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A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature
A quirky and reverent romp through nature with an irreverently funny guide
In these wry and explosively funny essays, nature obsessive Charles Hood reveals his abiding affection for the overlooked and undervalued parts of the natural world. Like a Bill Bryson of the Mojave exurbs, Hood takes us on a joyride through the obscure, finding wilderness in Hollywood palms, the airports of Alaska, and the empty lots of Palmdale. In a zinger-filled whirl of literary and artistic allusions, he celebrates Audubon's droopy condor, the world-changing history of a cactus parasite, and the weird art of natural history dioramas. This debut collection of creative nonfiction from a widely published poet, photographer, and wildlife guide unveils the wonderment of nature's underbelly with poetic vision and singular wit.
In these wry and explosively funny essays, nature obsessive Charles Hood reveals his abiding affection for the overlooked and undervalued parts of the natural world. Like a Bill Bryson of the Mojave exurbs, Hood takes us on a joyride through the obscure, finding wilderness in Hollywood palms, the airports of Alaska, and the empty lots of Palmdale. In a zinger-filled whirl of literary and artistic allusions, he celebrates Audubon's droopy condor, the world-changing history of a cactus parasite, and the weird art of natural history dioramas. This debut collection of creative nonfiction from a widely published poet, photographer, and wildlife guide unveils the wonderment of nature's underbelly with poetic vision and singular wit.
224 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2021
16 people are currently reading
360 people want to read
About the author
Charles Hood
17 books8 followersCharles Hood has studied birds and natural history from the Amazon to Tibet, and he has seen more than five thousand species of birds in the wild. A widely published poet, he has received numerous fellowships and writing awards, and his most recent artist-in-residence positions were with the National Science Foundation in Antarctica and with Playa Arts in Oregon. He has also been a visiting professor in England, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea and a research fellow with the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. Currently, he is a teacher of writing and photography at Antelope Valley College in the Mojave Desert. - Author bio @ Heyday Books
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
November 16, 2021
If you loved Brian Doyle's nature essays in One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike, but kind of glazed over on the more religious pieces, you'll love this book. They've got a similar wit, warmth, and love for the undersung moments in life and the natural world, but Hood comes at life a little more askew and aslant.
Is Hood a scholar in the wilds or a birder in the library? He's happy to study the tracks of shrews and penguins or the art of Audubon and taxidermy dioramas, and it's a lot of fun to get caught in the flow of his associative trains of thought and the unplumbable depths of his knowledge that spans Los Angeles's history as a riverine landscape to Melville's travel journals to personal experience in Antartica.
This book makes me so happy, too! Because there are kit foxes in Bakersfield and cactus parasites that dyed the British army's coats a brilliant carmine -- our world is one on which humans and nonhumans are firmly enmeshed and we can delight in that instead of defining as nature that which most of us will never see or encounter and thinking it is inevitably ruined when we get to know it.
Is Hood a scholar in the wilds or a birder in the library? He's happy to study the tracks of shrews and penguins or the art of Audubon and taxidermy dioramas, and it's a lot of fun to get caught in the flow of his associative trains of thought and the unplumbable depths of his knowledge that spans Los Angeles's history as a riverine landscape to Melville's travel journals to personal experience in Antartica.
This book makes me so happy, too! Because there are kit foxes in Bakersfield and cactus parasites that dyed the British army's coats a brilliant carmine -- our world is one on which humans and nonhumans are firmly enmeshed and we can delight in that instead of defining as nature that which most of us will never see or encounter and thinking it is inevitably ruined when we get to know it.
November 7, 2021
Charles Hood is the one nature writer that is worth binge-reading. This book is an impassioned defense of less-than-pristine nature, including all those neglected, scrubby, coyote-haunted parts of California that get dismissed as ugly or worthless. There is a sense of keen attention and hilarity even in the more somber pieces. This is not a book about escaping from the sprawl to seek 'unspoiled' places. It's about the hidden beauty that bunches up against all that sprawl, occupying vacant lots and abandoned buildings. But Hood also includes a rallying cry to seek out threatened species and places before they are gone: "Go before the border closes, the crevasse widens, the herd thins, the engine stalls, or the pestilence spreads." Words to live by.
