New website coming
this spring!
You are warmly invited to HTL's Nature Book Club, with Rama Hamarneh, PhD. The book club provides a space to discuss books related to nature, together as a community!
Several times a year, we will meet on Zoom to discuss a book we have read, and the work's relationship to nature. We will explore multiple aspects of nature in literature - represented through multiple genres and authors from around the globe.
Next Meeting:
Tuesday, April 1 at 7pm on Zoom
The Zoom link for each meeting will be sent out to the book club email list a few days before the meeting. The book club is free to attend, and all are welcome.
For April, we're reading Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
In her first book, renowned forest ecologist Suzanne Simard invites us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths – that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Simard writes – in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways – how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies – and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
This book is available through the Upper Hudson Library System, as an ebook and audiobook on Libby and Hoopla through the library, at Market Block Books, and through other book sellers.
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Previous Nature Book Club selections:
The Lord God Made Them All by James Herriot
The Nature Principle by Richard Louv
Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe by Carl Safina
Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
The Life and Death of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot
Beaverland by Rachel Philip
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
What an Owl Knows: the New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone
Forest Walking by Peter Wohlleben and Jane Billinghurst
All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot
The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild by Thomas Seeley
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World Alison H. Deming and Lauret Savoy, eds.
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori
"For me, nature has always provided inspiration for both writing and reading."
- Nature Book Club Leader Rama Hamarneh, PhD.
Rama is a published writer with a PhD in Comparative Literature. She works as a staff adviser at RPI, is on the community committee for Poesten Kill Bends Preserve in Troy, and Vice President of the HTL Board of Directors.
Questions about Nature Book Club? Contact Dan at dan@rensselaerplateau.org.