Reading List: the Books of the South

Your indisputably definitive state-by-state list of Southern nature books

Photo by Hitoshi Suzuki on Unsplash

I am storming into your inbox intending to court fury: I have decided to create a state-by-state list of the best books on Southern nature.

Am I wrong? Certainly, since there’s no such thing as a “best” book, ever.

Are you mad? Good. Let me know in the comments—which I hope becomes a savage fight club of people duking it out on behalf of their favorite books.

I’ve set up a little store on Bookshop where you can buy these books (and send me a tiny sliver of money), which I will happily update whenever someone makes a convincing case for their favorite nature book.

So let’s get ready to rumble.

The Trans-Mountain South

Yes, I know this isn’t actually a region, but I needed some kind of organizing principle, and since my Arkansas pick is set in the Ozarks, this is where we’re at.

Virginia

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

When I called for nominations for Southern nature classics on Twitter, I completely overlooked this—a book I first read in a college English course called “A Sense of Place” that indelibly shaped the writer I am today. Thankfully, Dillard’s classic was mentioned by others, and indeed, received more nominations than any other book.

Kentucky

Wendell Berry’s The Long-Legged House

I haven’t tackled Berry’s latest book—which appears to reveal some problematic thinking—but the essays in this early collection were, for me, mind-warping. Perhaps Berry’s Unforeseen Wilderness, on the Red River Gorge, should earn the title for this state, but I haven’t read that yet. (Impressively, all of Berry’s books appear to be on backorder at Bookshop so you’ll have to seek them elsewhere.)

Tennessee

David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen

I’ll admit that I haven’t read this one yet—whoops—but I love Haskell’s thinking, and I love Tennessee’s old-growth forests, so it felt like a shoo-in. Let me know if you agree, or think otherwise.

West Virginia

Emma Eisenbeg’s The Third Rainbow Girl

I struggled to think a good WV book until I remembered this part-memoir, part-journalistic account of a decades-old murder in Pocahontas County. I’m friendly with Emma, so maybe it colored my reading, but I found it a gripping investigation of queer life in the rural South.

North Carolina

Corban Addison’s Wastelands

I’m taking another gamble here on a book I haven’t read—and a geography I don’t know well. Most of my Carolina time has been in the mountains, but longtime readers know that problems with animal agriculture are, for me, a pressing topic—and everything I’ve heard about this book is laudatory.

UPDATE: Arkansas

Got any nominations?

My original book for Arkansas—Daniel Woodrell’s Outlaw Album—is actually by a Missourian. So we need a replacement here.

The Deep South

Mississippi

William Faulkner’s Big Woods

This is, in my opinion, the classic work depicting the riverside landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Or, really, Faulkner’s novella “The Bear” is the classic, which appears in a different form in Go Down, Moses, which should also be read. But the version in this collection is a bit more accessible and is followed up by stories that show the changes on the land through the decades.

Since I lived for a decade in Mississippi, I’ll offer a runner-up here, too, also fiction, but depicting a very different part of the state: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.

UPDATE: Louisiana

John McPhee’s The Control of Nature

Only a third of this book deals with Louisiana—the other two essays focus on Los Angeles and Iceland. But the opening chapter, “Atchafalaya,” is a doozy. Exploring the bold—some might say hubristic—engineering that keeps the state’s swampy landscapes intact, it’s an essay that I literally cannot read anymore. I’ve been writing about similar topics, and McPhee is just so good that he sends me into despair. [An alternate choice, proposed by a reader, is Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell, a book that brought national attention to the land loss crisis affecting Louisiana’s coast.]

UPDATE: Alabama

James Agee’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men

You can’t tell the story of Southern nature without exploring the impact of its agricultural economy. Plus, this odd and sometimes difficult book is just a stone-cold literary classic. [Though I’ll an update here: as a reader has pointed out, a necessary accompaniment is Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers, an as-told-to account of life as a Black sharecropper in Alabama.]

Georgia

Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Another consensus favorite from my Twitter solicitation, this memoir is partly about the Southeast’s lost longleaf pine forests—but also about how disconnected Southerners can be from the nature that once was a key part of the region’s culture, thanks to clearcutting and other landscape changes.

South Carolina

J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place

I note, rather despairingly, how few Black authors I have on this list. There are many possible reasons, including the biases in my own reading history. This book—a memoir of Lanham’s love for the nature that surrounds his family’s home in Edgefield County, S.C.—is another I have not yet read. It stood out as another consensus favorite on Twitter, so I’m looking forward to tackling it soon.

Florida

A state that is a region apart

Florida

Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

The expected picks for Florida might include Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling. (What is it with Florida and that first name?) I haven’t read either, whereas Their Eyes Were Watching God was one of those rare high school assignments that I loved, so I’m making it my nominatino.

Almost the South

Let’s throw these states a bone.

UPDATE: Missouri

Daniel Woodrell’s The Outlaw Album

I originally recommended this grim Ozarkian story collection, by the author of the perhaps more famous Winter’s Bone, as a book for Arkansas. Whoops! As a reader pointed out, Woodrell is from the Missouri Ozarks. So let’s give Missouri a book on this list.

UPDATE: Texas

John Graves’ Goodbye to a River

A couple Texas writers have pointed out, probably rightly, that Graves’ book on the Brazos River is an acknowledged classic. So while I’m guessing my original pick, Rick Bass’s The Deer Pasture, given its focus on deer hunting, may fit in well with Southern culture, I’ve been convinced to make a switch.

UPDATE: Maryland

William Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers

Several readers have made a compelling case that this Pulitzer prize-winning book about blue crabs is the Chesapeake classic. So, sorry, Tom Horton, Bay Country has been knocked from the list.

Oklahoma

John Joseph Matthews’ Sundown

I don’t know much about this book, which was nominated by our resident Oklahoma consultant, writer Jason Christian, but it sounds lovely. For a very different look at the connection between Oklahoma and the Deep South, I’d also recommend Jay Miller’s Ancestral Mounds, which looks at Indigenous spiritual practices that first emerged thousands of years ago in the Southeast, and continue now in Oklahoma.

Delaware

To the contrary of what a map I saw on Wikipedia suggests, Delaware has no claim on the South. Sorry.