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A review by bookwoods
The Overstory by Richard Powers
5.0
4.5/5
This book is truly something – a combination of environmental activism and literary fiction, a wake up call to the despairing state of the natural world. For the importance of the message and the powerful prose this deserves all the stars I can give, but because of the large cast of characters, my slow reading process and the slow pacing, I got a bit lost in the web of connections and feel like there’s still more to get out of this, a more immersive reading experience to be had. Unfortunately I picked this up in a hectic time of my life and could only fit in some pages here and there instead of reading for hours at a time, which is what Overstory would have benefited from. Definitely going to look into other novels by Richard Powers!
”The ’environment’ is alive – a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acaia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”
This book is truly something – a combination of environmental activism and literary fiction, a wake up call to the despairing state of the natural world. For the importance of the message and the powerful prose this deserves all the stars I can give, but because of the large cast of characters, my slow reading process and the slow pacing, I got a bit lost in the web of connections and feel like there’s still more to get out of this, a more immersive reading experience to be had. Unfortunately I picked this up in a hectic time of my life and could only fit in some pages here and there instead of reading for hours at a time, which is what Overstory would have benefited from. Definitely going to look into other novels by Richard Powers!
”The ’environment’ is alive – a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. Love and war can’t be teased apart. Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries. A thorn acaia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”