Read: The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond with Forests and Nature
by Peter Wohlleben, Jane Billinghurst(Translator)

★★★★☆ 📚

New science about trees back up with references mixed with personal rumination and experiences. The good trees do for us and the planet and the bad we do to them.

Some really fascinating snippets about tree biology too:

The trick to living another couple of decades or even centuries is to compost yourself. Fungi that enter via a wound in the tree convert the wood into a sort of humus as they eat their way through the tree, creating debris that is soft, crumbly, and moist. Now the tree can grow inner roots into this “soil” and reabsorb nutrients it stored in earlier years in its growth rings.

Read: Pew by Catherine Lacey ★★★★☆ 📚
The main character has little memory and their sex, colour, age and origin are all in doubt. They are discovered in church and meet the locals, good folks to their own thinking, without talking Pew revels them to us. We never find out about Pew and the ending is ambiguous.

But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time

The book begins with a quote from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – which I’ve not read for a long time.

Read: Burning Your Own by Glenn Patterson ★★★★☆ 📚 1969, Mal is 10. I’d have been 11. Mal lives in a estate in Northern Ireland. Great, horrible, atmosphere. Football with his pals and building bonfires with civil rights and politics in the background.

Read: The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig ★★★☆☆ 📚 a take on “Strangers on a Train”. This kept me turning the pages but spelled things out a bit too much. I also guessed what was going on even before the big hint.

Read: so you’ve been shamed by Jon Ronson ★★★★☆ 📚
I think I must have read excerpts of a lot of this over the years since it was published. Still quite interesting although I kept hearing Louis Theroux in my head.