Abbie Book Group May 21 at 7 p.m.

The next Abbie Greenleaf Library Book Group read will be The Overstory by Richard Powers. Books are now available at the library. Discussion will take place on Tuesday, May 21 at 7 p.m. 

In addition to The Overstory we will also have available copies of the nonfiction book The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wholleben. Patrons have pointed out that this book is fascinating and is an excellent compliment to The Overstory.

"The Overstory by Richard Powers, a sprawling epic about the wonderful life and alarming death of trees, has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The award marks a new high point in the growing prominence of environmental novels.

The Overstory is a complex novel that begins with several apparently unrelated stories about people throughout the country and across the centuries: There’s a Norwegian immigrant who travels to Iowa and begins homesteading before the Civil War. There’s also a video game pioneer, an intellectual-property lawyer, an amateur actress and a soldier in the Vietnam War whose life is saved when a 300-year-old banyan catches his body falling from a plane. “He owes his own life to a tree,” Powers writes.

That, in short, is the point of The Overstory: We all owe our lives to trees, these massive air purifiers and soil conditioners that have made human civilization possible. . . ."  excerpt from the Washington Post