Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures
(Random House, $28)
“Like the universe,” said Rob Dunn in Science, “fungi are sublime.” If you have ever studied mushrooms or their kin, that observation won’t surprise you. But fungal biologist Merlin Sheldrake has a gift for conveying the myriad astonishments of his field. I’m a fungi expert myself, yet “nearly every page of this book contained either an observation so interesting or a turn of phrase so lovely that I was moved to slow down, stop, and reread.” Fungi, Sheldrake reminds us, colonized land from the sea, enabling plants to move ashore. Fungi can transform rock into food, tie tree roots into a networked communication system, or seize control of a human brain. Sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, fungi are marvelously strange. “More than anything else, Entangled Life is an ode to other ways of being.”
Sheldrake makes his own field adventures part of the story, and he can be charmingly old-fashioned, said Eugenia Bone in The Wall Street Journal. Whether he is describing trailing a truffle hunter or soaking in a fermentation bath, “I kept picturing the 32-year-old as a Millennial version of Charles Darwin.” The author’s “playful, wide-eyed” manner can occasionally grow tiresome, said Julian Lucas in Harper’s. Still, you’ll be as amazed by fungi as he is, because they live in or on everything around us and “challenge the very idea of hard boundaries between beings.” A
by Graham Greene (1955). A master of troubled consciences unfolds a compact tale of empires—the British, the American, and the Asian—braided around three divided lovers. Though it’s set in Vietnam, this is the book to read to understand the latest news from Kabul, or just to know why we feel homesick for faraway places and betray the people we love.
The Quiet American
(1894). We all know the gnomic, explosive verse of the woman who let Death and Jesus and Eternity and Wild Nights into her bedroom. But this book, no less strange and original, crackles with some of the most passionate love letters ever written, addressed to a future sister-in-law.
Letters of Emily Dickinson
by Henry David Thoreau (1854). These riddling reflections on a pond moved me to quit my comfortable job in New York, to see that a single room could be more luxurious than a five-bedroom house, and to realize that the only accounts that matter are the ones we keep in private. From two years of near-seclusion and 10 years of writing, Thoreau produced an American scripture that draws on the wisdom of the world.
Walden
by Alice Munro (2009). Like her literary goddaughter Elizabeth Strout, the Canadian short-story master and Nobel laureate Alice Munro enjoys the gift of being surprised by life and thus showing us real people whom we can never predict. Remaking every rule she doesn’t break, she throws off fresh and unexpected tales of liberation as true as your neighborhood tomorrow.
Too Much Happiness
by Rohinton Mistry (1995). If you’ve already read Dickens and Hardy and Hugo, this is the contemporary epic to add to your shelf. Four regular souls in Bombay in the 1970s struggle to survive poverty and oppression. All are seen with such compassion, intimacy, and craft that they become the reader’s friends for life.
A Fine Balance
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust (1913–1927). Some writers show us the self; some give us the world. Proust saw through both with enough cool poise to fashion the wisest, deepest— and funniest—handbook to life this side of a Buddhist sutra.