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Saige

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Saige is Currently Reading

Saige is currently reading

The Burning God (The Poppy War, #3)

by R.F. Kuang (Goodreads Author)

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Jun 10, 2026 12:54AM

Saige is currently reading

The Overstory

by Richard Powers

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in March 2025

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Saige said: " 4.5 stars

I was startled by this book's power to make me feel trapped. In metal and plastic and technology, brought to awareness of my own inability to name any of the trees that I walk past every day. I've started noticing them more, after this book. 4.5 stars

I was startled by this book's power to make me feel trapped. In metal and plastic and technology, brought to awareness of my own inability to name any of the trees that I walk past every day. I've started noticing them more, after this book. Powers' writing allowed me to see differently in a way that few authors have offered before. He puts forth a serious, prolonged, storied argument for treating trees as persons to whom we owe our lives and our protection. He gives no quarter, allowing none of us to ignore our own complicity in the ongoing climate crisis. And it is ongoing - his book offers no real resolution, any more than life offers resolution. We aren't just headed for the brink, we're hurtling over it.

This is a slow book. Not boring or lifeless, but slow. Written for tree time. I like that it refuses to speed up, focusing on details and places and the names of different plants for page after page after page. The characters come together and grow together in slow, subtle ways that feel realistic. Their paths intersect and deepen the shared story, but they're never all thrown together into the big-group third act nonsense that a lot of books with many POVs tend to fall into. I think Nick was my favorite; seeing him learn steadiness even after Olivia's death was very moving, and I like that his path remained open-ended.

The only thing that stops this book from being 5 stars for me is that the last 50 pages or so don't quite seem to know where they're going. Some of the sentences seem to gesture at wisdom or grand philosophy but miss the mark for me. I also don't really understand the part about Neelay's "learners". They sound like a form of AI, but knowing modern AI and its murderous impact on the environment, the idea that technological advancements could somehow mediate between human and tree languages just didn't work for me. It seemed like a complete reversal of the slow, vegetable listening that the other characters were learning to do the whole book long. ...more "

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(page 440 of 502)
— Mar 06, 2025 04:00PM

Mar 08, 2025 10:04AM · see review

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