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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
emotional
hopeful
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
It's been over a week and I'm still thinking about this book. I tell all my friends about it, because it is utterly fascinating. I love watching nature documentaries, but they hardly, if ever, go into anything deeper than the mating habits of bower birds. But this book makes the connection that bower birds (and perhaps other animals that don't have so obvious a way to tell) DO have preferences for their sexual partners, and perhaps DO have some agency over who they procreate with instead of relying solely on base need. That is just so fascinating to me. I describe this book to my friends thus: it is the intersection of colonialism, queerness, and nature. If that sounds like something you're interested in, READ THIS BOOK!
Thank you NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the ALC.
Thank you NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the ALC.
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
This book is queer, romantic, and beautifully written! It hits on so many topics! The author is great at storytelling and making autobiographical events, scientific history, ethics and philosophy together sound romantic. I was totally surprised when taxonomy, evolutionary biology, scientific history of biological sciences, invertebrates, and fungi, were discussed!! My background being in zoology and entomology, and become giddy when hearing anyone appreciate invertebrates! This book made me miss working in biological sciences all the more. Which is an unhealed wound for me, the current administration pushed me out of my biological science job back in Feb👎.
I do have some criticisms. To be honest this book was a little too romantic for my taste and commonly anthropomorphized animals as having human emotions, but still a great read.
adventurous
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Forest Euphoria is absolutely beautiful. I appreciate nature, but I've never connected with it the way the author does and I've never been able to put it in words the way it was done in this book. I don't normally write reviews because I don't think anyone particularly cares what I think, but I ended up recommending this book to so many people, I just thought it would be easier to recommend it to everyone.
It's easy to find beauty in trees and flowers, but it's not easy for everyone to see it in mushrooms and eels and bugs. But the author sees the beauty in every part of nature and passes it on to the reader.
It's truly lovely and comforting to see how we're all connected. I have a feeling I'll come back to this book again and I'll continue to recommend it to anyone who will listen to me.
It's easy to find beauty in trees and flowers, but it's not easy for everyone to see it in mushrooms and eels and bugs. But the author sees the beauty in every part of nature and passes it on to the reader.
It's truly lovely and comforting to see how we're all connected. I have a feeling I'll come back to this book again and I'll continue to recommend it to anyone who will listen to me.
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
fast-paced
medium-paced
This... wasn't really what I was expecting this book to be. Like, I knew it had memoir elements going in, but I didn't think it was actually a MEMOIR + diary (and I mean literal diary entries) with some nature facts sprinkled in. I thought this was going to be an examination of nature through the lens of queerness, not the examination of the author's queerness and talk pieces about 4-5 species that she relates to as a queer person?
Some of the species she touches on are... really thinly grasped when it comes to the theme. Example: Crows. She describes them as queer adjacent because they're... maligned socially? Like some people consider them bad luck etc. Same with cicadas, which she attributes queerness to because they live in brooding cycles and that they live in "community time" rather than clock time or capitalism time. I... am fairly certain more groups of people than just queer people also practice the idea of "community time", but whatever. It's a reach.
So the real points of this book are:
- Affirming the author's queerness
- Doing shrooms is life affirming and never has consequences
- Cis het white men ruin objective science
- Prisoner sympathy
- Armenian Genocide generational trauma
- Might as well read a Robin Wall Kimmerer book because she's name dropped so much. Seriously
Anyway, I think this could've been good if it actually like 1) had a coherent narrative structure and 2) had far less purple prose. The misleading promotional blurb really did not help it in this case.
Some of the species she touches on are... really thinly grasped when it comes to the theme. Example: Crows. She describes them as queer adjacent because they're... maligned socially? Like some people consider them bad luck etc. Same with cicadas, which she attributes queerness to because they live in brooding cycles and that they live in "community time" rather than clock time or capitalism time. I... am fairly certain more groups of people than just queer people also practice the idea of "community time", but whatever. It's a reach.
So the real points of this book are:
- Affirming the author's queerness
- Doing shrooms is life affirming and never has consequences
- Cis het white men ruin objective science
- Prisoner sympathy
- Armenian Genocide generational trauma
- Might as well read a Robin Wall Kimmerer book because she's name dropped so much. Seriously
Anyway, I think this could've been good if it actually like 1) had a coherent narrative structure and 2) had far less purple prose. The misleading promotional blurb really did not help it in this case.