Peachy Reads

Being a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, and a Britophile, it was only a matter of time before I picked up this book. I’ve always found Bryson to be rather an unlikely traveler, and this, I suppose, is part of the inherent humor in his books.  His approach is a bit haphazard, and he sort of ping-pongs to all corners of Britain—the well-known spots as well as the “undiscovered” bits, and even the less attractive parts.    At the start of the book he proposes a diagonal axis, the “Bryson Line” from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath in Scotland, which he intends to follow, but doesn’t really. Rather, he seem to end up going just where he pleases—Sailsbury Plain, Cornwall, Wales, London, Norfolk, Yorkshire…  True, as others have noticed, in this volume he seems frequently grumpy and at times overly nostalgic for the times when every hamlet was defined by an independent ironmonger, a post office, a tea room, and a butcher.  But just as frequently he rhapsodizes about what makes Britain unique,

Peter Wohlleben may well change how you regard trees. A forester in charge of a beech forest near the Belgian border in Germany, he has some unusual (at least to me) ideas about how trees exist, along with some groundbreaking ideas about how forests should be maintained. He makes the convincing argument that forests are communities in which members have intricate interdependencies and amazing defensive strategies.   In fact, trees may be more sentient and beneficial to each other (and to us) than anyone previously may have imagined.   He is a scientist, but is definitely thinking outside the box. This book created a bit of a publishing sensation when it came out in Germany, and it has since been translated into many languages and received well-deserved international attention.