Fungi, and how they make our worlds.
Merlin Sheldrake's 2020 book is the best popular introduction to modern mycology in print. It manages to be scientifically rigorous, personally warm and often genuinely funny — a combination almost no science writing achieves.
The material ranges across mycorrhizal networks, lichen symbiosis, fungal decomposition, psychoactive fungi and the industrial and ecological applications of mycology. Sheldrake himself is a working researcher; the book reads as though a serious scientist decided to write about his field for adults who happen not to specialize in it.
What survives after reading it is a considerably enlarged sense of what a living organism can be, and of how much of the biosphere runs on relationships we have only recently begun to understand.
How to Change Your Mind — Michael Pollan
A journalist's careful entry into the psychedelic revival.
The Master and His Emissary — Iain McGilchrist
The divided brain and the making of the Western world.
The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley
The essay that gave a movement its vocabulary.
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