Read the latest column by Reader Services librarian Misha Stone on the Seattle Times website or below, where it's republished with permission.
The Seattle Public Library loves to promote books and reading. This column, submitted by the library, will be a space to promote reading and book trends from a librarian's perspective. You can find these titles at the library by visiting spl.org and searching the catalog.
Earth Day may not always conjure thoughts of reading. But when you are taking a break from your garden or hikes, consider settling in with one of these intriguing titles in science, memoir and science fiction to help you connect with nature and consider our collective future.
Mushrooms are a hot topic in the Pacific Northwest, and few scholars write with as much enthusiasm about fascinating fungi in all of its forms as Merlin Sheldrake. Sheldrake's "Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures" pays homage to the wild and scientifically baffling behaviors of mycelium, from their multifaceted network communications to their psychedelic and even zombie properties.
A central question the author explores is how mycelium communicate without a brain. Sheldrake unfolds multiple stories of mushrooms and lichen with astonishment and curiosity, including mycelial networks and fungi that live in the bodies of insects.
Mushrooms will alter your perspective, and so will this book. As Sheldrake writes, "If I think about mycelial growth for more than a minute my mind starts to stretch."
Nature writing has been dominated by white, cisgender male writers, which makes Black poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy's memoir, "Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden," especially welcome. "Soil" delves into the tension between race, class and gatekeeping that can happen in nature writing, and even nature itself.
When Dungy and her husband moved to Fort Collins, Colo., they engaged in a seven-year journey to resist their community's homeowner association restrictions on what residents can plant by diversifying their garden. When monocultures prevail, as Dungy points out, biodiversity gets lost.
Dungy also boldly questions what's left out of Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." While beautiful, this beloved treatise ignores the messiness of daily life and the social justice struggles occurring at the time.
Dungy's gorgeously observed memoir of cultivation and resistance celebrates nature's connective power while reflecting on and interrogating the erasure of Black life and contributions to our shared landscape.
Dystopian fiction offers cautionary tales about the fate of our planet while telling compelling stories of survival. In "Land of Milk and Honey" by C Pam Zhang, smog overtakes the planet, killing off biodiversity in plant and animal life. While the majority suffers, the rich hoard research and resources.
A chef accepts a job offer to work atop a mountain in the Italian Alps where a rich entrepreneur and his driven, geneticist daughter feast and build a dynamic biodiverse enterprise while the world crumbles. As the chef creates multicourse experiences from an impossibly stocked pantry for a small group of the elite, sensual descriptions of food convey the opulence amid societal decay.
A love affair between the chef and the employer's daughter adds titillation to this gorgeous and sinister exploration of pleasure and power in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
For a more hopeful and galvanizing environmental novel, try Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future." A climate catastrophe in which extreme heat creates mass extinction events forges radicalism in one man and pushes more cooperation between disparate nations to solve the global crisis, but will incremental change be enough?
Robinson weaves in heady scientific solutions alongside geopolitical machinations in this epic and thought-provoking science fiction novel deeply informed by urgency and a clarion call to collective enterprise. As U.K.-based climate activist Nigel Topping said of Robinson's writing at a United Nations climate summit: "These are deeply researched, plausible futures he's writing about."
Look for new Peak Picks titles at the Seattle Public Library that will keep Earth Day's rich possibilities alive, including "Street Trees of Seattle: An Illustrated Walking Guide" by Seattle author Taha Ebrahimi and "The Backyard Bird Chronicles" by Amy Tan, who will talk about her work at the Central Library on May 29.
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