Episode · How I Write · 2025-06-18
Books mentioned on Robert Macfarlane: The Most Beautiful Conversation About Language | How I Write
I interviewed Robert Macfarlane, a writer who has mastered the art of nature writing. What makes him fascinating isn’t just that he writes beautifully about landscapes, but how he thinks about language itself.
Robert Macfarlane recommended Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, and discussed Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and Ulysses by James Joyce.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce is a famously experimental and notoriously dense modernist novel that challenges traditional narrative structures with its idiosyncratic language and dreamlike logic.
Discussed“like James Joyce's Ulyses uh or Finnegan's wake deeply rhythmically alert text but in non-fiction I think partly because it has this weird name non-fiction”
Where to get it
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Ulysses
James Joyce's landmark modernist novel Ulysses chronicles an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, mapping human consciousness and daily existence through a revolutionary stream-of-consciousness technique.
Discussed“like James Joyce's Ulyses uh or Finnegan's wake deeply rhythmically alert text but in non-fiction I think partly because it has this weird name non-fiction”
Where to get it
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Letters to a Young Poet
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is a collection of intimate correspondence offering profound guidance on art, solitude, patience, and the inner life of a creative individual.
Recommended“So it's in his letters to a young poet which I would say to any reader got to read it. Any writer that's actually at it's on the main table at my house right now. Flipping through it.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (4) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“First line of the wild places. The wind was rising so I went to the wood. Or let's take that one.”
“So when I was writing a book called Underland, which took me eight years, um I came to realize that there was a a series of images that recurred across many of the journeys.”
“So I wrote a a spell in this big book of spells, nature spells for children. You wrote this? Yeah, I wrote this called The Lost Words working with this wonderful artist called Jackie Morris.”
“So the the very first book I wrote in my um early to mid20s was a book called mountains of the mind I grew up as a mountaineer and a climber as I mentioned”