2025 read #93: Strata by Laura Poppick.

Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick

Illustrations by Sarah Gilman

244 pages

Published 2025

Read from December 4 to December 6

Rating: 3 out of 5

My perennial wish: more pop science books intended for people who are well-versed in the basics and want something more.

Strata is not that book. In her prologue, Poppick writes that she intends this book for folks who maybe haven’t thought about rocks before — an introduction to Deep Time to get more people to engage with the geology, and the world, around them. Noble, especially in our dismal age of anti-intellectualism. But it’s a bummer that this is the majority of what popular science has to offer as a genre.

Poppick does the science journalist thing of interviewing colorful experts, spending a significant chunk of the text sketching personalities via anecdotes of fieldwork or risky bush piloting. I get why human interest stories are so prominent, given the tastes of the audience. It’s also good to contextualize scientists as human beings, especially when we consider the history of white men excluding everyone else from science for so long (and pressuring other demographics out of the field to this day). I want more than that, though.

Clearly, what I want is something closer to a college textbook. Which isn’t the fault of this book in particular, but rather the nonfiction publishing market at large.

Poppick unpacks four broad “stories”: the oxygenation of the atmosphere; the Cryogenian; the rise of terrestrial plants and, with them, mud; and the thermal maxima of the Mesozoic. Each of these is investigated with an eye toward a better understanding of our current moment of global catastrophe. If it helps even a handful of people understand the perils of the present through an appreciation of the past, I’ll count this book as a success.

As one scientist she interviews says, “[P]eople could be more happy if they spent more time looking at rocks.” I can’t argue with that.

2025 read #84: Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Illustrated by Alison Atkin and Marc Dando

390 pages

Published 2020

Read from November 5 to November 10

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

When I got my BA in Anthropology, way back in the late ’00s, the consensus on Neanderthals was that they were an over-specialized branch of hominin evolution, hyper-carnivores eking a meager living on the edge of the habitable world, oddly stagnant in culture across deep reaches of time, dead without descendants. They may have buried their dead, took care of their disabled cohorts, and utilized mineral pigments, but otherwise seemed to demonstrate no conception of art. It was deemed unlikely that they could make complex and varied vocal sounds. Neanderthals were depicted as a tragic curiosity, offering insight into adaptation and extinction—fellow travelers crowded out by our own species or starved by the loss of habitat.

The beautiful thing about science is that we’re always learning more, and adapting what we think we know to adjust to new information. Thanks to genetic sequencing, we know H. sapiens interbred with Neanderthals (and other related populations). We’ve found evidence of rudimentary sculpture and even construction. Neanderthals lived in and adapted to a broad diversity of environments. They also seem to have engaged in some measure of cannibalism as mortuary ritual. It’s a more nuanced picture by far.

Of course, the very dynamism of science means that this book, a mere five years out of date, might not be worth reading for all I know. Still, Kindred is one of the few science books in my library, and five years out of date is better than my education, which is approaching twenty years old.

Sykes, like so many scientists turned pop-sci writers before her, produces a readable but often uninspired text that feels like she tried too hard to keep her wording casual. It’s a style choice that strikes me as condescending. Each chapter begins with a sensory immersion sequence in italics, which can sometimes still be fun, but here just feels awkward. She also tries to slip in the occasional poetic flourish, which falls flat more often than not.

That said, I love science, I miss studying human evolution and prehistory, and this book is a perfectly adequate refresher. Once it gets past the de rigueur background information, Kindred offers fascinating and detailed looks at everything from Neanderthals’ health and injuries, to granular examinations of the climates and environments they experienced, to extensive inventories of their varied foodways. From there, it sketches more speculative pictures of Neanderthal aesthetics and emotions. It’s a solid pop primer, so far as I can tell with my outdated background. It also offers a gratifying amount of depth that these treatments rarely provide.

2025 read #73: The Forest Primeval by Leo J. Hickey.

