Trees Trees Trees

With Earth Day just around the corner on April 22^nd, and DC welcoming in the Spring with cherry blossoms and warmer weather, some of my reading taste has also turned to the natural world. Maybe yours has too! 

Spring is also a time of busyness, change, and sometimes chaos. When the pace picks up or things feel overwhelming, it can also be a relief to remember that, at a core level, we are just bodies in space.  

To augment these feelings and to get in a frame of mind for the coming change in the seasons, here are some books that, though they relate to readers as people, also draw firmly from the world around us; I find the focus on trees in particular to offer a space for reflection and reassurance. Hopefully the following tree and nature focused fiction titles resonate with you as well. 

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North Woods by Daniel Mason

Told in a way that overarches even the human lifespan, this book presents an understanding of time that gives grace to the bigger picture. It begins when a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony with no foreknowledge that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As each inhabitant confronts the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. 

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The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love.

Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.

A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is a book to read to be reminded that as much as trees are a part of our life, we are also a part of theirs. 

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The Overstory by Richard Powers

A book I read a year ago now, but have continued to think about, this book faces the nuances of how we share spaces with the life surrounding us - both other people as well as elements of nature that can't speak for themselves. Billed as fiction but with enough information to fill a textbook on trees, reading this book is a welcoming and enveloping experience. This winner of the Pulitzer Prize depicts an Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan; an artist inheriting one hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut; a hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s who electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light; and a hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers--each summoned in different ways by trees--are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, author Richard Powers delivers an impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of--and paean to--the natural world. 

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Greenwood by Michael Christie

Another entry-point to fiction that is about characters engaging with nature and activism, this book extends into both the past and the future. The Greenwood family leads us into the bulk of the story including through vignettes. One of these takes place in 2034 and Jake Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests.  Another is when it's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. There's also a timeline when it's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. Finally, the book depicts 1934 when Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple syrup camp squat when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime that will cling to his family for decades. Throughout, there are trees: thrumming a steady, silent pulse beneath Christie's effortless sentences and working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood and blood--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light. 

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The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter

In this story of dark pine forests, by singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, readers are given a lyrical, sweeping novel about a young boy's coming-of-age during the last days of the lumberjacks.

In the tiny timber town of Cordelia, Idaho, ninety-nine year old Weldon Applegate recounts his life in all its glory, filled with tall tales writ large with murder, mayhem, avalanches and bootlegging. His story is brewing with ancient magic, and Weldon's struggle as a boy to keep his father's inherited timber claim, the Lost Lot, from the ravenous clutches of Linden Laughlin.

Ever since young Weldon stepped foot in the deep Cordelia woods as a child, he dreamed of joining the rowdy ranks of his ancestors in their epic axe-swinging adventures. Local legend says their family line boasts some of the greatest lumberjacks to ever roam the American West, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, the jacks are dying out, and it's up to Weldon to defend his family legacy.

Braided with haunting saloon tunes and just the right dose of magic, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All is a novel bursting with heart, humor and an utterly transporting adventure that intends (and in many ways) succeeds in enveloping readers into a narrative informed by the world around us, its past, and its potential future.