I don’t often recommend books—well, at least not on a weekly basis —but I’ve just polished off one that ranks among the best books I’ve read in the past several years. It’s a Pulitzer winner (when I’m trawling for fiction I check the Booker and Pulitzer winners): The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers (see Wikipedia entry here). I recently finished another fat book of his, The Time of Our Singing (2003), and while it was engrossing and worth reading, I was somewhat put off by Power’s use of language that seemed show-offy, as well as the emphasis on music, which made me (a classical-music ignoramus) unable to fully appreciate a lot of the allusions.
This time the book is not about music but about trees. Well, about how trees and the desire to preserve them affects the lives of nine people. Some of the characters work on trees, like a biologist who discovers how trees communicate with one another (I think she’s modeled on Suzanne Simard), while another man, a Sikh computer programmer (they are all in North America), has his tree encounter by falling out of one, paralyzing him from the waist down. Most of the others are deeply into ecology, motivated by knowing that trees are essential for our well being and the health of the planet, and are being cut down at an incredible rate. All but one of the chracters (the computer guy) become eco-activists, chaining themselves to trees and, ultimately, committing crimes against tree-cutting firms, who they see as evil. The stories have a lot of sadness, but also a lot of joy, and you follow the characters from youth through old age: the narrative is chronological but jumps from person to person. A sense of doom hangs over the whole story, with repeated references to our future demise via global warming and loss of natural habitat.
The title surely refers to the view that trees are more important than transitory humans (humans are surely the “understory”), and that the wanton cropping of forests is immoral. That is the “truth” of this book, but it’s not a universal truth, as many clearly don’t agree with it. But if you think that humans are exacerbating global warming and creating a potential catastrophe, as I do, then yes, that warning is real. But we don’t have to learn it from this book; scientists have already told us that.
Powers still plays with language in a way that’s occasionally irritating, but the story is mesmerizing—a page-turner, even though it’s 500 pages long. Here are a few plaudits from the book’s Amazon page, just to let you know that others find it equally impressive. And remember, it got a Pulitzer, which is usually, though not inevitably, a guarantee of literary quality. (I find the Bookers a more reliable guide to quality.)
“It changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it…. It changed how I see things and that’s always, for me, a mark of a book worth reading.”
― Barack Obama“The best book I’ve read in 10 years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet.”
― Emma Thompson“Monumental… The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review“The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period.”
― Ann Patchett“I’ll never see a tree the same way again.”
― Louis Sachar, New York Times“I’ve read a lot of good books, but the last truly great book I read was The Overstory, by Richard Powers.”
― Ed Helms, New York Times Book Review
And yes, The Overstory may change your life by affecting how you view trees, and that is reason enough to read it. That, of course, is not a “truth”, but a “way of feeling” that’s one of the reason to read books like this.
You can get this big book for only eleven bucks on Amazon, or thirteen for the hardback. It would make a wonderful holiday gift for your friends who love nature.
Finally, as always, I proffer this not just as a recommendation, but also as a solicitation. What books have you read lately that you’d recommend to other readers? I get many good recommendations from posts like these, so don’t be hesitant to tell us what you like.
The cover:
I also am a big fan of The Overstory. In my universe, Trump’s removal of protections for the old trees in the Tongass National Forest, and old growth in our National Forests in general, is his greatest crime. Sorry, it’s impossible to talk about forest ecology without invoking him.
Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (I)
Ersatz Religion : The Gnostic Mass Movements of Our Time (II)
Eric Voegelin
1968, 1997
Regenery Press, Chicago;
Washington D.C.
Thanks, reserved it at Victoria (TX) public library.
I am in general a fan of Powers’s books, tho some are distinctly better than others. Being a classical music fan and (very) former physicist, I loved “The time of our singing”. With great music and wormholes, what’s not to like? Powers always inserts ideas from science into his books. “The echo maker” draws on ecology and neuroscience. Well recommended, too.
+1
My reading current reading project is a survey of American novels, to determine my favorite American novelist (all my favorites are British). The best book I have read so far in this survey is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (best known for Middlesex). It feels like a collaboration between Ian McEwan and the filmmaker Whit Stilman. The protagonist is an Ivy League literature major trying to make sense of modern romance. She loves classic marriage-plot novels, but feels ambivalent about whether they have any useful insights in navigating her relationships. I highly recommend it, especially to fans of Jane Austen.