The Forest Primeval: The Geologic History of Wood and Petrified Forests by Leo J. Hickey

62 pages

Published 2003

Read September 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

Earlier this month, my partner R and I visited the Yale Peabody Museum. (It’s free!) I’m currently hyperfocusing on fossil plants and ancient ecosystems, partly because of the novels I’m writing, partly because it’s a dang cool topic. When I found this slim volume in the gift shop, I couldn’t pass it up.

It’s a scientist’s idea of a primer for non-specialists, which means we get thrown into a welter of terminology with only the barest effort to define it. I’m still shaky on the distinction between a wood section’s radial face and its transverse face. One shoddy diagram is considered sufficient explanation; the terms aren’t defined in the glossary. And because the book is over twenty years old, I can only surmise how much of it has been superseded by more recent lines of evidence.

Still, I love paleobotany, and this is a neat appetizer for the more technical books I’ve been pricing in recent weeks. If you ever happen to read my forthcoming paleo-fiction and find a reference to Cretaceous highland meadows of Ephedra plants, you can credit this book.

2025 read #61: In the Presence of Dinosaurs by John Colagrande and Larry Felder.

In the Presence of Dinosaurs by John Colagrande and Larry Felder

Illustrated by Larry Felder

Foreword by Jack Horner

189 pages

Published 2000

Read from August 30 to September 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

One tiny blessing of being born when I was: my teenage years coincided with history’s biggest boom of dinosaur books. There were novels, most of them bad. Short stories in magazines, some of them good. And then there were the big, glossy, full-color illustrated books for adults. I spent substantial portions of the late 1990s reading through some outsize coffee-table book or other (Hunting Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs:A Global View, The Ultimate Dinosaur). Those were glorious times.

One of the very last tomes of that particular wave (that I’m aware of) was this one, which came out during my painful transition into adulthood. I picked up a copy at some point in the early 2000s, possibly back when my then-spouse and I would hang out at Borders every weekend, blowing untold amounts of money on stacks of books we would scarcely look afterward. I got rid of that copy in a subsequent move. It wasn’t until this summer that I found a cheap (if slightly battered) replacement.

Presence is organized into chapters by specific environments: rain forest, plains, coastline, and so on. Grounding dinosaurs into ecological context is something I’m interested in, both as a would-be scientist and as a novelist. So some twenty-ish years later, I’m finally taking the time to read it.

Felder’s artwork is outstanding. Finely detailed, almost photographically sharp, with the occasional startling chiaroscuro. In addition, this might be one of the earliest glossy art books to normalize feathered dinosaurs, which gives it some historical interest.

The written portions of the book are considerably less edifying. The text lacks flow, and is frequently repetitive, resulting in a dull read — even though not all that much information is presented. Clearly the art was expected to be the main draw.

Presence puts into perspective how much dinosaur paleontology has changed in the last quarter century. When I read a confident declaration that “Dinosaurs descended from partially aquatic ancestors,” it’s a reminder of just how long ago Y2K was, and also a prompt to take everything else here with a grain of salt. Perhaps not the most useful research I could be doing for my own books.

Also inspiring caution: fundamental errors, like dating the Morrison Formation to 220-200 million years ago, instead of its actual range of 156-146 million years ago. What do you mean that got through editors and typesetters without getting caught?

Still, the book’s focus on climate and cohesive ecosystems (rather than charismatic megafauna roving through a greenscreen void) is welcome, and perhaps a bit ahead of its time. And I can’t deny that it’s a little bit inspiring. Do I now want to write stories set in Late Triassic Arizona, Early Jurassic Connecticut, and Late Cretaceous Interior Seaway barrier islands? Absolutely!

2025 read #54: When the Earth Was Green by Riley Black.

When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution’s Greatest Romance by Riley Black

Illustrated by Kory Bing

281 pages

Published 2025

Read from August 2 to August 19

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We need more paleobotany and paleoecology books. I’m in the process of writing a novel set partially in the Cretaceous, and there are so few avenues for learning what ancient environments would have been like. A particular textbook sells for $500 on eBay. Wikipedia has a couple useful pages, but even a ubiquitous Upper Cretaceous tree like Dryophyllum lacks its own entry. In fact, the most thorough online source of information about Dryophyllum that I can find appears to be a fandom wiki for a video game.