January 2, 2022
A wonderful set of nature essays that are both humorous and interesting. The author is an avid birder and hiker as well. Lots of vivid descriptions of California nature and unlikely places to see interesting wildlife.
May 14, 2022
Fantastic essays that are full of hope and joy.
Want to read
November 8, 2021"LA Times," November 7, 2021
July 4, 2022
Funny, thoughtful. Vocabulary. Great gift from Julia. Makes me homesick for California, esp. the desert and the water.
February 17, 2022
This was one of my favorite books in a long time. It's just so smart and big-hearted without being obvious or embarrassing about it. Charles Hood is a SoCal English teacher and award-winning poet who moonlights as a nature field guide writer. This series of linked essays is all about nature, and perhaps more specifically how the natural world has formed and engaged and enthralled and healed and affected him—and, in the end, how much sheer joy it has afforded him. Whether he's waxing poetic about his backyard on walks with his dog during the pandemic shutdown ("I like this desert. I feel at home here. On paper, this does not seem inevitable. In fact, on paper, my local plant list sounds like a salad only the devil would eat: bitterbrush, burro weed, creosote, jumping cholla, Mormon tea. If we take away the labels, the plants themselves must be praised for their tenacity and admired for their small, miraculous, life-affirming flowers"), geeking out on the region's palm trees and prickly pears (so much history!), or confessing his helpless love of natural history dioramas in spite of their inaccuracies and ideological pitfalls ("They are useful, attractive, artistic, but also colonial and limiting and laden with daddy issues. I love them, but that love rides in a chariot pulled by the twin dogs of shame and doubt"), he encounters the world with such openness, curiosity, and humor. His allusions surprise and delight; the memoir elements are deftly balanced with a resolutely outward focus. He explores so many different ways to engage with nature, and I enjoyed the chapters on extreme listers, those who keep nature journals, and the last, which details a whale watching excursion. I defy you to read the last pages of that chapter (and the book) and not feel your heart swell to bursting with fullness. This world has problems, yes, very many and quite grave, but there is still so much abundance and beauty—and I, for one, very much needed that reminder.
June 2, 2022
Bought this on a whim when we went on our little vacation a couple weeks ago, purely on the title and the blurb; "Hood is the love child of Rebecca solnit and Edward Abbey, assuming such a child had been raised in an art colony by demented garden gnomes". A multi-hyphenate artistic guy. He stopped counting bird species when his life list got to 5,000 (get to work Mark :) ) and then he started on mammals and is approaching 1,000. This was laugh-out loud funny with topics mostly set in Southern California, ranging from ; The Lure of the List, his obsession with Nature Journals, the history of Palm Trees in CA and many more. My favorite of the year, even though, the book I read after this, was The Stranger and was also a 5-star read.
Book Quotes:
It has a bad rap, the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is the place where old sofas crawl to the ends of dirt roads to die. Fame touches the Antelope Valley rarely, though Tom Selleck was part owner of a shopping plaza and came out to cut the ribbon.
To think about the urban jungle is to admit that humans destroy habitat but humans also create habitat, and to discount what I call blended ecologies (part-indigenous, part-cloud cuckoo land) would be like refusing to eat Tex-Mex because it lacks haute cuisine pedigree.
We may ignore water, take it for granted, think we have run out of things to do with it. Yet someday in America our rivers will remember where they came from, where they used to go, what things they still know how to do. Water will come again.
my childhood keeps trying to send me memories, but they all burn up, coming through the atmosphere. When was the first time I went to the natural history museum, the zoo, the pet store, the La Brea Tar Pits? Can't be sure.
Book Quotes:
It has a bad rap, the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is the place where old sofas crawl to the ends of dirt roads to die. Fame touches the Antelope Valley rarely, though Tom Selleck was part owner of a shopping plaza and came out to cut the ribbon.
To think about the urban jungle is to admit that humans destroy habitat but humans also create habitat, and to discount what I call blended ecologies (part-indigenous, part-cloud cuckoo land) would be like refusing to eat Tex-Mex because it lacks haute cuisine pedigree.