Eugenides is one of the best living American novelists, in my opinion. He’s not exactly prolific, but what he lacks in quantity he makes up in quality. All three of his novels are on my top 20 list.
I’m currently reading If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares, about the potential danger of artificial superintelligence. I’m only halfway through at the moment, but can confidently recommend it, as it has a lot to say, and says it very well.
If I’m not mistaken, I found out about this book the last time we had a book thread here on this website.
It’s very good.
OK both of you. I read a review of that, you’ve sold me. (Haven’t seen you here for a while Robert, I used to like your youtube channel years ago.)
D.A.
NYC
Two Powers books that combine music and biology are “The Goldbug Variations” (1991) and “Orfeo” (2014). Both are very good.
+mucho!
The Overstory is now only $2.99 for the Kindle version.
I read his Echo Maker which I thought was really good. Also enjoyed Galatea 2.2.
I recently read the entire Barefoot Gen comics about the Hiroshima bombing and aftermath and it is fantastic. I then continued with The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett Graff, and oral history of the making of the atom bomb. Also very good; I listened to it and the audiobook has a cast of readers and that worked out really, really well.
Well, if it’s fat novels you’re interested in, three that I intend to reread one day are “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen, “Rabbit Angstrom” by John Updike (an omnibus edition of the four Rabbit novels), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon.
As for not-quite-so-fat novels, I can recommend “Lake Success” by Gary Shteyngart, and the Booker Prize–winning “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty, which has one of the funniest opening lines I’ve ever read: “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.”
I second Kavalier and Clay, the only one of those I’ve read.
I have read The Corrections, and I liked it. I also read Run Rabbit Run from the rabbit series. That one I liked up to a point but did not finish since the main character pissed me off so much I just wanted to smack him.
But maybe we have similar tastes? A while ago I was on a bit of a horror novel binge, and read Carrion Comfort by Simmons. It’s about a small group of what I would call Mind Vampires, the havoc they cause, the murderous in-fighting among them, and a group of ordinary people trying to stop them. I especially loved the ending. It would make a good movie or series.
Dan Simmons is the author who wrote the sci fi classic Hyperion, and I’m finally reading that now.
Kavalier & Clay and The Sellout have been on my wish list for years and I need to get to them.
The whole Hyperion quartet is impossibly amazing.
Seconded.
Run Rabbit Run and the Corrections were both excellent. I’ll keep an eye out for Hyperion. thx Mark,
D.A.
NYC
I should read Kavalier & Clay, as Chabon’s short story, “The God of Dark Laughter” absolutely knocked me out and left me staring.
I just read The Corrections for the first time. It was a fantastic read. I was sorry to see it end.
I too have a couple of shorter novels to recommend:
My Sister the Serial Killer was wickedly funny.
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm is a post-apocalyptic SF novel. While it has its flaws, it was a wonderful work of imagination.
Finally, The Monster of Florence is a non-fiction account of a series of murders in Italy that had all sorts of fascinating side stories and shady officials.
