9 Books That Will Make You Want To Go Outside And Touch Grass

Do you know that moment when you can’t stand to look at your phone another minute? The messages keep coming in, red news alert bubbles are pinging, an email pops up from your boss reminding you of that thing you’re trying to compartmentalize. You fling your phone down onto the couch (that was targeted to you on social media) where it bounces a few times, before settling into a crevice you’ll be frantically scrabbling for when it’s ringing incessantly 20 minutes later, an automated voice reminding you of your upcoming root canal.

When the bad news just keeps flooding in, there’s only one thing to do: leave your device behind, go outside, and touch grass. It’s naturally green! It smells fresh and funky! Worms live down there—can you even believe it?!

During the early days of the pandemic, I was doing “Yoga with Adriene” and working on the poems for my image-text collection, Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, from a small square of grass behind my city apartment. There were only two options: online or outside. All summer, I watched morning glories take over the yard and thought about the ways the world could change. 

Getting offline and into the real world for a little fresh air and perspective shift can change your mood and help you reconnect with yourself and your community. Here are 10 books that will make you want to go outside and touch grass. 

The Nature Book by Tom Comitta

Using only found text, Comitta has compiled a “literary supercut” of writing about nature from three hundred works of fiction. Without any human characters to follow, readers are forced to reconsider the arc of the story itself, grappling with the romanticism of a world that could fully exist without us (and would probably be better off).

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico

In this book-length poem, readers follow young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet, Teebs, who can’t write a nature poem. The stereotypes about nature and Native Americans weigh too heavily: “Who is the ‘I’ but its inheritances,” writes Pico. Deconstructing the colonizers’ conflations about nature and his people takes time, pop culture, sex, and music, but eventually, Teebs gets there. By the end of this epic, both speaker and reader come to a new understanding of what “the natural world” could mean. 

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

Published in 1909, naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter tells the story of Elnora Comstock, a poor young woman living on the edge of the Limberlost Swamp. The novel includes: 
✅ A dramatic quicksand death
✅ Themes of logging and environmental exploitation
✅ Moth collecting by lamplight
✅ A teenage coming-of-age journey

Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology edited by Michael Walsh

Queer Nature features 375 pages of expansive, contemporary nature poems centering LGBTQIA+ voices. Featuring work from over 200 writers, including Kaveh Akbar, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Eileen Myles, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong. Michael Walsh curated the anthology with the intention that he “didn’t want to restrict the nature poem to the outdoors or to the ‘wilderness,’ a colonial term, in recognition of how built places are communities, habitats, and contested sites…”

Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch

In her debut novel (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, among others), Ffitch presents a feminist reimagining of collective living. When protagonist Helen arrives in Appalachia to live off the land, everything starts happening all at once. But, with the help of neighbors who turn into family, she meets (sometimes messily) each challenge that shows up at the door. 

Hoarders by Kate Durbin

An NPR Best Book of 2021, Hoarders will make you look around your apartment and think, maybe now is a good time to bring all of this garbage to the thrift shop. Better yet, get rid of everything and go live in a minimalist yurt. In vignettes organized around individual episodes of the popular reality tv show, Durbin combines found language and observations to explore the stuff we can’t get rid of and its connection to our psyche. 

The Healing Woods by Martha Reben

A memoir published in 1952, the book follows New York City-born Reben as she leaves her bed at the tuberculosis sanatorium in Saranac Lake in upstateNew York (against medical advice) and treks 11 miles into the woods with a fishing guide named Fred Rice. In a true retreat to nature, Reben spends the next six years living in a tent from spring through fall, before finally moving back into town. 

Earth Science by Sarah Green

“…naked human on a hot summer night, / one of us taking a turn / being the river, one of us taking / a turn being the bird.”  The poems in Green’s collection explore all of the hot stuff of our world—from cracker crumbs in the sheets to the urgent need to pee in bumper to bumper bridge traffic. On second thought, forget grass—this collection will make you want to walk outside and stare up at the infinite stars.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

An artist and her granddaughter share the summer months on a fairytale island in Finland. Best known as writer and illustrator of the popular Moomin books, Jansson pulled from her own life for this work of literary fiction, described as her favorite novel she wrote for adults. Written the year after her own mother’s death, The Summer Book explores love and death amongst the moss, flowers, driftwood, and seal skulls.