We may ignore water, take it for granted, think we have run out of things to do with it. Yet someday in America our rivers will remember where they came from, where they used to go, what things they still know how to do. Water will come again.
my childhood keeps trying to send me memories, but they all burn up, coming through the atmosphere. When was the first time I went to the natural history museum, the zoo, the pet store, the La Brea Tar Pits? Can't be sure.
August 12, 2022
I thought from the title that this was going to be a book about foraging for wild food in the desert. It wasn't that. It was a collection of essays by a birder/hippie guy who is a professor at a small college in what most people would consider the most barren and least interesting part of the California desert. He's not just a birder; he's also an animal spotter and has lists of all kinds of animals that he has seen, but he is not as rigorous as some of his fellow hobbyists, and his slightly imperfect dedication to his hobby is part of his charm. He takes his nature as he finds it - rare birds in sewage ponds, animals in his back yard, and in other improbable places scarred with the ugly mark of humanity. It's not that nature is ugly, it's more that he finds beautiful nature in places that others may find ugly, but that he still sees as interesting and beautiful. I recently read and enjoyed another book that has a similar perspective on nature - Wild Souls by Emma Marris, in which the author points out, as does Mr. Hood, that there is really no such thing as pure nature any longer. Every place on the planet bears the mark of human impact, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just how nature works and in accepting that we are part of nature, we have to also love nature in its adulterated impure form because that's the only kind of nature that we have any more.
February 26, 2022
This is wonderful book...a look at nature around the world...from plants to birds to wild cats to whales...and much more. Historical detail and literary allusions! All done with a keen sense of humor.
I highly recommend!
I highly recommend!
May 20, 2022
Really wonderful! I wasn’t sure what to expect, since I picked up this book based on the title alone, and ended up being delighted by the whole thing. Especially the essay on NHM dioramas, which made me feel like the author has looked into my soul and written every thought I’ve ever had on the subject. Smart, laugh-out-loud, thought-provoking, unexpected nature essays. Recommended!
January 7, 2022
3 1/2 stars, actually, for a stream-of-consciousness revelation on the nature of "ugly nature", that works most of the time. There are some lovely literary passages, balanced out by some that seem to just take space on the page.
Read
August 11, 2022This is wonderful book...a look at nature around the world...from plants to birds to wild cats to whales...and much more. All done with a keen sense of humor.
January 7, 2025
When I read the first chapter, which was fantastic, I thought this was going to be a five-star book. And on balance it was a good book. I liked The Lure of the List, Nature Journals for Fun and Profit, Love and Sex in Natural History Dioramas.
I thought Hood had some ideas about restoration ecology were not necessarily unique, they were thoughts I have myself had, and have seen in technical publications. What was so enjoyable however was the way he articulated those ideas in a succinct and vivid manner.
There are lots of book reviews I read that describe a book as funny that will end up being lame when I get around to reading. I found Hood’s writing to actually be playful, delightful, and humorous.
With all that said, Hood sort of sabotaged the book in a couple ways in my opinion.
Firstly, the title and the first chapter give you an expectation that this will be about species that are overlooked or thought poorly of. I think that theme, if I’m being charitable, only very weakly ties the essays together. More realistically this is just a collection of nature writings from a quirky English professor.
Secondly, the writing is lazy in some spots. I’m thinking specifically of Fifty Dreams for Forty Monkeys. I’m sure if you asked him, he’d have his reasons, but as a reader it is not obvious why he is writing in such a staccato structure, and it was not enjoyable to read. There were other instances where it seemed like Hood was trying out some cutesy creative writing exercise that readers are a captive audience to and (most? I don’t know this may not apply to some more sophisticated readers) are not going to appreciate themselves.