One of my favorite reads was called “This Thing of Darkness,” by Harry Thompson. It’s a loosely fictionalized version of Darwin’s trip on the Beagle, but the key character is Robert Fitzroy, captain of the ship. I say “loosely fictionalized” as the conversations between them are obviously contrived, the but other facts of the book are true. It’s a riveting, tragic story. When my husband and I ventured through the Drake Passage and Patagonia, we reread it and it’s just as good if not better. An interesting element is that Fitzroy suffered from what we’d today call bipolar disorder (hence, “this thing of darkness”), and would often hide in his cabin for days or weeks. But his crew were so devoted to him that they covered for him. The author Thompson, an award-winning BBC producer, also suffers from BPD, hence his interest in Fitzroy. It was an award-winning bestseller in Europe. You can’t get hard copies in the US but a kindle version is available on Amazon. (In a typical pathetic move by US publishers, they decided that American audiences wouldn’t understand the original title, so they renamed it “To the Edge of the World” 🙄.) The link is here: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=to+the+edge+of+the+world&crid=2HFKVUG66R9WT&sprefix=to+the+edge+of%2Caps%2C141&ref=nb_sb_ss_p13n-expert-pd-ops-ranker_3_14
From your description, it sounds like really good historical fiction. If you’d be interested in flat-out fantasy based on Darwin’s voyage and discoveries, an unknown but excellent duology by Sean Russell, World Without End and Sea Without a Shore fits the bill.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’m not usually a fantasy reader (read: never), but I’m intrigued. And you can get both books in one combined version, called Moontide and Magic Rise: https://www.amazon.com/Moontide-Magic-Rise-ebook/dp/B074LTLP23/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2APJ3FL0ZZSZU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.2KiMH6DVpbTKdKmB4VskdTboD0s4e8JkDIsTdZM_DbD3LGaKhoPogtnHXdMHyTzZahFgmiHruPow09491dUjJmmiKrcqivCJzf3MmE7IPRE.rfiAL8VuWhp8U-w8529zDlCzVrkbPWA-RWMHUrKNI3I&dib_tag=se&keywords=sean+russell+moontide+and+magic+rise&qid=1762953232&sprefix=sean+russell+moontide+and+magic+rise%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-1#averageCustomerReviewsAnchor
I love Richard Powers, but liked Orfeo, The Goldbug Variations, and The Prisoner’s Dilemma much better than the Overstory, which I found a bit didactic. I used to read all the Booker shortlist, but I’ve been disappointed in most of the books in the last couple of years.
Hi Merilee:
Would you be so kind as to expound on the disappointment? Are they just dull? Do they mostly consist of woke whining (which is my impression of most very recent literature, especially award winners and nominees, my experience of the little into which I’ve dipped my toe, and my rationale for not sampling more of it)? Or something else? Thanks!
Mark, the disappointment seems to have started maybe 5 or so years ago when the Booker Prize was opened up to non-British books in English, And also the International Prize. This may just be coincidental, as I do like many American, Canadian, and Aussie writers. You may be onto something with the “woke whining”…but also a lot of really ugly stories.I’m thinking of The Vegetarian and A Little Life, both of which I found hard to stomach (and I don’t have a weak stomach…) As I mentioned earlier, until fairly recently I read all 6 short-listers plus all 6 international shortlisters, but just have not wanted to waste my time on so many of the newer ones, especially when I have SO many better unread books on my shelves and on my kindle.
On a completely different note, I have been catching up on some of my unread David Quammen essays. He is a fantastically smart and witty nature writer. And some novellas by Richard Ford, he of the superb Frank Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, etc.) So many books, so little wakeful energy🤓 And then there are New Yorkers, Atlantics, and Harper’s….
Just looked at my Excel spreadsheet of books read, and I seet that I read the new Booker winner, David Szaly’s, All That Man Is in 2017 and that I gave it high marks. Other than that I don’t remember anything about it, but on that basis, I ordered his new book, Flesh, on kindle.
Interesting. Thanks for the information!
Most of my fiction reading is science fiction and fantasy, and I won’t pick up anything after 2012 unless it’s part of a series I’ve already started (e.g. The Expanse), or an author I already trust (e.g. Tim Powers). And what good stuff I have found has not been nominated for or won any awards! 🙂
You’re very welcome. Unfortunately I am not a fan of sci-fi or fantasy.🥺
Have read it. . . and come away with even increased admiration for the author and his work.
A local was famous for the first treesitting protest in 1978 or so goes the claim.
Googke:
“The New Zealand Stephen King was a prominent conservationist known for his leadership in protesting the logging of the Pureora Forest and establishing the Native Forest Restoration Trust.”
“the 1978 Pureora Forest protest where he spent a week occupying a tōtara tree to stop logging.”
Unfortunately, Mr King was good for trees,
but for children, a bit of a sleaze.
Where I live we have a lot of regeneration of big native trees and they are life savers I kid you not.
I don’t have any deep meaningful book recommendations,
But if you want a filler, light, a bit of math comedy and some scary bits.
“Humble Pi”
Matt Parker.
