Read The Overstory by Richard Powers ★★★★☆ 📚
Several different stories & ideas around the importance of trees to the world weave together. Some resonated with me more than others.
Many of the ideas are better known now than when the book was published.
The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story
This is a good story, it might change part of your mind, unfortunately like everything else it is more complicated.
Read The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood ★★★☆☆ 📚
My theory is that hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational superstition—broken mirrors and so forth—hope’s not based on any kind of logic, it’s just unfettered optimism, grounded in nothing but faith in things beyond our control.’
Sometimes uncomfortably gripping. A touch of The Secret History.
Read: The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey ★★★★☆ 📚
Set in the 15th century, a priest tries to solve a “murder”. More about the priest than the murder. Told in reverse it revels his character & the story in an interesting way. Hypocrisy, superstition & morality.
Read: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel ★★★★☆ 📚
Gentle SciFi. Some of the characters from The Glass Hotel appear.
When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?
And
What if it always is the end of the world?
Read: The Drowned by John Banville ★★★★☆ 📚
A who done it, that doesn’t focus of the crime or solution. Follows on from the previous one in a series, nothing is really clear, characters uncertain about most things. Lots of moral ambiguity.
Read: Groundbreakers- The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar by Chantal Lyons ★★★★☆ 📚
The author’s fascination with boar & belief in the good they could do to the environment doesn’t stop her reporting on both points of view. The difference between European acceptance & Uk fears is telling.
Read: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ★★★★★ 📚
A book around a famous (in the USA?) play I’ve never heard of. Compelling & mostly comfortable. Laugh out loud sometimes too.
Read Why we Die by Mick Herron
Read: The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo ★★★★☆ 📚
I exist as either a small canid with thick fur, pointed ears, and neat to black feet, or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men
Had be believing in a main character that was a fox god. Told from 2 engaging points of view, the fox & an aging detective in 1908 Manchuria. In part mystery story but a lot more fun.
Read Orbital By Samantha Harvey ★★★★☆ 📚
Six astronauts and cosmonauts watch the earth roll 16 times in 24 hours. Plotless, thoughts ,observations & meditations.
yet hard to believe in anything but that blackness, which is alive, and breathing and beckoning. If Nell had ever been afraid of nothingness, once she was in it she was consoled by it inexplicably and yearned
