MNA Online Book Club — The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

Join us online Sunday December 14th at 2 p.m. to discuss The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

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Tentative future books are:
Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide by Keith Payne
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Wisdom of Plagues by Donald McNeil

If you are interested in any of these titles, or have other book suggestions, please message me or leave a comment below.