"[Trees and plants] perceive, relate, and communicate; they exercise various behaviors. They cooperate, make decisions, learn, and remember – qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom, intelligence. By noting how trees, animals, and even fungi – any and all nonhuman species – have this agency, we can acknowledge that they deserve as much regard as we accord ourselves."
Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, 2021
"Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest's underland is a new language altogether – one that doesn't automatically convert it to our own use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi... We need to speak in spores."
Robert MacFarlane, Underland, 2019
Recently finished 'Greta & Valdin', 2021, by Rebecca K Reilly. I almost DNF'd this but very glad I didn't. For me, the sibling characters developed like real family – initially they seemed self-absorbed and frustrating, but then I became deeply invested and needed things to be okay for them. The book became a comforting space where things could go wrong and the world didn't end.
Recently reread 'The Eyre Affair', 2001, by Jasper Fforde. Was a lot of fun. The main character, Thursday Next, is a brave, if not a little impulsive, detective, without the tropes (Fforde subverts a lot of them). There's dodos, metatextuality, time-play, and bucket loads of imagination.
Tammie