Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator who in 2009 moved with his family to a farm on the Beara Peninsula in Cork.
He wrote about his rewilding project there in the bestselling book .
by Robert Moor, a fascinatingly diverse and quirky exploration of the human relationship with trees and forests.
I mostly read to understand or learn new things, rather than for escape or comfort, but history probably fulfils that role for me to some extent.
The most recent such book was by Clodagh Finn and John Morgan, and last week in Waterstones Cork I picked up a copy of , a biography by Lorcan Collins.
The last one was probably by Richard Powers. People rave about this book, but I couldn’t get into it, likely because I was up to 90 at the time.
I’ll give it another try when I have less going on.
It wasn’t a book that made me want to be a writer, but the temperate rainforest I’ve been rewilding for over 17 years now on our farm on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, and the desire to communicate that story as widely as possible.
by Edward O Wilson, for opening me up to the wondrous life on our planet.
by Edward O Wilson, for opening me up to the catastrophe we as a species are inflicting on the wondrous life on our planet.
by George Monbiot. I already knew that how we produce our food is by far the biggest reason nature is crashing, and that changing our diets away from animal foods is crucial to the survival of both the biosphere and our own species, but this book brought that reality home far more forcefully.
It also explored our best chances of attaining genuine food security (in Ireland, we are highly vulnerable in this sense) against the backdrop of an increasingly unstable future.
by Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata.
The many amazing ecological insights it contains just blew my mind. Ecology can be very dry (often necessarily) or, like this book, a fun dive into the workings of life on Earth.
An exploration of whether it’s really true that ‘people are part of nature’, as is so often said. I briefly considered this question in my first book, .
However the potential inferences are so complex and, I believe, profound, as to merit their own, deeply considered, but honest, book.
Robert MacFarlane’s .
by Gary Lennon, based on my book of the same name. I cannot imagine it done better.
At the time of writing, the film is selling out in smaller cinemas across Ireland.
I try to spread myself around real, non-online bookshops: they all need and deserve our support.
When I’m up in Dublin, I love to pick up a volume in Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street, and then dip into it with a coffee in their sunlit upstairs café. Another of many city favourites is Hodges Figgis.
Something in between: I have two large bookcases devoted solely to natural history and the environment, but all the rest are arranged fairly randomly.
Coffee in the morning, anything non-alcoholic after that.
Brendan Behan describing his own real-life incarceration in .
