“The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes,” Adam Nicolson writes. “No need for binoculars or special stalking skills: go to the rocks and the living will say hello.” In Life Between the Tides, Nicolson writes about rockpools and the flurry of marine life within them with a poet’s sense of wonder. The author has created his own tidal pool along the coast of Scotland, which soon fills with sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs, anemones, and more. Great writers and thinkers appear in allusions and ripples of his musings: Virginia Woolf and her experimental novel The Waves, and T.S. Eliot and his own Massachusetts rock pool, among others. —Laura Zornosa