What We’re Reading for Taurus Season

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Living at the border between life and non-life, fungi use diverse cocktails of potent enzymes and acids to disassemble some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, turning rock into soil and wood into compost, allowing plants to grow.

What’s more, fungi not only help create soil, but they also send out networks of tubes that enmesh roots and link plants together in the “Wood Wide Web.” 

And we can partner with fungi to heal the damage we’ve done to the planet. Fungi can be used to make sustainable building materials and wearable leather, but they can do so much more. Fungi can digest many stubborn and toxic pollutants from crude oil to human-made polyurethane plastics and explosive TNT. They grow food from renewable sources: edible mushrooms can grow on anything from plant waste to cigarette butts.

Merlin Sheldrake’s revelatory introduction to this world will show us how fungi, and our relationships with them, are more astonishing than we could have imagined.

This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayon

Briseis has a gift: with a single touch she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms.

But their new home is sinister in ways they never expected.

It comes with a mysterious set of instructions, a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world, and generations of secrets. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it.

From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes an enchanting story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader.

Beyond epiphenomena like “Cop Killer” and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. 

On a 90’s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones.

But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.