This is a very difficult book to review. It seemed to me to be a mishmash of different genres, or a dumbing down of a scientific topic for the masses.

A very quick read being a short 160 pages. We live in a high stress world, everything happening right now. We're well along the way to losing our sense of perspective. Yes, we can stop and smell the roses. If this particular rose is fragrant it might distract us for a moment. Maybe we take a picture and post it on social media. But then it's gone and we find ourselves taking the next picture.

Tristan Gooley's How to Read Nature bring us to the point of our picture and has us stop to think about what this brief moment with nature is telling us. Take for example the Acacia Tree in Africa. It's just a tree that Giraffe's love to feast upon. We may even stop seeing the tree because we find the Giraffe more interesting. Then we notice that the Giraffe's aren't eating very long from any tree, why? Then we notice that they are walking by trees to get to others, why? If we are reading nature and do a bit of investigation we will find out that the Acacia is releasing chemicals that make the leaves bitter to the Giraffe. They are also releasing pheromones that warn other Acacia's, but only downwind. So the Giraffes have learned to walk up wind. Now we know which way the wind is blowing.

He points out that everything is undergoing constant change. You now look at the world differently because of what we know. We begin to change ourselves by acquiring new insights.

Tristan Gooley as made this interesting, readable, and informative.

I wish to Thank Tristan Gooley, the Publisher, and NetGalley for my review copy

This is a amazing read for all of us that love and interact with nature.
New York Times–bestselling author and navigator Tristan Gooley teaches us when he goes for a walk, he uses all five senses to “read” everything nature has to offer. He shows us how to engage all five senses to immerse ourselves in nature.
Gooley introduces readers to his techniques and teaches us how to embrace our nature experiences and appreciate all nature has to offer. If you are a hiker, a advocate for nature, a backpacker or just someone who loves nature, you will embrace this book and all the author teaches us. I found it well researched, and a enjoyable reading experience. The exercises are easy to follow to incorporate into your daily walks. The descriptions of nature's glory are truly beautiful and reminiscent of the teachings of the great Thoreau.

Something about this book's tone rubbed me the wrong way, each time I tried reading it I found myself not enjoying it and having to put it down for later. This surprised me since I am a naturalist and I am always looking for ways to expand my appreciation for the natural world. Even though this book was not at all for me, I can say it was very well written and organized, though maybe if you wish to read it or give it as a gift, be the kind of person who is only getting into nature appreciation rather than a trained naturalist.

Wonderful resource for those looking to be more mindful and reconnect with nature.

Have you ever seen Wall-E? Do yo remember when they arrived on the planet and needed a crash course about life on Earth and how to crawl out of the spaceship?. I think you know where I am heading with this. How to Read Nature aims to help you notice your natural surroundings and awaken to a more nature-mindful you. It is a spark, an introductory approach to nature and how you can understand and interact with it through natural navigation. What the book is not, is a specialized guide for those who already have a fair understanding of the subject and desire more in-depth content. Hint: check other books by the author.

What I specially liked was Gooley's sense of humor and easy to follow exercises, almost as if he was giving me a remote course. If this book succeeds and gets you interested about nature, you can find a lengthy list of literature for further reading curated by the author. It is organized matching the chapters of the book and includes a brief description for each title. If Thoreau was still alive, he would probably give 5 stars as well.

As an avid birder, sailor and hiker, I find Tristan Gooley's book "How to Read Nature" to be helpful in ever aspect of my outdoor life. It has helped me gain a better understanding for the natural world around me and how it influences and intersects with wind conditions, likely and unlike birds and finding my way home when i've become too distracted by the beauty at hand.

i had high hopes for this book but was disappointed. it seemed more like rambling musings of someone rather than a "how to". the only thing i took away was how to tell which way is south from a crescent moon. i was looking for more practical advice than to "pay attention but everything changes anyway." The constant emphasis on how things change constantly was a bit annoying because it made it seem like nothing was ever helpful. Also being that the author was British all the references were lost to me and it made it hard to understand.

A good introductory text on how to read and become aware of nature. Short, and therefore limited in scope, hopping from topic to topic, which acts well to pique interest and would easily lead off into reading in more detail for those interested. UK-based, so not directly translatable to other countries, but the lessons could still be applied to other landscapes.

My thanks to NetGalley and The Experiment for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

This is a very difficult book to review. It seemed to me to be a mishmash of different genres, or a dumbing down of a scientific topic for the masses.

What makes me say this is that at times it feels rather memoir-y and personal to the author, which was fine, no complaints. But other parts were more of what I expected, nature and some science behind it. Only the science didn't really blow me away. No citations, no notes (please note this was an ARC that I read, the finished copy may have these things) and the bibliography was rather scanty. Granted, the book was not that long, but I expected more in the way of expanding my TBR.

