Book Review: Keeping a Nature Journal by Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E. Roth
Keeping a Nature Journal: Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You by Clare Walker Leslie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Own. Birthday present from my in-laws (Thanks, again!)
This book, while annoying with its philosophy at times, is worth reading in order to learn about nature journaling. In some ways, it seemed they tried to make more of it than there is, but there were enough good ideas for planning, encouraging, and instructing drawing nature. “Outdoorsy” and “artistic” are not adjectives anyone would use for me, but this book made it seem like an achievable goal.
The several ideas of how to practice, how to see, how to draw what you want to draw. There are many drawings included in the book … from professional artists to small children’s drawings. This makes the book really quite beautiful.
Negatives include, the universalism and zen/Buddhist philosophies. It got annoying at times. The other negative is the repetitiveness of the book; to fill 200some pages, there was a lot of redundancy … and often the redundancy was often how everything is nature, so you could journal about your children watching TV if you wanted. [shrug] Easy enough to skim over or ignore in order to get to the helpful parts and the lovely pictures.
I didn't read this book straight through, but read the introduction and first part, then just paged through the pictures and read bits and pieces as I went, so the repetition didn't strike me.
Just having the pages of examples helped me to get ideas and have a better understanding of the sorts of things we could be doing.
There's all sorts of things we *could* be doing. *Sigh.*
There are many years ahead of us, we're starting small. One place, every month. Note something.