Currently Reading

Two books that I'm currently enjoying:

The Dead Father - Donald Barthelme
The Wild Trees - Richard Preston

The Dead Father, one of Barthelme's classic novels, is a postmodern, metafictional pastiche that seems to defy the inertia of the giant half-dead, half-alive Dead Father being dragged by a cable across a collage of scenes and landscapes by a band of nineteen people. It's a remarkable story told in a remarkable style.

The Wild Trees seems more like science fiction than a narrative about an extraordinary scientific endeavor. It is an account of a group of adventurers who dared to climb to the tops of redwood trees and explore in the minutest detail the amazingly complex structure of a previously undiscovered unrecorded ecosystem 300 feet off the ground. Here you'll read about tree-dwelling voles, salamanders, earthworms and copepods; imagine clouds of honeybees buzzing around airborne huckleberry gardens, fern grottos, and many other wonders you may have previously assumed were bound to the ground beneath your feet. You'll read about a tree named Iluvatar by its discoverers whose complex crown of 220 trunks arranged in 6 hierarchies was one of many trees mapped in three dimensions. This tree is the most structurally complex living organism every discovered.

trees, Donald Barthelme, redwood, coast redwood, mapping, climbing