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

This is one of the most unusual novels I’ve read in years. The Overstory follows the lives of nine people and examines their connection with trees. Some of the characters come together over the course of the book, while others stay on their own. Even though the book takes a pretty extreme view towards the need to protect forests, I was moved by each character’s passion for their cause and finished the book eager to learn more about trees.

Besides being gorgeously written, and brimming with amazing information (about plant intelligence, especially), ‘The Overstory,’ by Richard Powers, is something genuinely new, in the way it decenters the human as the source of all meaning and value. Here, it is the trees.

The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period.

But back to the pile of books. Nonfiction besides “Erosion”: C. D. Wright, “Casting Deep Shade” (her gorgeous last book, a meditation on the American copper beech); Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility”; Mark Doty, “What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life” (and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to go with it); David Abernethy, “The Dynamics of Global Dominance”; Samuel B. Griffith II, “The Battle for Guadalcanal” (I had an uncle who flew planes in the Pacific theater of the war); Alain Badiou, “Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy” (the premise of which seems to be that the young Wittgenstein upended professional philosophy by asking the philosophers what they mean by meaning.) Poetry: Arthur Sze, “Sight Lines”; Ariana Reines, “A Sand Book”; Catherine Barnett, “Human Hours”; Robert Lowell, “The Dolphin” (the new edition edited by Saskia Hamilton); Giovanni Pascoli, “Selected Poems,” translation by Taije Silverman with Marina Della Putta Johnston. Fiction: Richard Powers, “The Overstory”; Steve Yarbr

The best two books I’ve read in years (#theoverstory should be mandatory reading the world over), yoga, spice, mamma earth and figuring out that all you’re ever looking for can be found within. Corny as hell but my god is it true.

The best novels change the way you see. Richard Powers’s The Overstory does this. Haunting.