walden Pond and spends two years living simply, recording the natural world and his thoughts, in a manifesto that became a bible of American self-reliance.
The Hidden Life of Trees
A forester reveals the social networks and intelligence of trees.
Native Realm
Miłosz's autobiography of his education, from a childhood in Lithuania through the war in Warsaw to his defection, as a search for a European identity.
The Writing Life
Dillard's short book on the daily work of writing, the cabins and studies where she has done it, and what it costs, with a detour to a stunt pilot who wrote in the sky.
Laughter
Bergson's essay on the comic: what makes us laugh at a person, a phrase or a situation, and what laughter does for a society.
Platero and I
Prose poems of a poet and Platero, his small silver-grey donkey, walking the streets and fields of Moguer, an Andalusian village, through the seasons of a year.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A year at a Virginia creek, watched by Dillard in essays that move from muskrat to praying mantis to the theology of a world that keeps eating itself.