The Overstory is, quite frankly, a very long book. Both in page length, and otherwise, it takes a long time to get through. It is also a heavy book, one that in the context of current day deforestation left me with a pit in my stomach. It’s also a book worth reading, no matter how long or how desolate it left me. The book starts off with little vignettes of all the characters, providing a backstory for each of them. Having not read the synopsis, […]

Galatea 2.2 – 4/5 This is a reread from when I was in grad school, so something close to 20 years. I’d first heard of this book and Richard Powers from a selection being anthologized in the Norton American lit. It’s a weird book to anthologize because of how cohesive the entirety of the book is and how dependent it is on context. But Richard Powers doesn’t really write short fiction and they must have wanted him in there. The book is not exactly semi-autobiographical, […]

My first interaction with this book came from another Richard Powers book, Galatea 2.2, in which the narrator, Richard Powers spends his time lamenting having to give up this book to publication and how much he wants to go back and live with them. That book has some similar focus to this one. In a lot of ways this book is a novel version of Escher, Godel, Bach, which looks at complex systems, number sequences, spirals, patterns, and chaos. This book does the same thing. The […]