Every once in a while, I like to delve into a topic in which I'm not particularly interested; after all, as a translator, I never know when a tiny nugget of highly specific information might prove invaluable in identifying and understanding an allusion. This explains how I came to read The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger. I was immediately charmed by the rich, dynamic language used by the author, a former journalist who, numbed to the impacts of the environmental disasters on which she'd been reporting, quit her job to "think about plants full-time." Here's an example:
In this ruined global moment, plants offer a window into a verdant way of thinking. For us to truly be part of this world, to be awake to its roiling aliveness, we need to understand plants. They suffuse out atmosphere with the oxygen we breathe, and they quite literally build our bodies out of sugars they spin from sunlight. They made the ingredients that first allowed our lives to blink into existence at all.
In lush though accessible prose, she provides snippets of her conversations with a plethora of passionate plant people, recounts some of her trips in the field, and records her own observations, covering topics such as hearing, memory, communication, interspecies relationships and mimicry amongst the wonderful world of flora. Her enthusiasm for recent developments in scientific knowledge as well as for exciting discoveries still to come is infectious. Definitely a non-fiction page-turner!
Just as I enjoy rereading favourite novels, I also tend to revisit podcasts after an interval of a few years. I used to be a devotee of "The Slow Home Podcast" by Brooke McAlary, which she co-hosted with her husband Ben, as much for their chats on all things slow as for the gentle, calming atmosphere they created. I always felt simultaneously invigorated and soothed at the end of each instalment. Last week, after learning that they now had an equally delightful "plodcast" called "The Tortoise," I downloaded all of the episodes, listened, and was absolutely ecstatic that despite the new format, the old magic is still there.