Heading into this book, I’d hoped for more in the vein of the closing chapters of Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, which linked the Earth’s past with our own contemporary fights for personal autonomy and queer liberation. There are bits of that here and there; the introduction, in particular, can be quite lovely in its musings on life’s interconnectedness and interdependence. Certain chapters, such as the one on fall color in the Pliocene, are beautiful and evocative. The conclusion is, once again, especially impactful, a much-needed reflection of human diversity and possibility.

For the most part, though, Green offers more of the Raptor Red-adjacent pop science that characterized most of Last Days. It’s enjoyable, and Black covers many topics not often seen by the public at large, which is always welcome. This book is a nice first step for introducing the reading public to the plants of the past, but it’s only that — a first step. Let’s hope it starts a paleobotanical revival and leads to more in-depth books gaining publication.

2025 read #53: Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior by David Hone.

Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know by David Hone

Illustrated by Gabriel Ugueto

176 pages

Published 2024

Read from July 28 to August 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

Circa 1998, I was as up to date on dinosaur science as it was possible for a semi-homeless teenager with no formal education to be. There were comprehensive popular overviews and specialist encyclopedias in every library. Those were good times for amateur dinosaur aficionados.

In 2025, we’re in the midst of a much smaller dinosaur renaissance. There are quite lovely new books that do innovative, edifying, expressive things with the topic. But none are the lavish, comprehensive pop-science tomes you used to get in the ’90s. So I’m not scientifically “up to date” the same way, and it’s unlikely I ever will be.

This book is a step toward catching up at least a little bit, though. In particular, Behavior provides a solid foundation for considering non-avian dinosaurs as once-living animals with complex behaviors and interactions with their environment. A lot of recent work in dinosaur science has been, shall we say, excessively optimistic about what behaviors can be recovered from the fossil record. Hone’s approach lays out the diverse possibilities of dinosaur behavior, while cautioning against conclusions drawn from sparse fossil data: “[M]uch of the scientific literature tends toward a confidence in interpreting dinosaur behaviors that probably should not be there….”

I would love a greatly expanded version of this book. Its main weakness, to my taste, is its summary nature. Fascinating glimpses of dinosaur behavior are reduced to a single sentence plus a reference to a paper that I lack access to. I’d prefer a book two or three times longer, giving proper paragraphs (if not subheadings) to more case studies. But even as it stands, Behavior helps break down the movie myths of dinosaurs we all absorbed in the 1990s. A useful starting point for anyone who might want to write more realistic dino fic in the near future.

2025 read #11: The Green Ages by Annette Kehnel.

The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel

Translated by Gesche Ipsen

281 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)

Read from January 29 to January 31

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I expected this to be a book about social ecology and its evolution through the centuries. The lovely cover, the title, and even the jacket flap copy certainly suggest an examination of crop rotation, coppicing, and common land, and how those traditional lifeways might be integrated with renewable energy for a wholesome solarpunk future. The book touches on some of that, but it isn’t Kehnel’s main focus.

Instead, Green Ages is mostly concerned with economics: communal abbeys, beguinages, microfinance, circular economies, and so on. Important things to think about, just not what I anticipated. And Kehnel does little more than introduce some ideas; she rarely digs deeper. A typical topic line: “Diogenes and the origins of the ‘tiny house’ movement.”

Like other academics with competent but uninspired prose, Kehnel writes in a faintly patronizing, “let’s learn about this together” voice directly out of a freshman textbook. (Or perhaps that’s just the style common to translations from German; I recall that Forest Walking had a remarkably similar vibe.) A typical sentence: “They were medieval influencers with a high impact factor.”

Overall, Green Ages was worthwhile, but didn’t quite deliver on the vibe of its packaging. I’m really not an economics girlie, so I can’t say for certain, but I feel like this book doesn’t offer much there beyond broad generalizations. Perhaps I’m merely disgruntled. Now, though, I want a book that actually documents the ecology of medieval lifeways.

2024 read #147: A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett.