I can no longer count the number of great book recommendations I got here. I’d just like to mention two non-fiction ones that were fabulous, Empire of Pain (the Sackler family and the oxytocine story, one of Jerry’s recommendations) and Fiasco, on the Iraq war.
One non fiction book I read during the past year that I would highly recommend is Musa al-Gharbi’s We have Never Been Woke. There is much more in it than the title suggests, and one should not let oneself be put off by the boring undergrad level introductory chapter on sociological methodology. It’s a very data driven attempt to make sociological sense of social justice movements through US history (with a chapter on each one) and comes to somewhat provocative, for the most part at least semi-convincing conclusions that have some overlap with both some of Thomas Sowell’s and some of Peter Turchin’s work.
Another non-fiction but much more personal book with somewhat related content from a completely different perspective is Rob Henderson’s mainly autobiographical Troubled, where he describes his journey as the child of a drug addict single mother who spent much of his childhood in foster care (reform badly needed in that system!), how he managed to extract himself from that milieu and the disconnect he felt with higher ed progressives when he ended up at university, as one of the disadvantaged people progressives ostensibly care about. I found this a painful read because of what Rob went through as a child and young adult and read it in instalments, but well worth the emotional effort in the end.
As a fan and amateur of classical music, I loved The Time of our Singing, although I found the moralizing and hand wringing a bit overdone. I usually dislike fiction books with an ecology topic (usually the authors haven’t done sufficient research), but as so many biologists here recommend Overstory, will give it a try.
Musa al Gharbi is excellent (though I’ve just seen him on Genspect interviews) and Rob Henderson is one fantastic intellectual.
D.A.
NYC
The Overstory is a wonderful read.
Powers’s most recent – Playground – really drew me in. A sympathetic (but critical) portrait of the life of a Silicon Valley magnate – at the culmination of his life’s work, and as he succumbs to Lewy Body dementia, he realizes what he’d foregone, in human relationships and in his relationship to the natural world.
Thanks for the reminder about Playground. I have it on kindle, as yet unread. Currently reading Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy and Yuval Harari’s Nexus.
I might also add the very interesting Fluke, by Brian Klaas.
I have been immersed in Roman history. Mary Beard’s magisterial SPQR, a sweeping overview, is also often finely detailed. Tom Holland’s translation of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars is a new rendition of one of my favourites, a gossipy, not always reliable, often hilarious, sometimes disturbing series of profiles. I read these books for pleasure, but the parallels with the current world-wide wave of Caesarism, so evident in the US, are striking.
A further thumbs up for ‘The Lives if the Caesars’. I hadn’t encountered previous translations but I found it very easy to read once I’d tuned into the structure.
Just to add thing into the mix, I can recommend ‘When we cease to understand the world’ by Benjamin Labatut. Interpolated fiction I’d call it. Concerning some of the brightest minds in science during the early 20th Century.
+1 on Mary Beard’s SPQR. I loved it.
Amazes me where you get the time, PCC(E). I too am retired but I almost never get around to novels*. My obsessions of science and politics and my terrible new twitter addiction keep me too busy!
D.A.
NYC
*Except Lionel Shriver’s novels.
James Wade – Narrow The Road
Taylor Brown – Gods of Howl Mountain
Robert Olmstead – Savage Country
Fantastic books, for those who like bleak American “Southern/Western” settings and beautiful “Cormac McCarthy esque” prose.
Would love any similar recommendations if anyone has them.
Excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers
~p.211 (ebook ; section Stop Sacrificing Virgins )
bold : Gnostic prison, Hermetic / dialectic (combine truth with abstraction), etc. noted by [] :
“We’re trapped. By social identity [ Gnostic prison ]. Even when there are big, huge truths staring us in . . .” He hears his peers jeering, Bias Boy. Well, no. Clearly not, or in-group realignment would never happen. Transformation of social identity.” [ Hermetic / Dialectic ]
“Does it?”
