Entangled Life, and the trouble with reading about fungi in August
I bought this one in a train station, which is the only reason I own a physical copy of a book about fungi. It sat on the pile for most of the winter and then got read in four sittings during a hot spell in July, mostly on a balcony, mostly while being distracted by the fact that the tomato plants had gone over.
The premise is simple enough that it survives a summary: fungi are not a footnote to plants and animals but a third way of being alive, and once you start looking for them you find them holding up most of the things you assumed were self-supporting. Forests trade nutrients through fungal networks. Lichens are two organisms behaving as one for so long that the question of which one is the lichen stops being useful. Yeast is why bread and beer exist. None of this is new information exactly, but it is arranged here in a way that keeps knocking the ground out from under the reader.
What I liked most was the structural honesty. The author keeps admitting where the science thins out. There is a chapter on fungal networks in soil that spends as much time on how hard it is to measure anything underground as on what has been measured, and that chapter is better for it. Popular science usually rounds uncertainty down to zero for the sake of a clean narrative, and this book mostly refuses.
The weakness is enthusiasm. Every third page has a sentence that wants to be quoted on a poster. Some of them earn it. Some of them are doing the work of an argument that has not been made yet, and after a while I found myself pencilling small question marks in the margin, which for me is a sign that a book is still worth reading but has stopped convincing me on rhythm alone.
Practical effect on my life: I now stop at fallen logs. My spouse has learned to keep walking and wait at the corner. I have not yet bought a hand lens, but the link is open in a tab, which is how these things start.
If you have read one of those books that reorganises a category you thought was settled and want another, this does the job. If you want a field guide, this is not it, and the author says so early.