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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
If I could give it more stars, I would. Simply one of the most beautiful, moving, enlightening books I have ever read. I know I will come back to it often.
challenging
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
19% into this & it was not holding my attention. I might revisit at a later date.
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A
I have tons of respect for this book, but did not particularly enjoy reading it. I stayed through to the end mostly as a challenge to myself and I think some parts of it will probably stick with me. But also glad to be done.
This book changed the way I look at the world. There are so many things that feel true here. How can we transform so that we can listen to what the world is trying to tell us? How do we fit into the more-than-human world? Do we still have time?
The language is so rich and beautiful. The story feels so epic and large.
Part 1 is a masterpiece, and the rest is also a masterpiece but not as good as the start. There are definitely flaws but it still really worked for me.
The book really makes trees seem like alien life or sci fi technology. It makes the point that if humans invented technology that could do all the things trees do—manufacture healing chemicals, scrub carbon from the air, etc—it would be a wildly innovative technology! It paints nature as this brilliant inventor who has had an explosive technological revolution over the past billions of years.
The language is so rich and beautiful. The story feels so epic and large.
Part 1 is a masterpiece, and the rest is also a masterpiece but not as good as the start. There are definitely flaws but it still really worked for me.
The book really makes trees seem like alien life or sci fi technology. It makes the point that if humans invented technology that could do all the things trees do—manufacture healing chemicals, scrub carbon from the air, etc—it would be a wildly innovative technology! It paints nature as this brilliant inventor who has had an explosive technological revolution over the past billions of years.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A book that lavishes trees with as much care and attention as its human characters, The Overstory is filled with a deep and unabashed love for these majestic beings. The first portion of the book, Roots, is a collection of eight independent short stories featuring nine characters that span from the 19th century to the dawn of the millennium. A different species of tree is present in each one, playing roles that range from major life-saving ones to, well, just being a tree. The characters’ stories continue to develop and some intertwine in the main section aptly titled Trunk, where the core narrative (woven amongst other minor ones) focuses on five individuals who eventually find themselves at the forefront of a radical environmental activist group, likely inspired by the Earth First! movement that emerged in the 1980s. The section ends with a tragedy that causes the group to disperse, and the remaining sections, “Crown” and “Seeds”, describe the aftermath where idealism grapple with reality, and hope lingers on tentatively.
Much of the plot happens around trees where they serve as objects of scientific study, places of habitation and refuge, sources of nourishment and material, artistic inspiration, reminders of the past and many more. Powers takes care to differentiate each species of tree by highlighting their unique abilities, which often prompted much Googling and Wikipedia browsing from this tree-illiterate reader and wondrous fascination upon realising that they were all true — who knew that aspens grow in clonal colonies of which the oldest, Pando, has a root system that is 80,000 years old and occupies 43 hectares? Or that the gingko reproduces through sperm that grow from pollen grains and swim a short distance inside the seed to fertilise the ovule? A character writes a book detailing all these facts and more, with her discovery of how trees talk to each other and act as one connected, thinking organism inspiring other characters to act (a thinly-veiled reference to the actual book “The Hidden Life of Trees”).
Powers’ prose is rich and evocative, and his inclusion of words from the unfamiliar territory of plants — words like “serotinous” and “marcescent” — gives ordinary moments a touch of the otherworldly. He is also careful not to be too didactic in a book where half the characters eventually become hippy tree huggers for a while. There is a scientist who gives a dramatic speech defending the need to preserve plants for their own sake, but also other scenes where the trees are just a tangential part of the story: the computer programmer who creates virtual universes that are ever-expanding by translating the processes of evolution and growth into code; the story of a couple hanging together through illness and death with their love of books; the behavioural scientist who tries to figure out what makes environmentalists tick.
Having also read David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth recently, this book also drives home the message that we humans as a species are not the masters of the universe we imagine ourselves to be. Rather, our evolution has been shaped by forests that function on time scales many times longer than ours: ripening fruit leading to colour vision; abundant foods nourishing the early hunter-gatherers, dead trees transformed into fuel over millions of years and consumed in seconds. In response, we have locked ourselves into an imminent heat death, one that the natural world will survive through, albeit suffering immeasurable damage too. The record heat waves this summer and the burning of the Amazon rainforest have made this all too evident. But why have we failed to galvanise ourselves into breaking out of our self-interests and greed? Powers address this in a self-referential passage that ponders what literature can do:
The Overstory, then, is his attempt to make this planetary struggle relatable. He achieves this at some level by elevating trees from inanimate objects into characters that are individual but also collective and by hinting at the hidden connections that bind us so closely together, but perhaps this is also a goal too lofty for storytelling alone.
Much of the plot happens around trees where they serve as objects of scientific study, places of habitation and refuge, sources of nourishment and material, artistic inspiration, reminders of the past and many more. Powers takes care to differentiate each species of tree by highlighting their unique abilities, which often prompted much Googling and Wikipedia browsing from this tree-illiterate reader and wondrous fascination upon realising that they were all true — who knew that aspens grow in clonal colonies of which the oldest, Pando, has a root system that is 80,000 years old and occupies 43 hectares? Or that the gingko reproduces through sperm that grow from pollen grains and swim a short distance inside the seed to fertilise the ovule? A character writes a book detailing all these facts and more, with her discovery of how trees talk to each other and act as one connected, thinking organism inspiring other characters to act (a thinly-veiled reference to the actual book “The Hidden Life of Trees”).
Powers’ prose is rich and evocative, and his inclusion of words from the unfamiliar territory of plants — words like “serotinous” and “marcescent” — gives ordinary moments a touch of the otherworldly. He is also careful not to be too didactic in a book where half the characters eventually become hippy tree huggers for a while. There is a scientist who gives a dramatic speech defending the need to preserve plants for their own sake, but also other scenes where the trees are just a tangential part of the story: the computer programmer who creates virtual universes that are ever-expanding by translating the processes of evolution and growth into code; the story of a couple hanging together through illness and death with their love of books; the behavioural scientist who tries to figure out what makes environmentalists tick.
Having also read David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth recently, this book also drives home the message that we humans as a species are not the masters of the universe we imagine ourselves to be. Rather, our evolution has been shaped by forests that function on time scales many times longer than ours: ripening fruit leading to colour vision; abundant foods nourishing the early hunter-gatherers, dead trees transformed into fuel over millions of years and consumed in seconds. In response, we have locked ourselves into an imminent heat death, one that the natural world will survive through, albeit suffering immeasurable damage too. The record heat waves this summer and the burning of the Amazon rainforest have made this all too evident. But why have we failed to galvanise ourselves into breaking out of our self-interests and greed? Powers address this in a self-referential passage that ponders what literature can do:
“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilised on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
The Overstory, then, is his attempt to make this planetary struggle relatable. He achieves this at some level by elevating trees from inanimate objects into characters that are individual but also collective and by hinting at the hidden connections that bind us so closely together, but perhaps this is also a goal too lofty for storytelling alone.
Good book, nice short stories. But just became distracted and never finished. May return to it one day.
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Content Warnings
Minor: Death, Suicide