About book The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch In Nature (2012)
I absolutely adored this book. It took me a long time to get through because it gets pretty technical, but I feel like I learned so much. Some chapters made me want to keep a notebook handy to take notes. There's just so much to absorb!It's not often that I read something that presents the science of things in such an elegant and thoughtful way. Haskell describes animals, plants, fungi, ecology, and evolution with a profound sense of beauty and respect that you don't get from a lot of scientists. He doesn't just observe and explain. He feels, experiences, and relates. This is an amazing book. It is reflections on a square meter of old growth forest in Tennessee over the course of a year... biology, ecology, chemistry, meteorology... written so beautifully that it was practically poetry.The problem for me is that each visit was a couple of pages only, so it reads as short essays. (It would work great as meditative bedtime reading, if that's your thing.) And I hate essays and short stories. I read to immerse and can't in this style.It is STUNNINGLY done, but a terrible fit for me. I learned a huge amount, and each piece I read was, in and of itself, gorgeous and wonderful. In the end I really didn't like it, but I know exactly why, and it's not the book's fault. Hence the high rating.
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Meditative. Anew way to look at the working of nature in a microcosm.
—sloreysteph