A History of Dinosaurs in 50 Fossils by Paul M. Barrett

160 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

Much like A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils, this is a coffee table book illustrated with photographs of the namesake fifty fossils, presenting a brief, glossy overview of dinosaur science. Unlike Plants, I went into Dinosaurs knowing quite a lot about the subject matter. The state of science publishing is dire, however, so I’ll take what I can get at this point. And I’ve been out of the loop with dinosaur science long enough that I might learn things even from a pop science book.

Considering the limitations of its structure, A History of Dinosaurs does a fair job at doling out beginner information: what defines dinosaurs, their evolutionary origins, their diversity and adaptations, and so on. The illustrations include paleo-reconstruction artwork as well as fossil photos, which was nice. While I do wish popular science books would return to trusting their audience instead of spoon-feeding them printed listicles, this one wasn’t a bad effort.

2024 read #83: The Dinosaurs by William Stout.

The Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era, illustrated by William Stout

Text by William Service; edited by Byron Preiss

Introduction by Peter Dodson

160 pages

Published 1981

Read July 18

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (maybe 3 if I’m generous)

Can we take a moment to notice just how hard Byron Preiss pushed for illustrated dinosaur books for adults? Throughout the decade or so between the Dinosaur Renaissance and the Jurassic Park craze, his name recurs as editorial instigator for a particular sort of publication. We have The Ultimate Dinosaur, Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, and this book. Dude was committed to making pop culture dinos happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were even more I’ve yet to learn about (especially since he seems linked to Don Glut’s Dinosaur Society, which cashed in on the ’90s dinomania with its own titles).

I forget the context, but I first heard of this book recently from a fellow writer on social media. She grew up paging through William Stout’s artwork and William Service’s accompanying prose vignettes. The cover is absolutely stunning, an art nouveau Parasaurolophus in 1970s kitchen tones. Naturally I wanted it. I was able to find a cheap copy on eBay, and here we are.

Stout’s artwork, inevitably, is the major selling point here. To contemporary eyes, his dinosaurs look lumpy and veiny, perhaps reminiscent of Frank Frazetta’s shadowy barbarians, though the delightful art nouveau influence runs throughout the book. There is a stunning full-page spread of a Leptoceratops beneath a magnolia in full flower that I want framed on my wall. If the book were exclusively composed of Stout’s art, I’d rate it more highly.

Service’s vignettes are, at best, serviceable (heh), a dry run for the fictionalized approach to paleontology that would culminate in Raptor Red. The concepts Service explores, and the pop science terms he deploys, provide a fascinating glimpse of how deep the tropes of ’90s dinomania reach. For example, this is the earliest I’ve ever encountered the usage of “raptor” as a colloquial catch-all for small, fast, sharp-clawed theropods. Even the contemporaneous Time Safari called them dromaeosaurs. Oddly, Service is out of synch with Peter Dodson’s introduction, returning again and again to the trope of cold-blooded dinosaurs stymied by an errant chill.

Some of the vignettes depict speculative behaviors I don’t think I’ve seen touched elsewhere, such as a Styracosaurus instinctively munching tart bark to help purge toxins it had inadvertently eaten. (This is also the only description of dinosaur constipation I’ve ever read: “At times peristaltic waves of contraction passed down the colon; cloacas trembled and everted in vain.”) This treatment of dinos as living animals makes The Dinosaurs a rewarding read even now, with much of its science forty years out of date.

2024 read #40: A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.*

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson*

277 pages

Published 1998

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread. 

When I read this book at 16, way back in 1999, I was already fixated on hiking the Appalachian Trail. I had grown up living in the woods — or, more precisely, I had grown up on the road, which by age 12 had devolved into sleeping in the car in various parks and forests from the Adirondacks to the Cascades, from the Mogollon Rim to the Black Hills.

My father had, in his saner days, indulged in the Rocky Mountain High vibe of the ’70s. He harbored a glimmer of that even as he turned paranoid and violent with age, one dim spark of humanity lingering as he devolved into a monster. At one point in my tweens, he thrifted the February 1987 issue of National Geographic, which had the article “Appalachian Trail: A Tunnel Through Time.” I pored through it again and again, examining every photograph, imagining myself at this particular shelter, navigating that specific piece of trail, finding this certain wildflower. When I fantasized about leaving my father behind in my impending adulthood, it was natural that I couldn’t conceptualize anything beyond walking away into the woods. (I certainly couldn’t imagine integrating into human society.)

