R Sukumar picks his favourite read of 2024

Many years ago, when my son was still in middle school, he spent a couple of weeks in a hill-state, doing a bird audit in a patch of rewilded forest. I drove up to spend a weekend with him, and as we walked through the forest, he spoke of how soon the wild had recovered and taken over. I believe that’s generally true of nature – and also in a deeply personal way. If you open yourself up to nature, if you allow a little bit of nature into your life, it takes over and changes you – for the better. There’s an elemental power to it, but in a very everyday sort of way.

The best book I read in 2024 (and the best book I have, and likely will read in a long time) was Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare. It’s about a busy professional who retreats to a countryside barn during the pandemic, and the orphaned leveret she finds, adopts, and cares for. As she struggles to raise the hare, balancing the need to care and protect with that of retaining its essential wildness, we learn more about her, but also more about hares, the natural world, how we interact with it, and what it does to us. As Dalton writes, “there was a time when I knew nothing about hares…. The same can be said, I have realized, of the many other aspects of life that have opened to me as a result of this experience. It has been like acquiring a new set of faculties and a greater degree of perceptiveness towards my physical environment…. And I have been reminded that we are creatures as tied to the seasons of nature as the hare, and as affected by its reverses, even if we are unaware of the fact.”

Dalton writes about how, when she travels, she sees “not just people and places but the tracks and traces of nature that surround us always, wherever we are.” That’s true; sometime in the 2000s, I was at a business meeting at a hotel near an estuary in Chennai. Through the window of the coffee shop, I could see a solitary wader feeding. It was a curlew. It was also the highlight of my meeting!