“Of course! Here in America, people went from believing that women are too frail to vote to having a major-party vice presidential candidate, in one lifetime. From Dred Scott to Emancipation in a few years. Children, foreigners, prisoners, women, blacks, the disabled and mentally ill: they’ve all gone from property to personhood. I was born at a time when the idea of a chimpanzee getting a hearing in a court of law seemed totally absurd. By the time you’re my age, we’ll wonder how we ever denied such animals their standing as intelligent creatures.” [ Dialectical transformation directed towards resolution/complete negation of contradiction at the End of History ; Hegel, Fukuyama ]
[…skipping…]
“I’d like to determine the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind . . .” [ Gnosis, Gnostic insight ]
“. . . while everyone else is still trying to stabilize in-group loyalties. Now we get somewhere. This could be a topic. With much more narrowing and definition. You could look at the next step in this same historical progression of consciousness.[ Gnostics such as Hegel, Marx, Marcuse, Deepak Chopra, constantly refer to some type of Ideal collective consciousness, the development of which improves at each turn of the dialectic ] Study those people who support a position that any reasonable person in our society thinks is crazy.”
“For instance?”
“We’re living at a time when claims are being made for a moral authority that lies beyond the human.” [ reunification of the fractured pieces into their completion as a whole, One, at the completion of History ]
[ end excerpt ]
Addendum :
There’s a straight line from the “People went from ..” section to :
Essay on Liberation
Herbert Marcuse
1969
Application of negative dialectics to existing society to Liberate the perfect society concealed within, by removal of its contradictory features.
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1969-essay-on-liberation.html
p. 236-237 print edition.
May I disrupt the novel rhythm and contemporary vibe and put in a plug for Elizabeth Bishop? The poems, of course, but her correspondence with Robert Lowell is also delightful.
+1
The first 2/3’s of Overstory is compelling and full of insights on trees, but the last third or so I found depressing and slow going because it deals more with the aftermath of some of the characters’ activities and the deterioration of other characters health.
For a fun, frivolous read: Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Plet, in which an octopus plays a major role in solving a mystery and reuniting a family.
A French novel describing the reaction of the church, politicians and business tycoons to a short document from a retired priest revealing an irrefutable proof of the existence of God – A Corner of the Veil, Laurence Cosse, has an appropriate ending.
Any book by Andrea Barrett. Ship Fever is a good start, and the many of the ones after that feature science done by women and recurring characters.
On the exact same topic, there is a 1972 book called “The Day the Sun Stood Still”, which contains three novellas, each treating the topic, “what would be the effects on society if god actually did show up and prove that he exists”. If you like this kind of thing, it’s the kind of thing you’ll like. Not the easiest book in the world to come by, though.
Thanks for the reference. Will check it out. It’s always seemed to me that that lack of proof of God is a fatal flaw of religion and that if there is a God, she is a terrible communicator. So imagining what would happen if God suddenly became obvious to all is fascinating, IMHO.
Africa is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin is quite good (non-fiction) and a quick read.
I am currently reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I am finding it very engaging (I loved The Martian). Some passages get a bit dry; but I really like it.
Recent good reads:
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel
Immune by Philipp Dettmer
Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger (and I don’t care a whit about football)
Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant, wonderful memoir
I did not like:
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, makes far too many unfounded assertions about fungi being intelligent
The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. Spends more time on the native Tahitian man Mai than on the supposed subject of the book: James Cook and his third voyage. I just got tired of hearing about how bad all western explorers were and how wonderful the natives were. He describes the killing and eating of some of the crew of HMS Adventure by a group of Maori in New Zealand as, “a religious ceremony” and part of their (wonderful) culture and never mentions the word cannibalism. I got sick of it.
The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger, makes far too many unfounded assertions about plants being intelligent and even conscious
Hmm, I enjoyed Entangled Life a lot!
I too enjoyed The Overstory immensely.
I’ve recently read a few books that were successful in their day but seem to have gone out of fashion somewhat, as far as I can tell. ‘Lost Horizon’ by James Hilton (who also wrote the better-known ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’) is great and, incidentally, gave us the term ‘Shangri-La’. ‘The Cone Gatherers’ by Robin Jenkins, set during WW2, is my third favourite tree-related book after ‘The Overstory’ and ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’. ‘A Month in the Country’ by J.L.Carr is a beautifully written short novel set in the aftermath of the First World War. It’s not about the war but you feel its shadow throughout. (I think this novel is still well-regarded, not out of fashion.)