Botany of Desire

“Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World” by Michael Pollan is the first non-fiction book to make my Bread and Butter Books list.  As a reminder, books that make this personal list must have an excellent foundation or plot (bread) and language and writing style (butter) to reinforce that plot.  I never thought that a non-fiction book could have a plot, a purpose maybe, but not really a plot to drive the reader to find out what happens next, to find out more about a subject instead of a character.  Pollan has done a remarkable job creating this, somehow making real plants into a character that the reader can care about.

“Botany of Desire” tells a dramatic story of intrigue and the mystery surrounding botany.  He begins with a discussion and history of how the apple became an American staple, then researches the beauty and the economics of the tulip, then discusses the controversy surrounding cannabis, and finally debates the farming methods of the potato.  The story isn’t just about these plants; it’s about people trying to control these plants for their own survival whether that be for communication with others as in the case with Johnny Appleseed and his magnificent stories, appreciating and capitalizing on the beauty of the tulip, reaching a higher state of consciousness to better understand the world and our place in it, or simply growing crops for food.  This is a book that weaves these themes in and out of the discussion of plants while tying them all to the idea of human control: Apollo (logic) vs. Dionysus (chaos) in the Greek world of gods. 

Pollan says, “Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject.  That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”  Humans may be at the top of the food chain, but is it possible that this was a manipulation, that humans are only there because plants want them to be?  Maybe the world is even more complicated than we thought.  Maybe even humans are both subject and object.

Pollan develops these ideas with rich imagery and questions providing a smooth and buttery experience for the reader.  For example, he asks “How astonishing is it that we happen to inhabit a universe in which this quality of vanilla-ness-this bean! happens also to reside?  How easily it could have been otherwise, and just where would we be (where would chocolate be?) without that singular irreplaceable note, that middle C on the Scale of Archetypal Flavors?...” I can practically taste the vanilla-ness as he mentions it and then just as easily contrast it with chocolate-ness all the while picturing it on a great piano keyboard and realizing that without this flavor, this note, we wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.  I never realized how important one flavor might be and how it might determine how we experience other flavors.  This also left me wondering and desiring to taste those other Archetypal Flavors.  What might they be and where might I find them?

While it is non-fiction, “Botany of Desire” is definitely a bread and butter read.  It is a nontraditional story of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the plant world.  If you don’t believe, me you should read it to find out how.

Gone Girl

"Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn is an amazingly written story about a husband and wife, their relationship, their struggles with self-discovery both individually and as a couple, and a missing person case.  I’m afraid to mention much more about the plot because it’s a mystery and I don’t want to give anything away.

The writing, the butter, is what makes this story, the bread, captivating.  Even though the bread is moldy and leaves a bad, rotten taste in your mouth at times, the butter makes it worth continuing.  And yet you know if you continue eating you will be sick, continue reading and you won’t trust humanity. Flynn writes from both Nick’s point of view and Amy’s point of view, so that the reader feels that there is a complete picture, two sides of the same story.  I was skeptical at how this would work for a mystery book, but because of that skepticism, I think that it strengthened the mystery and my longing to understand each character and their parts in the events that transpired.

From Amy’s journal about her parents - “They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish-expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.”

From Amy’s journal about her husband – “Nick responds to adoration.  I just wish it felt more equal. My brain is so busy with Nick thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head Nicknicknicknicknick! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides.  I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.”

The imagery that each of Amy’s journal entries create is brilliant.  The reader can picture the events the setting and the people exactly as Amy pictured them.  This can create an alliance between the reader and Amy until the next chapter when the author presents Nick’s thoughts.

From Nick’s thoughts – “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head.”

Also from Nick’s thoughts “Go's voice was warm and crinkly even as she gave this cold news: Our indomitable mother was dying. Our dad was nearly gone—his (nasty) mind, his (miserable) heart, both murky as he meandered toward the great gray beyond. But it looked like our mother would beat him there.”

The description presented in Nick’s thoughts much like the imagery in Amy’s journal provide facts, at least facts as seen by Nick, describing what the reader is lead to believe is the same story.  These facts appear slowly in Nick’s chapters of thoughts and experiences as the story unfolds a depiction of two very lost people.

While the book is disturbing at best, it is still a bread and butter book as both the story and the language are intriguing and captivating.   I recommend reading it over watching the movie.  While the movie is equally if not more disturbing because of the visual component, the imagery and the description are not as vivid and easily captured on screen.  Word of warning – the movie is not a date movie not matter what you might hear, but it shouldn’t be watched alone either. On that dire note – happy reading!