Also, the author stated quite a few things very absolutely. But no proof to back him up. The point in question was if plants hear or not. He's pretty emphatic in his "no", but there is not ONE shred of evidence that he uses to back this up. Now, that is a topic that interests me, so I have read articles, papers, etc. about how plants DO react to different types of music, whether it is ail and do poorly or move towards the speakers, to the point of wrapping themselves around said speakers. No, I don't have the paper citation for you, but this is a book review, not a book where a citation is needed. I can get that info for you, if interested. I think a simple Google search will do it.

So the fact that he is all "nope. nope, nopity nope" about it and the lack of ANY citations moved this down a star for me.

The mash-up of genres and the somewhat lowest common denominator feel of this book also lowered it one star. It's not a bad book, but it is just a quick dip into the pond as it were. I was expecting a more thorough lesson in nature and how to understand it. This was for a severe novice, though to be fair, you HAVE to start at the very beginning and master those skills before you can move on to more advanced concepts.

This was not what I was expecting at all. The book itself isn't bad and it is clear that the author knows his stuff, I just don't feel like he shared much of his knowledge in this particular book. I do own his book on how to read water and plan to read it soon. I admit to being rather apprehensive about it now, but like I said, he knows his stuff. The book won't be fluff, but it may not be as in-depth as I would like.

3.5 stars, rounded down because this book was not a four to me. I felt that there could have been more to it. I am frustrated in that regard. Not a bad book, a good book for beginners in observation. Worth a look.

How to Read Nature is a fantastic book for any nature lover or city dweller alike.

This book was written by a guy who seems quite dedicated to the outdoors and this book is supposed to communicate his love to the rest of us, but I had a hard time with it.

The author is very widely-traveled, I understand, and he seems to know what he's talking about, but for me this book failed to connect or to inspire, and I think it was because he didn’t approach it the right away. It felt to me like a slapdash approach, with scattered thoughts being tossed in almost at random, like the author was merely dabbling here and there without really coming to grips with things. I think he could have done a better job at bringing newbies into his world. He has other books out there along similar lines, and I found myself wondering if this might be a shorter distillation of one of the earlier works.

I kept asking myself who is this book aimed at? To whom is it supposed to appeal? The obvious answer is 'anyone who is interested in nature', which is why it interested me, but the problem is that it’s too invested in 'wild nature' - being out in the countryside - for it to be relevant to city dwellers. Now it’s true that many city dwellers do like to get out into nature, but it’s not so common for those people to be able to devote the time and frequency to getting out into the countryside that it would require for this book to be of any real and enduring value. I kept thinking that a 'Nature for City Dwellers' book might have been of more utility in this case.

For those who reside in, or spend a lot of time in the country, a lot of what's in here will be preaching to the choir, since they already know many of these things. I acknowledge that there's nearly always something to be learned, but it felt like it would be of limited value to them, too.

Is there a segment of the population in between those two extremes which might benefit? I'm sure there is, but how large it is, is an open question. Additionally, the book is very British in its own nature. It’s not that it doesn’t mention other countries and other cultures, and other wildlife, but it’s essentially British at its core, which may limit its appeal.

There is a group of people like me, who are not blind to nature and always willing to learn more. I live on the edge of a city and take care of my own yard, so there is a connection I have that perhaps too many others do not. I don't notice the detailed things he does, because I don't have that kind of time to spend on this, but I do notice things both in the yard, and at times when I do get a chance to be out in the semi-wilds, and to me they're interesting.

On hikes and rambles in the past, I've pointed things out to my kids, but their interest in those things waned as they grew to have other focuses. Maybe that's a failing of mine, but I remain unconvinced that this book, which tries to do the same thing, is a going to draw in very many people who do not already lead, or seek to lead or in some way emulate the same kind of outdoors life to which the author has access. Most people do not have that option very readily available to them.

Yes, these things are interesting, but they’re not critical to most people's everyday life and a lot of the things he talks about are irrelevant or unattainable to most city dwellers. So this begs the question as to why a better connection was not made to the advantages this knowledge would bring, or to the utility it would have or your average person about town (and I mean that quite literally).

A connection with nature is always better - better for the planet if nothing else. If people are made more aware of how critical Earth's health is to us and how delicate aspects of it are, through people being led to feel closer ties to nature, Earth is likely to be better protected, but there are other virtues, mind-expanding ones which, while touched upon here from time to time, felt somewhat glossed over. Which brings me to the photographs included in the book. They are all monochrome, which really divorces them from nature, in its glorious technicolor, so for me they didn’t add anything. More on this anon.

