Weird Science

“Solo,” by Rana Dasgupta, is not nature fiction exactly, but it is a structurally unique novel of science, music and imagination. Dasgupta’s debut follows the dispiriting real life and vivid daydreams of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man. The chapters in the first section — or movement — are named for chemical elements. Those in the second section bear the names of sea creatures. Together the two sections read like a beguiling experiment.

Man vs. Nature

You’ve read books by Bill McKibben and John McPhee, giants in the field of personal writing about nature. Now you should add the work of another contemporary nature writer who has built a career around landscape writing. For more than 30 years, Rick Bass has written both fiction and nonfiction about the collision between humans and the wild. Like much of his work, some stories in his latest collection, “For a Little While,” are set in northwest Montana. Piercing and direct, Bass’s stories are populated with independent-minded people living in beautiful, unpredictable environments.

Tree-Huggers

A sturdy and inspiring pair of contemporary books about trees would make a good discussion pair for your book group. In “The Hidden Life of Trees,” the German forester Peter Wohlleben anthropomorphizes trees — firs are “crafty,” beeches are competitive — even (convincingly) making the case that trees are social beings who create families that share resources and care for their young.

Eric Rutkow’s history of the United States, “American Canopy,” has a unique point of view: How have trees and forests shaped the country? From industry to infrastructure, from urban development to conservation, Rutkow traces how the pines, white oaks, giant firs and orange groves across the nation’s landscape influenced the way its citizens have lived.

Zoo Stories

Immersive devotionals to single species have proliferated in recent years.

In “The Soul of an Octopus,” Sy Montgomery travels as far as French Polynesia to learn about the surprising intelligence and unusual personalities of the eight-armed predatory mollusk. Montgomery’s enthusiasm for her mysterious subject shows: She even greets octopus slime with good cheer. Mixed in among the book’s many literary and scientific charms is an unexpected artistic one. In the lower right-hand corners of the pages lies a long series of octopus illustrations. Thumb the pages rapidly to make a flip-book and watch the invertebrate swim.

In her small, exquisite book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating,” Elisabeth Tova Bailey observes a mollusk closer to home. While she recovers from a serious illness Bailey watches a snail that lives in a terrarium next to her bed. Bailey follows the eating, sleeping, reproductive habits of her gastropod with growing admiration and affection, supporting her own observations with illuminating snippets of biology.

Name Calling

The quest to name the earth’s dazzling multitudes of plants and animals is the subject of “Naming Nature,” by Carol Kaesuk Yoon. The science of taxonomy began 250 years ago with Linnaeus. Yoon’s wide-ranging book reveals not just the history behind it, but also the remarkable way the quest to classify every living thing reveals so much about what it means to be human.

Yours truly,

Match Book

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