So many people recommended this book to me but I just didn't love it. It took me a long time to get through the first 1/3 of it. Interesting story lines and fun to see how they connected, but I'm sorry to say this one just didn't hold my interest. Too sprawling? I finished it, but it was a tough read for me. ( )

If you want your next book to be a challenge, look no further. This is a book of big ideas, too many to list. It is unusually dark and very heavy on the reader. The central theme is environmentalism, but it is a lot more than that.

While reading this my brain made a weird connection to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life. Not only because of the tree as the prevalent motif, but there is just something grandiose about these two works of art, something that will partly always remain unreachable to the audience, but you can sense that it is there. It is art pushed to the extreme, profound, but also insufferable at times. A lot is left to the interpretation of the reader.

Overstory touches on all the topics I love to read about, but it was still a hard work. It feels much longer than it actually is (around 500 pages). After the first part (Roots) that is a collection of stories through which we get to know the ten (!) main characters, things get a little complicated.
In the remaining parts of the book there are many superfluous descriptions, redundant characters and general lack of direction. Moreover, some ideas were really pushed too hard onto the reader through a black and white lens.

However, some paragraphs were so profoundly beautiful that it almost seems worth it. I kept rereading some sentences and have highlighted more paragraphs than in all the books I've read this year so far.

If the book had been edited and cleaned up a little more, I would have enjoyed it much more. It is a book you want to root for, you want everyone to read it. But, it is very inaccessible and I would be reluctant to recommend it to more casual readers. ( )

The book that got me into trees, which goes to show you the wondrous things that books can do. The Overstory seems to ask the reader to accept that trees have consciousness and can even make moral choices, and while I fully submit to the idea that life and reality are far, far more mysterious and wondrous than humans can yet understand, God bless us for trying so hard, I have my rather strong doubts about the claim. But still. Still. This novel shows us something big and true that most of us do not tend to see and that isn’t all that bad a description of great literature, it seems to me.

I feared for a long stretch of the second half of this doorstop novel that Powers was, after starting out so brilliantly with a series of character sketches linking his human creations to the natural world in ways seen and unseen, sending me off on Google searches to learn more about chestnuts and banyans and mulberries and elms, well, I feared he was descending into heavy handedness and mind closing didacticism. Jack booted police psychopaths operating in the service of corporate capital and state power may be a thing but it makes for an eye rolling scene in literature. And it seemed he was heading for a grand finish of nihilistic doomsdayism. But no, he branches off away from that future, sends out a bud of new life, that left me rising out of my chair in gratitude for this mighty work.

Might should be a 5 star then, but considering my enthusiasm for it hit a drag for a couple hundred pages, it gets a 4. For now. ( )

Like the mycelium that wrap around tree roots beneath the soil, providing a symbiotic transfer of nutrients, the stories Powers conjure rise to form a single overstory of grand limbs that only nature could conceive. ( )

Have you ever heard the old saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees.”

In his novel, “The Overstory,” Richard Powers kind of turns the saying upside down. He wants you to focus on the trees themselves.

Part polemic on the destruction of biodiversity, part Thoreauvian love-letter to the backwoods, The Overstory is nothing if not in the tradition of apocalyptic fiction, although something of a quiet, mystical apocalypse.

And it is very disquieting because there’s no happy ending.

Here’s what I get from the story: human development is killing the goose that laid the golden egg, our ancient old-growth forests. This much is pretty well a given.

So how do we get out of this mess?

1. Non-violent civil disobedience. We stop the clear-cutting by getting in the way of the saws.
2. We educate the masses, make them understand that pulling up the forests now is short-term gain for long-term pain
3. We follow this path to its logical conclusion, but along the way we “bank” our biodiversity and wait until the day when civilization has done its worst and re-build the world from its DNA up.
4. Why not encourage people to substitute their physical desires with cyber pleasures. Instead of making it easy to fly halfway across the world releasing tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, we give them a VR helmet and tell them to fly there virtually. Use technology to find ways not to clear cut our forests.
5. We go to the substantive roots of our legal system, the right to own property, and prevent people from disturbing the commons.

Like I said above, there is no happy ending and none of the above solutions proves feasible. Mankind doesn’t reform itself and the author, in my opinion, stalls about two-thirds of the way through his story about where to take his characters.

So much of what he feeds us about the trees is now pretty much based on scientific knowledge.

Trees do communicate amongst each other. They provide common defences against biological invaders. They exchange minerals for sugars with fungi. And they have a remarkable hydrolic system for getting water up trees hundreds of feet high.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic it’s that there’s a lot more we can do virtually that we don’t need to do in person. We can do without literally millions of polluting car trips to and from an office if we put our minds to it. ( )