The biggest problem for me though was the apparent random nature of the book. The chapters I thought ought to have been the lead-in: nature's clocks and calendars, all appeared in the second half of the book. This made no sense to me. Starting with the big picture and carefully moving to an ever detailed smaller one would have been the best approach.

To me it would have made more sense to organize the whole book in that way: following the year, and looking at how nature changes during it, with little detours into the other topics he covers as appropriate; in this way, people could jump into the book at whatever season they're in when they get their hands on it, and follow it all the way from there.

Some parts were slightly misleading. For instance, the tale of the Jarawa people who survived the St Stephen's tsunami in 2004 by moving to higher ground before it came. The book implies that they had - not quite, but almost - a sixth sense to read the clues and take action, but the fact is that their folklore told them if there was an earthquake, there often can be a giant wave on its heels. They were merely following word-of-mouth traditions of their people. It was not some magical connection with nature. They would still have moved even if a tsunami had not come, which would have been a waste of their time on that occasion, but still a smart move in the grand scheme of things wherein it’s better to be safe than sorry. Their survival is to be rejoiced and is worth learning of, but it's not worth making it seem like there was something just short of otherworldly going on.

In contrast, other parts of the book were oddly-lacking important details. For example in one section the author makes some observations about how to determine what kind of rock you're likely to find under a piece of land based on the flora that grows on that land. He says pines like acidic soil and beech trees like alkaline, but he doesn't say how to recognize a beech tree! Without that basic piece of knowledge, you’re prevented from anything else in that cascade. That seems like a sorry omission when it would have been just as easy to put it in there. Would a photograph, even a black and white one, of a beech tree have been appropriate here? I think so - or at least a drawing. Such photographs would have made a difference and not at all appeared all-but randomly chosen.

Obviously in these days of Internet searches, you can not only discover what a beech tree looks like, but also feed in a picture of an unknown tree and likely get a result telling you what tree it is, but if you only have the print book to hand, you’re rather stuck! This is part of what I meant when I said this book had a slap-dash feel to it, like a hastily-packed suitcase might be opened at your beach-front hotel to reveal no swim-suit or no sun tan oil! At least most-everyone knows what a beach looks like!

On a more serious note, I do agree that taking a greater interest in nature not only adds to our joy of life, but also helps us become aware of the more important things: that pollution and climate change are real and dangerous. I'm sorry there was essentially nothing about those critical topics in this book. It's a sad omission which brings me to an observation of my own. This book was formatted with very wide margins and a huge amount of white space, and with lines that were not single-spaced. It’s only a hundred-sixty pages but it could have been much shorter, probably a hundred pages or so.

This matters less in the e-version, except in that it still requires energy to transmit all those blank spaces across the Internet. In the print version, however, should this book go to a large print run, it’s an awful waste of trees. I would have thought that someone who boasts a close-connection with nature would have appreciated that and sought to ameliorate it, so this was another disappointment for me.

As was the search engine! At one point I was looking back to the beech tree and alkaline reference to verify I had not misunderstood. When I searched for 'beech', the app (Bluefire Reader) found it with no problem, but a search for 'acidic' crashed the book and brought me back to the screen which contained the list of books in my Bluefire library (which in this case was only this one book). That's not a problem with the writing or book layout, but it is a problem if people want to look up something and the search engine isn’t stable. Again this was an advance review copy, so maybe this problem, whatever it is, will be fixed in the published version. Maybe the problem is with Bluefire reader. I can't say. I can say it was annoying.

There's a practical issue to the book formatting, from a purely reading PoV, which is that the text was very small on the screen of my phone, which is more likely what you'd be carrying on a nature ramble, rather than the book or a large tablet computer. It’s possible to enlarge text on the screen, but then the page will not swipe to the next one (and sometimes it jumps back to the previous one while you're enlarging it, which is another annoyance!).

For each page, you have to enlarge the text to read comfortably, then you must reduce it to its original size in order to swipe to the next page, and finally, you must then enlarge that page to read it. It made for an irritating read. This is a problem with distributing books in PDF format. It’s not e-reader friendly unless you have a large screen. As I mentioned, though, this was an advance review copy, so maybe the actual published version will be in a more e-friendly format.

So in short, while I do believe books like this are of value and it’s important that people read them, I think this one could have done a much better job than it did and as such, I cannot recommend it as a worthy read.

Though it's not very in depth, this is a good introduction to the different ways we can get back to nature and use the signs that our great-grandparents used for weather forecasting and such. It will be good in our nature study / botany class coming up next semester.