All of which is more depressing and confessional than what I meant to say, which is merely that, as an outdoor hipster, I was well acquainted with the Appalachian Trail long before I encountered this book on the Wal-Mart bestseller rack. For the public at large, though, I understand that A Walk in the Woods was a moment of discovery. It is often cited as one of the main reasons the AT became over-popularized, setting in motion what would ultimately become the “walking frat party” of the yearly thru-hiker bubble. (Browsing the shelves of used bookstores, where, to this day, 80% of the outdoor recreation section will be stacks of this book, lends its anecdotal support to this idea.) Like any treasured place, the AT was better loved when it was less famous.

All of that, of course, still lay in the future. A quarter-century ago, avoiding my father as best as I could from the passenger seat, I read and reread A Walk in the Woods with all the intensity of a religious text, a meditation. So much so that, like childhood staples The War of the Worlds and Jurassic Park, every word and every line is familiar to this day, which I wasn’t expecting when I picked it up again for this revisit. I had truly forgotten how much this book had meant to me, once upon a time.

That nostalgia gloss is an awkward reading companion today. Turns out I don’t really like Woods anymore. Living in a car, I didn’t pick up on Bryson’s casual misogyny. Most women who cross his path get lampooned: desperate, unattractive, fat, unintelligent, prattling, oblivious. The only men he caricatures with equal gusto are the Appalachian rural poor, because of course this book is classist as hell, too.

In general, Bryson’s humor feels stale and mean-spirited to me nowadays, reading like an uncomplicated normie sitcom from the ’90s: Everybody Loves Raymond, maybe, or The King of Queens, something with a lot of fat jokes and a scolding wife, with the character Katz as the larger-than-life neighbor who gets cheers from the studio audience. Sometimes Bryson indulges in moments of almost enjoying himself, but then it’s right back to whole chapters of complaining about fat people, hostels, mice, maps, gizmos, rain, rain gear, or the National Park Service. It’s exhausting far more often than it is charming. (In retrospect, it explains why On the Beaten Path would be published so quickly thereafter. Clearly, the publishers thought “cranky misanthrope on the Appalachian Trail” was a license to print money.)

2024 read #38: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

280 pages

Published 1974

Read from March 13 to March 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.

In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.

The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.

At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:

For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. 

From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.

I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.

I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:

Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.

2024 read #1: The Animals of My Earth School by Mildred Kiconco Barya.

The Animals of My Earth School by Mildred Kiconco Barya

81 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 1 to January 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

A rich and wondrous book of ecopoetics, The Animals of My Earth School weaves and lingers to listen to animals both delicate and vast. Ants are as important as gazelles, and both have much to impart if we cared to be quiet long enough to hear them — lessons on sex and loneliness, society and control, birth and nurturing, persuasion and predation. Human existence feels ungainly in comparison, an essential something left behind, perhaps, when we lost our tails.

Animals bring color and sound into our lives, a vitality human technology cannot match. “Do they have any cares,” Barya asks in “Why I Wake Early,” “or is this / what it means to belong to the Universe?”

A running list of particular favorites:

“Giant Stag Beetles”

“The World Is Necessary, Even for Little Ants”

“Locusts”

“Heads Are Unnecessary for Copulation”

“Moon Dog”

“City of Antelope”

“The Heart, the Heart, the Hunger”

“The Lost Bull”

“The Human-headed Lion Seduces Three Lambs”

“Falling in Love”

“Little Wren”

“Factors”

“Dream of Lizard Solidarity”

“The Hyena”

2023 read #153: Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sebastien Steyer.

Earth Before the Dinosaurs by Sebastien Steyer

Translated by Chris Spence

Illustrated by Alain Bénéteau

Foreword by Carl Zimmer

181 pages

Published 2009 (English translation published 2012)

Read from December 11 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

I always despair at the general apathy toward science. Public apathy flows into a feedback loop with publishers’ capitalist calculations: amateur interest in scientific primers is sporadic to nonexistent, thus few of them get published for a general audience, thus there’s no way for the public to learn basic science. Plus, with any introductory text in a fast-moving field like paleontology, there’s always the probability that it’ll be outdated within a few years.

I’ve long been interested in the tetrapods (and the ecosystems) that evolved before the dinosaurs, but outside of a few books like Beasts Before Us, there really aren’t any popular introductions. I don’t know enough to know what parts of Earth Before the Dinosaurs might already be outdated — though 2009 feels like a long time ago, in paleontology years, so the concern was hard to avoid as I read it.

Whether it’s because of the original author or because of translation, the text alternates between patronizing and densely technical. The book belabors the importance of using precisely defined terminology, instead of lazy pop science metaphors like “missing link” and “transitional fossil,” yet ironically throws around a ton of jargon without defining it. (I know what sarcopterygians and temnospondyls are, for example. but I’ve been obsessed with evolution and paleontology for thirty years or more.)

Steyer’s central topic is evolutionary relationships, so we get an entire chapter on embryology but not much at all about my primary interest, which is paleoecology. 

The best part of the book, by far, is the luscious artwork by Alain Bénéteau. It amply makes up for any deficiencies of the writing and structure of the book.

2023 read #140: A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick.

A History of Plants in Fifty Fossils by Paul Kenrick

160 pages

Published 2020

Read November 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a coffee table book comprising photographs of plant fossils, each with a page or two of descriptive text linking it to some wider topic in botany, evolutionary history, and ecology. Make no mistake: I read this to inflate my book numbers. With a month left in the year, I’m pushing myself to read 150 books in 2023. Maybe even 153, which would break my adult record for most books in one year. (My all-time record, 183, which I hit as a teen in 1996 or 1997, is well beyond my present attention span.)

All that aside, this is a perfectly unremarkable introductory text for the reader who might be curious enough to visit a museum and actually read the placards, but hasn’t had a science class since high school. To illustrate the level of information in this book, the introduction begins: “It’s not easy being a plant.” It’s no Otherlands, but then again, it never set out to be.

The photographs, of course, are the main attraction. They’re frequently stunning, as fossils so regularly are. And this is a whole book of them. Can’t go wrong with that.

2023 read #137: Forest Walking by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst.

Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst

206 pages

Published 2022 (some portions originally published as Gebrauchsanweisung für den Wald in 2017, translated by Jane Billinghurst)

Read from November 24 to November 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

I received this book from my partner R for Yule last year, and it's been migrating up and down my to-read stack ever since. It’s the perfect time of year for a read like this, though. Late November is when the forest winds down for the year. Even when atmospheric carbon makes for 80⁰F days, the leaves are mostly gone, the few that remain plinko-ing down bare branches. It's a time to think of spring, to meditate on the life that we (as a species) have not yet managed to eradicate.

This book is shallower than I’d hoped, but charming nonetheless. It rambles through sensory experience, brief anecdote, and science tidbit, very much like a gentle walk through the woods. It’s clearly directed at a general audience, the sort of readers who maybe have a vague fondness for nature but haven't spent much time in forest themselves. The “In Closing” section summarizes Walking as an “appetizer.”

I can’t tell whether it’s because of this intended audience, because of translation, or because most of the book is written in second person, but at times Walking’s voice is reminiscent of 1950s primers for young readers. Here’s a sample line: “Does it sound odd to you that tree roots breathe?” There’s just a smidgen of “kindly uncle welcoming the nieces and nephews to the family cabin” condescension in there. (I recently got a copy of my childhood staple, The Stars by H. A. Rey, so perhaps that’s why the 1950s association is so vivid right now.) The result isn’t as informative as one might hope from the subtitle, but makes a nice way to wile away the dim hours after November sunset.

2023 read #69: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte

Illustrations by Todd Marshall and Sarah Shelley

484 pages

Published 2022

Read from June 8 to June 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve been wary of this book ever since I read Brusatte’s disappointing The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. One person I know found this book mediocre, and encouraged me to read Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs instead. However, there just haven’t been enough books about the evolutionary radiation of mammals — there’s no way I wouldn’t have picked up this book eventually.

Thankfully, the breezy, almost flippant “these aren’t your dad’s dinosaurs” style that made me roll my eyes at Brusatte’s Rise and Fall is somewhat more subdued here, making for blander but less patronizing prose. (That said, I need Brusatte to stop referring to DNA phylogenetic reconstructions as a “paternity test.”) Not even at its best, however, does this book compare to Elsa Panciroli’s excellent Beasts Before Us. Brusatte maxes out at a serviceable level of pop science journalism, and presents a greatest-hits skim through synapsid history rather than any cohesive, ecosystem-centered overview. He consigns much space to pocket biographies of paleontologists while skimming over vast subject areas — whole eras of life — in just a few pages.

That’s the kind of pop science that sells, I suppose. The public loves to read about personalities; no science book, sadly, is complete without various eccentric scientists. But where Panciroli doesn’t hesitate to call out scientists of the past for their horrendous beliefs and practices — I’m looking at you, Robert Broom — Brusatte maintains the polite veneer of older pop science books. He simply doesn’t talk about it. He does that whole “We just don’t discuss politics with Grandpa” act, thereby sweeping the white supremacist foundations of Western science under the rug.

I was pleased to find that Mammals is a hefty volume; despite the modern taste for human interest anecdotes, there was still room for a modicum of actual science to enjoy in this pop science book. Much of said information is relegated to the endnotes, of course, but it’s nice to have nonetheless. (Brusatte even uses the endnotes to acknowledge a little bit of Robert Broom’s shittiness.) If only more of it had filtered into the text!

2023 read #53: Oak and Ash and Thorn by Peter Fiennes.

Oak and Ash and Thorn: The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain by Peter Fiennes

280 pages

Published 2017

Read from May 15 to May 16

Rating: 4 out of 5

By the close of the ’00s, at the latest, it had become depressing to read ecological books from the 1990s and earlier. After a litany of losses and dire warnings for the future, such books would always close on a note of optimism — there’s still time! The worst has not yet come to pass! We just need to act now!

Living in a time when worse things have (and continued to) come to pass, we know all those optimistic codas added up to an exercise in comforting self-delusion. Capitalism would never be diverted from its consumption, its heedless self-absorption, its global destruction. No one with any real power ever acted to help. We’re all going down with the ship.

The pace of destruction, in fact, has worsened to the point that, today, even a book from 2017 feels hopelessly dated and woefully optimistic. Fiennes withholds no contempt from Britain’s Conservative government, and yet within the space of six years from this publication the Tories would unleash fresh ecological devastation and capitalistic horrors beyond anything documented here. They’re close to axing all environmental protections. Every day ancient woodlands fall, and now sewage is getting released untreated into Britain’s waterways, because deregulation, because Brexit, because capitalism. We’ve regressed to the days of industrial barons exploiting and poisoning the people and the countryside without any pretense of public safeguards. It’s a jarring reminder of the accelerating growth of fascism here in the “find out” phase of capitalism’s fuck around history.

Fascism is always the last bulwark of defense for capitalist systems in decline; now the entire world is in decline. “The authorities don’t like forests,” Fiennes writes in a chapter that began with Robin Hood, “because they don’t like places where people can hide.” Yet another layer in the long history of authoritarianism and its antipathy toward the world. Is it any wonder that capital never stepped up to curb the devastation it wreaked?

I’ve wanted to read this book since I first heard of it late in 2018. Since then, so much has changed… so much in the world has broken. I cried a few times reading this, wondering how much of the already impoverished and paved-over island ecosystem Fiennes described has been further destroyed. The very ash trees of the title, already dying when he wrote, are nearly gone.

Fiennes’ writing is often more conversational than poetic, rambling almost stream-of-consciousness through locations, literary quotations, concepts, asides. It’s no match for Helen Macdonald or Robert Macfarlane at their best, but whose prose is? I don’t want to give the wrong impression, though: this book is not lacking for beauty. The chapter where he condenses 7018 years of woodland history into 3509 words — two years for every word — is a marvel of wordcraft and structuring, offering evocative yet concise descriptions of the bygone wildwood, “a kingdom of trees” where people are outnumbered by wolves as recently as the Neolithic, and its accelerating diminution and destruction. Fiennes also excels at conveying details of atmosphere and at character sketches, the places and people from childhood rendered with a palpable sense of what has been lost, both natural and personal.

Really, this is a book of mourning more than it is a celebration of what remains or a sermon for its preservation. A note of “it’s too late, enjoy what life you can” pervades just beneath its pages. And perhaps that’s more honest, less willfully naïve, than the ecological optimism that came before it. If the powers-that-be are heedless, well… we’ll have to make them heed, any way we can, or else we all perish.

2023 read #33: My Beloved Brontosaurus by Riley Black.

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs by Riley Black

241 pages

Published 2013

Read from March 25 to March 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

A pretty conventional “dinosaurs aren’t like what they used to be!” pop science book, largely along the same lines as Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. While Black’s writing is in casual pop science mode here, and not trying to do anything fancy, it has a slight edge edge over Brusatte’s here’s-one-for-the-normies prose. Brontosaurus feels more informative and confident in the cognitive abilities of its audience, overall. There are chapters on dinosaur diseases and parasites, for example, rather than “here’s a whole chapter about T. rex!”

However, science often moves fast; ten years after publication, My Beloved Brontosaurus feels juuuust out of date enough to make me question if it was worth reading. The title itself, for example—a reference to how the genus Brontosaurus was subsumed into Apatosaurus, a metaphor to encapsulate the gulf between pop culture perceptions and ever-evolving dino science, the way that childhood’s kitschy dinosaurs were erased by refined understanding—was rendered obsolete in 2015, when a new study suggested that Brontosaurus was likely its own distinct, valid genus after all. (In all fairness to Black, she does mention a “rumor” of the then-ongoing study in the epilogue.)

Painless but inessential, that’s the vibe I’ll give it. And it’s about dinosaurs, so that always gets a generous rating from me.

2023 read #24: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Afterword by Jeanette Winterson

154 pages

Published 1977

Read March 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for years. I first learned about it in the works of Robert Macfarlane, who in all his books has been a tireless evangelist for The Living Mountain. Unsurprisingly, he appears to have been instrumental in bringing it back into print. Characteristically rambling and allusive, Macfarlane’s introductory essay insists on preparing the way for Shepherd’s words for almost thirty pages, including references -- nearly a third as long as Shepherd's entire text.

It would be difficult for any book to live up to that kind of fevered promotion. The Living Mountain, however, is an impressive book. The neglected human art of getting to know a particular place in deep, all-season detail, of finding new perspectives and new revelations in familiar grounds, of finding that Zen-like poise of bodily awareness of the elemental landscape, soars and floods through Shepherd's precise and beautiful prose.

I've never gotten to know a place as well as Shepherd got to know her native Cairngorms, but I've come close to that meditative natural transcendence often enough in the past that my body responded almost physically to her descriptions. It is a gorgeous book, equally at home with the transcendental writings of the early 20th century as it is with the modern British art of landscape essay. 

2023 read #19: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black.

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World by Riley Black

293 pages

Published 2022

Read from February 10 to February 13

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

The extinction of the dinosaurs is, to me, far and away the least interesting thing about them. That's why I avoided this book last year, when I was speeding through the likes of Beasts Before Us and Otherlands. When I learned that this book devoted much of its length to what happened in the aftermath of Chicxulub, however, I had to get my hands on it. Not nearly enough books deal with the scraggly process of ecological recovery and strange new mammalian evolution in the Paleocene.

Unexpectedly, the bulk of The Last Days is told in a speculative, dino’s-eye-view style, placing it closer in tone and vibe to Raptor Red than I anticipated. Black’s prose is what I’d consider middling pop science journalism—an improvement over Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, but not nearly as poetic and evocative as Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. Black’s best writing is also her most personal and vulnerable, exploring the parallels between the K-Pg extinction and her own personal transitions. As someone writing my own chapbook on the themes of paleontology, gender, and personal prehistories, I wish more of The Last Days had that same depth.