Thirdly, some of Hood’s little political quips, although honestly relatively subdued, took me out of the otherwise enjoyable reading experience. I didn’t pick up this book to read about Trump, immigration, colonialism, etc. Even if I did want to read about those topics, I’d think they’d deserved more attention than the little one, two, maybe three sentence diversions I commonly read which seemed intended as inside jokes to the already converted. His best course of action would have been to have some restraint regarding his personal feeling about such things and just focus on nature writing. Hood is of course free to publish any sort of writing he likes, but I’m under no obligation to like it and mind you, I don’t enjoy it because it is tiresome and banal, not because I have any sympathy for Trump, xenophobia, colonialism, etc (inoculating myself from any misinterpretation of this critique as evidence of me being some crypto-reactionary or whatever).
Still, these issues not withstanding, I could see myself buying this book. It motivated me to take my journaling more seriously and appreciate some of the commonplace nature I observe everyday (even if I thought Hood could have had more faithfully written around this theme), and I definitely think reading this book is time well-spent for anyone who enjoys quirky nature writing.
I thought Hood had some ideas about restoration ecology were not necessarily unique, they were thoughts I have myself had, and have seen in technical publications. What was so enjoyable however was the way he articulated those ideas in a succinct and vivid manner.
There are lots of book reviews I read that describe a book as funny that will end up being lame when I get around to reading. I found Hood’s writing to actually be playful, delightful, and humorous.
With all that said, Hood sort of sabotaged the book in a couple ways in my opinion.
Firstly, the title and the first chapter give you an expectation that this will be about species that are overlooked or thought poorly of. I think that theme, if I’m being charitable, only very weakly ties the essays together. More realistically this is just a collection of nature writings from a quirky English professor.
Secondly, the writing is lazy in some spots. I’m thinking specifically of Fifty Dreams for Forty Monkeys. I’m sure if you asked him, he’d have his reasons, but as a reader it is not obvious why he is writing in such a staccato structure, and it was not enjoyable to read. There were other instances where it seemed like Hood was trying out some cutesy creative writing exercise that readers are a captive audience to and (most? I don’t know this may not apply to some more sophisticated readers) are not going to appreciate themselves.
Thirdly, some of Hood’s little political quips, although honestly relatively subdued, took me out of the otherwise enjoyable reading experience. I didn’t pick up this book to read about Trump, immigration, colonialism, etc. Even if I did want to read about those topics, I’d think they’d deserved more attention than the little one, two, maybe three sentence diversions I commonly read which seemed intended as inside jokes to the already converted. His best course of action would have been to have some restraint regarding his personal feeling about such things and just focus on nature writing. Hood is of course free to publish any sort of writing he likes, but I’m under no obligation to like it and mind you, I don’t enjoy it because it is tiresome and banal, not because I have any sympathy for Trump, xenophobia, colonialism, etc (inoculating myself from any misinterpretation of this critique as evidence of me being some crypto-reactionary or whatever).
Still, these issues not withstanding, I could see myself buying this book. It motivated me to take my journaling more seriously and appreciate some of the commonplace nature I observe everyday (even if I thought Hood could have had more faithfully written around this theme), and I definitely think reading this book is time well-spent for anyone who enjoys quirky nature writing.
January 24, 2022
I really enjoyed this collection of essays about the interactions between humans and nature -- and ultimately about the weird beauty in our world. This author seems like the kind of person I love to meet -- with strange, deep fascinations (e.g. illustrated nature guides) and stories to tell about everything. It's funny, too.
November 12, 2023
Plenty of good writing in here, but the author's megalomania ruins it. (Did get a little better after the first couple of chapters.) I could see some goofy teen idolizing this, but yikes. What an unpleasant character.
February 3, 2024
For those who love California and all its diverse nature - this book is for you. Filled with fascinating tidbits from whales to the color red, Charles Hood keeps the reader entertained while expanding appreciation for the richness of the California landscape.
October 6, 2025
I loved how this book started, especially the point, “nature is not above us, separate but better. It is us- weeds, warts, and all.”
The rest felt like I was reading a book by an English professor and not a nature enthusiast (allegedly, the author is both).
The rest felt like I was reading a book by an English professor and not a nature enthusiast (allegedly, the author is both).
February 7, 2023
One of the funniest book I've read in a while. And inspiring in a way I didn't expect. I'm going to start writing my list of people I think should read it!
dnf
September 4, 2023Insomnia read, might come back
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews