The 100 best books about nature and the environment

No. 11 on this list. The Seagull · Anton Chekhov · 1896

Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Russian FGOS literature standard

One of Chekhov's four major plays and a permanent part of the world repertory and of drama syllabi. Its 1898 Moscow Art Theatre revival is the founding event of that theatre, which still carries a seagull on its curtain.

No. 12 on this list. The Return of the Native · Thomas Hardy · 1878

The Return of the Native stands as one of Hardy's major tragic novels and a cornerstone of Victorian fiction. Egdon Heath's status as literary landscape rivals any in English literature, and the novel appears consistently in academic curricula and critical studies of the Victorian novel.

No. 13 on this list. The Old Man and the Sea · Ernest Hemingway · 1953

Taught in schools: Kazakh literature curriculum (Kazakhstan)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Hemingway reduced fiction to one old man, one marlin, and the Gulf Stream, and proved that a story stripped to its barest elements could carry the weight of a parable about endurance, craft, and the dignity of losing. The novella's final image — the skeleton of the great fish picked clean at the dock — is among the most perfectly earned symbols in American literature.

No. 14 on this list. The Prelude · William Wordsworth · 1850

A fixture of every survey of English Romanticism and nearly every anthology of British poetry, though as a single long poem it draws less raw syllabus volume than assigned novels—closer to Beloved's discipline-specific canonicity than a mass-market fixture like Gatsby.

No. 15 on this list. Venus and Adonis · William Shakespeare · 1593

Shakespeare's first published work (1593), personally overseen and dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, went through more than a dozen editions in his lifetime — making it the most reprinted English poem of the Elizabethan era. It appears on virtually all Renaissance literature and Shakespeare syllabi and features in every serious account of early modern English poetry.

No. 16 on this list. The Tempest · William Shakespeare · 1611

Taught in schools: Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico), WJEC/Eduqas GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Prospero's island stages Shakespeare's final reckoning with his own art—the magician who conjures storms, manipulates lovers, and then drowns his book. Caliban's "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises" is the most haunting speech given to a character the play calls a monster.

No. 17 on this list. In Our Time · Ernest Hemingway · 1925

In Our Time is widely taught in American literature survey courses as the foundational text of Hemingway's iceberg style. It appears on thousands of university syllabi and is the required starting point for understanding modernist short fiction in America. The Modern Library and most major American literature curricula treat it as essential.

No. 18 on this list. Songs of Innocence and of Experience · William Blake · 1794

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Blake etched, printed, and hand-colored each plate himself, fusing lyric poetry with visual art in a form no one had attempted before. The paired "Lamb" and "Tyger" compress an entire theology into forty-four lines: innocence asks who made you; experience asks how dare He.

No. 19 on this list. The House of the Dead · Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1862

Fyodor Dostoevsky spent four years in a Siberian prison camp after the tsar commuted his death sentence at the last moment. He came out a different writer. The House of the Dead channels that experience through Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman convicted of murdering his wife, who records the daily life of the katorga — the forced labor camp — with the precision of a naturalist and the unease of someone who cannot stop looking. The other prisoners steal, scheme, perform folk plays, and occasionally show flashes of unexpected grace. Goryanchikov watches all of it without rendering verdicts. The book does not explain what prison does to men; it shows men inside prison, and lets the accumulated detail do the work. Dostoevsky writes with a clinical restraint unusual for him — no murder plots, no philosophical speeches, no epileptic crises. What remains is a documentary of degradation that refuses to moralize, which is exactly what makes the moral weight so heavy. Readers expecting Dostoevsky's trademark feverish psychology will find something quieter here: a sustained act of witness.

No. 20 on this list. Selected Poems of Czesław Miłosz · Czesław Miłosz · 1988

Nobel laureate and one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. Central to Polish literature and increasingly recognized in world poetry.

No. 21 on this list. Voss · Patrick White · 1957

Voss is recognized as a cornerstone of Australian literature and a major work of postcolonial fiction. It consistently appears in scholarly discussions of antipodean identity, imperial mythology, and mid-century modernism. The novel has maintained critical attention since publication and is standard curriculum in Australian and Commonwealth literary studies.

No. 22 on this list. Paterson · William Carlos Williams · 1963

Paterson is anthologized in every major American poetry collection (Norton, Heath, Library of America) and taught in American modernism, long poem, and 20th-century poetry courses at virtually every research university. It is one of the defining long poems of the American century, alongside The Waste Land, The Cantos, and Four Quartets. While less widely taught than Shakespeare or Fitzgerald, it occupies a canonical position in American literary studies comparable to Beloved (85).

No. 23 on this list. The Conference of the Birds · Attar of Nishapur · 1177

Recognized as one of the greatest works of Persian literature and a foundational text of Sufism. It ranks alongside the Quran and works by Rumi in Islamic intellectual tradition. Western literary canons increasingly recognize it as essential world literature.

No. 24 on this list. A Sportsman's Sketches · Ivan Turgenev · 1852

A Sportsman's Sketches is a cornerstone of 19th-century Russian literature, widely taught in world literature and Russian literature courses globally. Tsar Alexander II credited it with helping shift opinion toward the emancipation of serfs — a rare case of a literary work altering the course of national policy. Though formal syllabus data is absent from this database, its presence in curricula from Moscow to Michigan is well-documented across 170 years of continuous republication.

No. 25 on this list. Shakuntala · Kalidasa · 400

Supreme Sanskrit drama; first Indian text to reach European audience.

No. 26 on this list. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight · The Pearl Poet · 1375

Required reading in virtually every medieval and Middle English literature course at anglophone universities. The poem appears on thousands of syllabi and features in Great Books curricula worldwide. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon's 1925 scholarly edition set the standard text; Simon Armitage's 2007 translation reached mainstream audiences. The poem occupies the same canonical tier as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for the period it represents.

No. 27 on this list. Collected Poems of Derek Walcott · Derek Walcott · 1986

Nobel laureate and the defining poet of the Anglophone Caribbean. Central to postcolonial literature and increasingly recognized in the broader English-language canon.

No. 28 on this list. The Burning Plain and Other Stories · Juan Rulfo · 1953

Taught in schools: UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

In seventeen stories set across the parched hills of Jalisco, Mexico, Rulfo's peasants carry their dead with them — sometimes literally. A man hauls his father's corpse on his back through the mountains. An old woman refuses to believe her son is a murderer. Soldiers and sharecroppers and abandoned wives speak in short, exact sentences, and the landscape answers with dust and silence. The dead narrate their own stories without announcing they are dead; readers piece it together from the wrong temperature of the prose. Rulfo strips everything from his fiction — backstory, explanation, transitions — until only the essential pressure remains. The Burning Plain was published in 1953, two years before Pedro Páramo, and it shares that novel's method: grief without sentimentality, violence without drama, the supernatural arriving with the matter-of-fact normalness of weather. Gabriel García Márquez said he memorized the entire book and recited it to friends. That is the correct response. These stories end before they explain themselves, in the way that real catastrophe does.

No. 29 on this list. North of Boston · Robert Frost · 1914

North of Boston appears in virtually every American poetry survey course and its poems — particularly 'Mending Wall' and 'Home Burial' — are anthologized ubiquitously across high school and university curricula. While database recognitions were not found, this reflects a data gap: the collection is a cornerstone of American literary education and appears on nearly every canonical American poetry list.

No. 30 on this list. Go Down, Moses · William Faulkner · 1942

Go Down, Moses is recognized as central to American modernism and Southern gothic literature. It appears consistently in university curricula and major literary anthologies. While not achieving the absolute canonical singularity of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!, it commands secure canonical standing within American letters.