recognito

Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (for genarti ) is the second book I started in 2023 I finished last month! Like Middlemarch, I liked the book very much, and I was surprised by the ending. 

In this case, it's because I got got by the sheer amount of backmatter! I thought I had about half the book left... no. Around 60 pages. Idiot. It's likely, though, if I had finished it in 2023, I wouldn't have written it up, so who's winning NOW??? 

I largely found the book delightful. I found Sheldrake particularly good at structure, a skill I desperately wish more science writers had, and which makes him very successful at writing science. He was able to, particularly chapter by chapter, structure the book around science-as-she-is-lived, following the complications, inversions, changes, misses, and upsets that characterize close attention to the study of any subject. It was such a pleasure to follow him down a line of thought and study, and then have him raise a question that undercut it, introduce a new study that changed the thinking, or reveal a limitation in the study or studies that I wouldn't have thought to consider. His understanding of understanding as a not just a constantly-changing, often-wrong activity, but of the drama of that activity, and that that drama is best relayed through making the reader re-experience of it... I loved it every time, from his discussion of how it's completely impossible to study mycorrhizal networks in a lab (not enough variables) or in the field (too many variables) to his clear impatience with the notion of tree "nurseries," which to him seems embarrassingly forgetful of that fungi are also living organisms with needs, like a plant-world version of androcentrism.

Many of my delights in the book were also in his attention to metaphor, which also serves him extremely well as a science writer and history-of-science writer. From the beginning, he pays close attention to how the metaphors used to describe fungi affect how they were seen and studied, from the conception of a "parasitic" partner in lichens, to the idea of symbiosis, to the idea of networks. He interrogates the terms used by contemporary scientists, such as "market" or "supply and demand," and also of the power of inverting expected metaphors, like when he calls a company that makes building material out of mycelium "the industrial equivalent of a Macrotermes termite mound," asks if yeasts domesticated US, or points out that the existence of in-plant fungi should trouble our understanding of what an individual plant is, or if one exists. Meanwhile, he is fully aware--and seems thrilled by--that it is impossible to do the work of science without metaphors. That we come to understanding via comparison doesn't seem to be a drawback, for Sheldrake... His enthusiasm for fungi, and for the study of fungi, seems only deepened by his sense that our understanding will be in constant revision. 

Sheldrake, in fact, so communicates his enthusiasms that when, at the end of the book, he states that he plans to make a beer out of pulping one of copies of the book (fermentation) and growing oysters on another, it's barely even a surprise. Of course he does. (And, per his Instagram, did.) This kind of excitement made him an excellent guy to spend time with, although I think it may have contributed to my least favorite parts of the book. There are moments where Sheldrake indulges, it seems to me, in a kind of grandiosity, most commonly at the beginning and endings of chapters. It's not, so much, that I don't think the subject deserves grandiosity, but that it sometimes seemed attached to personal anecdote, or taped onto a chapter to remind the reader there was a reason to keep reading about mushrooms. I don't know if it was an authorial choice or an editorial one, but it frequently made me roll my eyes. Please, sir! I am bought in! That said, it could be that after reading it once, I'd roll my eyes less, and just think happily to myself, Yes that's right. How will the study of fungi expand our understanding of ourselves????? 

Finally, a few favorite factoids: 

• Some lichens don't live on anything. They just blow around, like symbiotic tumbleweed
• PENICILLIN WAS CROWDSOURCED
• when fungi (Ophiocordyceps) take over ants it becomes up to forty percent of the ant's biomass BUT ISN'T IN THEIR BRAIN 

Ok I can't leave it there. Too horrible. 

I really liked the book, and I was honestly disappointed when I realized my foolishness about backmatter. More please!