(Early) Spring Reading – The New York Times
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Joon Mo Kang
Here in New York City, we had several days of baseball-appropriate weather in February. The famous cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., are due to peak as early as they ever have. Spring — and spring books — are here.
In “The Songs of Trees,” David George Haskell travels to Japan, Jerusalem, New York City and elsewhere to closely observe the complicated relationships trees have with their environments, including humans.
Haskell is occasionally prone to a biological mysticism. “We cannot step outside life’s songs,” he writes in the preface. “This music made us; it is our nature.” But he also emphasizes when greenery is not touchy-feely. In the Amazon, he takes in impressive trees — about 50 meters tall — both from the ground and from up in their crowns. “If you slip or need to steady yourself, do not grab the nearest branch,” he writes. “Bark here is an armory of spikes, needles and graters.”
Lynda V. Mapes adopts a narrower lens but is equally ambitious in “Witness Tree,” which gets at sweeping ideas by looking at one century-old oak tree in Massachusetts. Among many other subjects — forest regeneration, acorn production, pollen records — Mapes has plenty to say about our early spring(s). “Climate change, the trees, streams, and puddles, and birds, bugs, and frogs, attest, is not a matter of opinion or belief,” she writes. “It is an observable fact.”
Quotable
“I often say that I want to write like Tupac rapped. I could listen to his album and within a few minutes, I could go from thinking deeply to laughing to crying to partying. And that’s what I want to do as a writer.” — Angie Thomas, author of “The Hate U Give,” in an interview with NPR
Stop The Presses
“The printing press has recorded and spread some of the greatest achievements of humankind. But remember, humankind is also full of idiots.” Those are two of the first sentences in “Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories From Book History,” by J.P. Romney and Rebecca Romney. Their work of history does chronicle some entertaining mistakes — like the 17th-century printer who produced a version of the Bible in which the Seventh Commandment read: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” But much of the book is devoted to the unusual rather than the erroneous. James Allen, for instance, was an American armed robber executed for his crimes in the 19th century. He wrote his memoir while awaiting execution, and requested that it be “bound in his own skin and delivered to the man who had helped capture him.” His will was done. Less gruesome stories are told about William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts and the feud that led to “the destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful fonts.”
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