Best books... Greg Wise

A champion of the Macmillan Cancer Trust, the actor will be taking part in its Follow the Stars Christmas concert, live online on 11 December at 8pm, and available to view until 31 December (macmillan.org.uk/followthestars)

The Overstory

by Richard Powers, 2018 (Vintage £9.99). I devoured it, then gave it to my wife who, upon finishing, immediately reread it. A wild and expansive novel, knitting together a glorious and diverse cast of characters, some of them human, some of them trees. I defy you not to be moved, and then angered about what we are doing to our planet and these glorious sentinels rooted upon it.

The Hidden Life of Trees

by Peter Wohlleben, 2015 (William Collins £9.99). Written by a German forester, this book totally changed the way I think of trees: they think, have memory, communicate, help or attack other species and are interconnected by the Wood-Wide Web.

Entangled Life

by Merlin Sheldrake, 2020 (The Bodley Head £20). The “hardware” of the Wood-Wide Web, the out-of-sight world of fungus, is unearthed to us here. The largest organisms on our planet and sustaining pretty much everything on it. This book, like the “magic mushrooms” within, blew my mind.

The Living Mountain

by Nan Shepherd, 1977 (Canongate £9.99). A love story to the Cairngorms, written towards the end of the Second World War, but not published for decades. An act of devotion to a landscape and to the idea that to try and understand a finite patch of land opens up an understanding of the infinite.

Molesworth

by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, 1958 (Penguin £10.99). The only prize I ever won at school was the Form Prize when I was nine. I got a book token and bought Down With Skool!, the first of the four books gathered together here, about the antics of our hero Molesworth at St Custard’s School. I relished the spelling (as I could never spell) and Searle’s extraordinary illustrations. A work of genius, “as any fule kno”...