Reading Roundup, July 2024: Plants, Art, and a Fantasy Classic
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoe Schlanger (Bookshop|Library)
This was interesting, most of the botany related through the narrative was new to me, and quite thought-provoking, though the science, as Schlanger makes abundantly clear throughout, is far from settled. Botany and wildlife biology/ecology are all in a highly interesting phase with impacts on and implications for human philosophy and ethics, especially with what we're learning about plant agency in this case. What I didn't enjoy as much is that this book suffers from a common affliction, the seeming need every journalist like Schlanger has to overexplain the scientific method in popular science works such as this. Maybe I'm just being touchy, but from my point of view it waters down the intriguing aspects of the book - the stuff that deals with what we're meant to learn here about plants specifically.
Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art by Nicholson Baker (Bookshop|Library)
This charming, quick read was a birthday gift from my wife. It's always enlightening to learn about the artistic processes of others, including and maybe especially those are not recognized as "masters" but just normal people creating their art.
The Once and Future King by T.H. White (Bookshop|Library)
I've read enough books in the past few years that retell/rework/reference some part of Arthurian legend that it has left me feeling as if I didn't know enough about the legend to truly understand what they were doing, as if I was missing something. I purchased the Oxford Classics edition of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur sometime last winter, and read a good chunk of it, but the medieval mode of storytelling is difficult for my mind (maybe any modern mind) to track, and so I put it aside - at least as a primary read.
And so I finally decided that it was time to read The Once and Future King this summer when I needed a break from my O'Brian project. I quickly learned that this book is actually an omnibus edition of four different novels, that each novel has its own publication history prior to this edition, and that there's a fifth book that was published after all of these, and from which certain scenes were stripped and inserted into the first volume in this omnibus edition. It's all...rather reminiscent of medieval-era oral storytelling, so I guess it fits.
I don't know if it was just the ups and downs of my own mental state this month, or if the writing really is as uneven as it felt at times, but I will give White credit for crafting a great update based on Malory (and what a great companion to have if you're trying to sort out your Malory). I absolutely gulped The Sword in the Stone, muddled my way through the second volume, did about equal turns of each through the fourth, and was rather exhausted by the end, except for the very end where you see how White has likely meant to tie it all together from the beginning.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (Bookshop|Library)
I read Olivia Laing's The Lonely City a number of years ago and really enjoyed it. I'm not sure why it took me until this volume to read another work of hers, but this one was if anything even more absorbing. Laing's trick of delving into the biography and philosophy of figures from the past in an attempt to mine meaning for today is like catnip for this reader. John Clare turns up in this book (he appeared briefly in Hamer's book I finished last month), and I relished getting to learn a little more about him and his tragic story, and contemplating its lessons for today. I also really enjoyed learning more about William Morris and his development from upper class gentry to full-throated socialist. Laing's own garden takes up very little of the book - just enough to frame the more meaty subjects the book takes up, but that's probably all to the better.