Reading and the Outdoors




This blog aims to be relevant and accessible. BookTube, Bookstagram and BookTok are such vital tools for engaging people in heavily-digitized times and can be harnessed in fun and creative ways to encourage people to get reading. This blog, alongside its corresponding Instagram, aims to tap into that sentiment and generate a stream of ideas that more generally encourage the exploration of links between literature and the natural world. 

Keep checking the blog, this page and Instagram for new ideas and conversation starters that start delving into the complex and exciting relationship between books and the outdoors! 

For now, here's a quick and somewhat incoherent list of general stuff you might want to do or think about. Hopefully the blog will unpack some of these things more in the future!  


  • Read a book in the place where it's set! I recently read Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall, where it's set. Reading a book in its actual location really helps immerse you and spurs you on - and it's exciting when you recognise a place name in the book from somewhere around you! Equally, I think reading a book about a place makes you appreciate it more. If you're not a 24/7 poet, seeing the world through the lens of someone who writes as beautiful as du Maurier, for instance, is a great way to sense and enjoy your surroundings. Romanticise your life <3

  • There's more than just nature in literature, there's literature in nature as well! I'm thinking about this in the more literal sense that you can just go outside with a book and it's a nice, calming backdrop that is probably more conducive to reading than a lot of other settings (unless, of course, it's tipping it down with rain). However, you could also think about this more abstractly. There's artistry in nature - in the way and times things grow, in animal calls, etc. I think there's probably A LOT to think about here but nature is so often lumped with "science" that it can be refreshing to think about it as an art, as well. (Maybe ecocriticism, a type of literary theory, holds some of the answers to this?)

  • Compile a list of your favourite books, by country. This is a bit of a trend on YouTube and tiktok at the moment, but it's a great way to think about different landscapes and how the geography of different regions shapes the characters, political and social contexts and more of many different texts. Expanding your reading into different continents is a great way to "see" (through however many words, or less) and tangibly appreciate and learn about new places and their unique geographies.

  • How do texts respond to the climate crisis? This a big one, and one that this blog certainly aims to look at closer in the future. Engaging with a diverse and global range of authors is crucial for exploring and exposing a number of issues related to the climate crisis - for instance; how the voices of the global south are often unheard in climate discourse; the tangible impacts the climate crisis is already having; general ignorance and how knowledge dispels fear and passivity. 

Stay tuned for more stuff like this across the blog and instagram! 

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