Today I had the great good fortune to hear David George Haskell read from and speak about his newest book, The Songs of Trees. You may know that I feel a deep connection with trees, so of course as soon as I learned about this book I knew I had to attend the talk, held at our wonderful local independent bookstore, Parnassus Books.

The Songs of Trees tells the stories of twelve trees from around the world, including one from Tennessee (he teaches at the University of the South, so not completely surprising). His first book, The Forest Unseen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is a meditation on a square meter of old-growth Tennessee forest, which he compared to a Tibetan sand mandala in a fascinating talk at the National Academy of Sciences. All great stuff that you might enjoy, too!

What I'm really loving about Professor Haskell's writing is how poetic it is and how it makes science accessible and interesting for the layperson. So far The Songs of Trees reminds me a lot of Mary Oliver's nature essays in Upstream - high praise indeed coming from me!