Book Bingo NW 2025: Pacific Northwest Nature

Our region offers so many incredible opportunities to experience nature, from the mountains to the Puget Sound, from the Duwamish Green Belt to the Burke-Gilman Trail, to the University of Washington Arboretum right here in Seattle. Here are some reading suggestions to fill your PNW nature square for this year’s Book Bingo!

Local author and naturalist David B. Williams has chronicled many of our region’s natural spaces, both wild and urban, in his various books and Street Smart Naturalist newsletter. Not only has he released a fully revised and updated version of Seattle Walks this year, he also has a new book, Wild in Seattle, which is a current Peak Pick! PNW regional artist and teacher Peggy Dean’s latest book, Pacific Northwest Line Drawing, is the perfect companion for starting a nature journal on your adventures in the city or in the wilder PNW.

For wider exploration of the region, our collection of Green Trails Maps has you covered for great hiking & trail maps, most of which are available for check-out as well as in-person browsing in Central Library’s Map Room. Both The Seattle Public Library and The King County Library System have reservable Discover Passes that allow entry to Washington National Parks, as well as many camping and recreational areas!

Environmental journalist and award-winning local author Lynda V. Mapes invites us to recognize trees as kin, not just commodities to consume in her latest book, The Trees Are Speaking, by connecting our region’s old growth forests to the logging-ravaged landscapes of the East coast via the essential relationship between salmon and forest. Mapes tells the vibrant stories of, among others, the Indigenous activists and scientists on both coasts working to both preserve and restore these vital natural landscapes. Our expansive forests can also be places of mystery and danger. Jon Billman explores the phenomenon of people who seemingly “vanish without a trace” in the woods in his book The Cold Vanish, which uses the 2017 disappearance of Jacob Gray in Olympic National Forest as a focal point for his thoughtful considerations of those who disappear and the vacuum that creates for those who are left behind.

Nature also offers a bounty of food to us humans and to the birds, bees, insects, and other wildlife that form the essential links in our ecosystem, whether it’s the wild mountainous regions or right in your own yard. Field Notes from a Fungi Forager by local author and chef Ashley Rodriguez is a gorgeously illustrated entry in the long tradition of mushroom foraging in the PNW. (For more inspiration on how to connect the food you eat to the nature around you, also check out her recent cookbook, Rooted Kitchen). Oregon locals Kristin Currin and Andrew Merrit offer an excellent guide to creating lush pollinator gardens with native plants, whether you’re using an apartment rooftop, balcony or a dedicated gardening space in Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer. For a deep-dive into regional food production, both historical and with an eye towards future sustainability that centers community, Kathleen Alcalá’s Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island is an excellent place to begin.

For a more poetic take on this wild, yet increasingly urbanized, place we call home, This One We Call Ours is the last poetry collection published by local poet Martha Silano before her passing just this May. Poet and editor of Cascadia Field Guide Elizabeth Bradfield describes this collection as “an anguished howl, a deeply informed wail, a love letter to what’s still here and to earth’s own ongoing, beyond us.” Silano’s final collection, Terminal Surreal, will be published this September.

Check out these titles and more for summer nature reading!

~ posted by V.

For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk BookBingoNW2025 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2025 on social media. Book Bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures and the King County Library System.

  Our region offers so many incredible opportunities to experience nature, from the mountains to the Puget Sound, from the Duwamish Green Belt to the Burke-Gilman Trail, to the University of Washington Arboretum right here in Seattle. Here are some reading suggestions to fill your PNW nature square for this year’s Book Bingo! Local author and … Continue reading “Book Bingo NW 2025: Pacific Northwest Nature” 

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