Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge discussion

A book that features birding

This is soooo timely! One of my fellow IRL book club members is a birder and I have been dying to tell her there is a book entitled Birding with Benefits by Sarah T. Dubb so I can ask her if that's true! LOL 😋

Lists that might help:
Birds and Birding
Ornithologists/Ornithology & Birdwatching in Fiction
Birding Big Year
Best Books for Birders
Young Ornithologists: Bird Watching, Falconry, etc. (Juvenile)
Big Year Birding List

Listopia: A book that features birding

I think A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever could fit (or any book in the Field Guide to Dumb Birds series). I haven't read it yet, but it does have some information in a humorous way.A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever

I'm going with Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper. He was in a viral video where he was bird-watching at a park and asked a woman to leash her dog. She threw a fit, said she was calling the police on him, "and I'll be sure to tell them you're Black." Fortunately he filmed it so the police knew her version was a lie.

I'm buying it in hardback, because he should get something out of that crappy experience.

Laura Ruth wrote: "I'm going with Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper. He was in a viral video where he was bird-watching at a park and asked..."

I read that one a few years ago and it was very well-written. I hope you enjoy it.

Laura Ruth and I are on the same wavelength!!! This is what I had planned to post:

Those of you who live new NYC may remember the extremely privileged older white woman walking her dog in Central Park who went absolutely bonkers when she saw a Black man in the park, she called the cops and everything (all while practically strangling her poor dog). That man was Christian Cooper, and he later wrote Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, and I've been wanting to read it. So maybe I'll read that.

If for some reason I cannot get that, I might read:
What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World
or
The Genius of Birds


All three have been on my TBR for a while and I'm excited at the push to finally read one.

I'm a birder myself and have What It's Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing—What Birds Are Doing, and Why on my TBR. I might consider finding some fiction on birding, though, depending what mood I'm in.

I like nature writing so I'm sure I can find something. I enjoyed Goshawk Summer: A New Forest Season Unlike Any Other and The Circling Sky: On Nature and Belonging in an English Forest which are both about nature near where I live.

How much can I twist this to let me read The Bardic Voices Series by Mercedes Lackey? The books are all named after birds and I believe the bird naming theme runs throughout the stories themselves.


The Lark and the Wren
The Robin & The Kestrel
A Cast of Corbies
The Eagle & the Nightingales
Four & Twenty Blackbirds


I also totally forgot I was looking at The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. This also would fill in at least one other prompt with The Wild Robot Escapes or The Wild Robot Protects (2026 Popsugar Challenge 18: A love story that defies social boundaries, in that Roz loves and cares for her ward. There are more forms of love than just romantic).

Would Migrations work for this?

I am joining Laura Ruth and Nadine and reading Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Thanks for informing me about this book. It sounds right up my alley.

I'm currently reading Tourist Season by Brynne Weaver and while it's dark romance with a lot of trigger warnings that MMC says that he is into birding and the FMC has trained a raven as her pet.

Sarah wrote: "Would Migrations work for this?"

I was thinking about this book fitting this category - I would say yes.... I loved this book FWIW.

Summer of Salt takes place on an island with a rare bird that attracts birders to visit every year. It’s a magical realism story