The birds are going crazy and the days are getting longer and warmer. Every morning it’s a tiny bit easier to drag yourself out of bed, and in a few more days it will officially be spring. This means it’s time to go outside! You don’t have to travel deep into the countryside and commune with nature if you don’t want to (though if you do want to, we certainly won’t stop you). Staying in the city is just fine. But leave your house. Look at some nice buildings and at the blossom on the trees. Breathe the air! Here are ten books, poems and sites to help you on your way.    

“NOW” BY CAMELLIA STAFFORD

In Letters to the Sky, Camellia Stafford wanders round London in various states of heartbreak and happiness. “Dear Camden” is a love song to the places of her youth: Camden Market, Kentish Town, Portobello Road. In “Corsage” the streets of Shoreditch remind her of where she used to walk with her ex. But the best one to read now is "Now", in which Stafford finds inspiration in being outside even when it's slightly too cold to be comfortable: 

Even if the wind does lift the corners

of this page, unsettle my hair,

the words are here on the bee wing tips, the confection of baby's breath.

“WORLD OF WONDER”

Want to know more about axolotls? Of course you do. Head over to The Butter, sister site of The Toast, where Aimee Nezhukumatathil will tell you about the cartoon-like creature that has the 'best little smile of all the smiley animals with no bones'. This axolotl info is part of Nezhukumatathil's series “World of Wonder”, which brings you a new strange/cute/dangerous plant or animal every fortnight. Highly recommended: the fairy penguin.

EDGELANDS BY PAUL FARLEY AND MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS

There's the city and there's the countryside... and then there are all the places in between that you never normally think about or visit. Unless you're the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, who travel around England visiting the gravel pits, sewage farms, landfill sites and canals that they find in the zones between city and country. The result of their travels is Edgelands, a book of essays that makes the case for the ugly, the smelly and the strange as places of "possibility, mystery, beauty". 

THE NIGHT CLIMBERS OF CAMBRIDGE BY WHIPPLESNAITH

The Night Climbers of Cambridge, published in 1937 under the pseudonym "Whipplesnaith", is a book about climbing on the roofs of Cambridge’s chapels and colleges. The climbing has to be done at night, since university authorities do not approve of students clambering around many feet above the ground, with nothing but their wits to stop them falling. "No one would have it otherwise," writes Whipplesnaith, since "official disapproval is the sap which gives roof-climbing its sweetness". Chapter by chapter, Whipplesnaith directs the reader to the best buildings for climbing in the city, interspersing this advice with accounts of climbers’ escapades. The best thing about the book is its black and white photos, which show men in oddly formal dress clinging to drainpipes, balancing on ledges and hanging off walls. They look utterly absurd.

“DETROIT LIVES” BY NEIL TA

Neil Ta's spookily beautiful photography series "Detroit Lives" shows the abandoned houses, factories and churches of a city which for most of the 20th century was one of the centres of industry in the United States, home to its biggest car manufacturers. Like Edgelands, Ta's photographs recreate decay and disuse as presence rather than absence.

“DEAR EILEEN” BY EILEEN MILES

The Letter Q is an anthology of queer writers' letters to their younger selves. In Eileen Myles's contribution the going outside is more metaphorical than architectural, with Myles describing a world warmer, wider and brighter than the one inhabited by her teenage self. "The world is open to you, unbelievably," she says. And later: "Your joy, like a dog, wants to go for a walk."

OPEN CITY BY TEJU COLE

The narrator of Teju Cole's debut novel is Julius, who came to America from Nigeria as a teenager and now, in his early 30s, is about to qualify as a psychiatrist. But the novel's main character is the open city of its title: New York, a place shaped by centuries of immigration. Julius is kind of chilling – so reserved, controlled and knowledgeable that he seems more machine than human – but he's also a wonderful guide. Starting out from his apartment in Morningside Heights, he walks through Manhattan until late into the night, expert at getting strangers to tell him their life stories and alive to the tensions and marvels of this 'strangest of islands'.

LANDMARKS BY ROBERT MACFARLANE

Muxy. Didder. Roarie-bummlers. No, we didn't know what these were either, until we read Robert MacFarlane's new book Landmarks. As in his previous works, MacFarlane rambles around Britain – but here he adds a glossary at the end of each chapter, containing the loveliest and most expressive landscape words ever to have been forgotten. Two of our favourites are 'grimlins', the hours in midsummer where dusk becomes dawn (the word comes from Orkney, where in June and July it hardly gets dark at all), and 'zwer', the sound made by the wings of a group of partridge taking flight.

“THE IMMORTAL HORIZON” BY LESLIE JAMISON

The Barkley Marathons is somewhere between a fun run and a treasure hunt, except there's very little fun involved and the treasure is worthless. Every year, in late March or early April, participants run a 20-mile circuit in Tennessee either five or three times. On their way, they search for a specified number of books, and each time they find one they tear out the page corresponding to their race number. The track is really, really difficult: the 100-mile version involves a cumulative elevation gain almost twice as high as Everest, and the terrain is studded with thorny plants that rip your skin apart. Of the 800 runners who have taken part in the longer version since 1986, only 14 have finished within the cut-off time (60 hours). The person in charge of the race is called Lazarus Lake; his name for the Marathons is "The Race That Eats Its Young". Who would take part in such a deranged and dangerous enterprise? Leslie Jamison's essay "The Immortal Horizon" tries to find the answer.

THINK OF A CITY

OK, OK, we know: sometimes spring is terrible. It rains and it's cold and windy, and the best thing to do is to stay indoors. When that happens, you can stave off your disappointment by taking a trip to Think of a City, where dozens of artists have contributed cityscapes that add up to one imaginary, magical city where every street looks completely different.