Looking for a summer read that’s different from the typical mystery, romance novel, or action story you usually take with you on vacation? Here are three climate-and-tree-related books I’ve read recently that you might consider grabbing. I listened to all of them as audiobooks, so if you’re a fan of “reading by ear” during your summer travels, take note. All three are excellent books, so consider picking up one or all of them this summer!
Discovering the Spiritual Wisdom of Trees
by Beth Norcross & Leah Rampy; 2025
While I can’t speak for anyone else, the best part of a vacation for me is being amidst a lot of trees. There are few places I feel as centered and calm as when I’m walking down a forest path or through a pine needle-strewn understory. This summer, I will spend a good chunk of my vacation exploring 50 acres of northern Wisconsin woodlands, and I imagine this book will be on my mind while I do so.
Norcross & Rampy have helped many people experience nature over the past two decades through their work at The Center for Spirituality in Nature. Through the simple practices they encourage readers to do, they offer ways for all of us to learn to see the world around us more clearly. You’ll learn some tree science, gain a deeper understanding of how ecosystems work, consider why increasing the number of trees is such a critical part of the fight against climate change, and much more. As you spend time in nature and use these simple practices, you’ll discover ways to explore your emotions deeply, connect with others, live purposefully, care for trees, and experience the Divine through awe and wonder.
I really enjoyed this book and plan to read it again soon, though I definitely found the audio version to be just a bit too calming to listen to during my commute. The “spirituality” of the book is not tied specifically to any particular faith tradition; instead, the book asks you to consider spiritual insights that are commonly found in many traditions. It’s highly readable and engaging, though you will get the most out of it if you take your time with it and actually spend time with some of the gentle giants around you. Since trees are living things that connect with so many other species, I could see this book being one worth reading with a group of friends so that you can process your experiences and insights within a community.
The Overstory
by Richard Powers; 2018
The Overstory was the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner in the fiction category, which perhaps gives you a clue about what serious readers think about it. Indeed, it’s going to take you a while to get through this novel, since the book is a hefty 512 pages long. Like a lot of prize-winning books, this one has its share of both fans and detractors. Obviously I (mostly) count myself in the former since I’m recommending it here.
The book is hard to summarize in a short space, since it contains nine stories that gradually span from the chestnut blight of the early 1900s to a contemporary multiplayer online world-building game. The stories occasionally intersect, but mostly the reader is encouraged to focus more on the thematic intersections. Like most of the novels I most love, it’s a tome that is filled with ideas, which at their core have to do with the ways people and trees relate to one another and what happens if we ignore or downplay our deep relationship with them. Often the book feels more like a work of creative nonfiction, since while there’s not a lot of dialogue, there is a good bit of educational content throughout. That content covers topics related to forest ecology, land management, our climate crisis, and many others.
In an interview, Richard Powers enumerated some of the questions the characters and readers will encounter. “What chance does activism have against the relentless appetite of capitalism? Can violence be excused in the defense of the last few patches of land that haven’t yet been lost to the violence of “development?” What difference do individual actions make? What is the best thing we can do for the world of the future? Is meaning really a private, synthetic, and subjective thing, or might it be found out there, in living processes that predate human beings by billions of years? What does it mean, to learn that trees turn out to be social beings, networked together underground, cooperating and coordinating their behaviors with one another? How would it feel to think like a mountain or like a forest? Can we free ourselves from the grip of groupthink, the parochial narrowness of human time, and the colonizing consensus of “the real world?” Why are there so few non-humans in our literary stories? What is it in us human beings that has led us to believe that we are separate from and sovereign over all the rest of creation? How can we become indigenous again? What would it take to get us to come back home?”
If these questions feel like the type of thing you enjoy wrestling with in a novel, you’ll probably enjoy it. But if you can, I’d suggest reading this one in print form. For me, the reader’s attempts at character accents were highly distracting. More importantly, though, I really wanted to read this book with a pen and highlighter at hand.
Savi and the Memory Keeper
by Bijal Vachharajani; 2021
Have you ever had the experience of a book dropping into your awareness at exactly the right time? Savi and the Memory Keeper was that kind of book for me, and I devoured most of it in a day. It’s a YA (Young Adult) novel about a girl’s special relationship with plants, especially a particular fig tree. But like a lot of great YA fiction, there’s a whole lot going on in this beautiful and moving tale.
After her father dies unexpectedly, Savi and her family move to Shajarpur, India. It’s a place where everyone is always happy and the weather is always perfect, yet things are far from ideal for Savi. In the midst of her grief and adjustments to a new school, Savi discovers she has an unusual ability: she can communicate with all 42 of her father’s plants (which are not thriving under her care) plus she can talk with the huge fig tree behind her school. In time, she develops friendships with other youth from her school with various special abilities to connect with the natural world…just in time to uncover a secretive group in Shajarpur who are decidedly not “friends of the earth.”
At its core, the book is about the grief we all live with – conscious and unconscious – when it comes to our changing, warming planet. Like The Overstory, it gradually raises difficult questions for the reader. How is it that we can and should respond when the changes are gradual yet significant? What sort of natural memory are we losing? What factors cause us to decentralize the importance of caring for the earth, and can we reverse course? What role do friendships play in helping us to be whole during our times of grief, whether it’s the grief that comes with our deepest losses or the growing eco-grief so many of us feel? When nature seems to lose out to “development,” is there still hope?
The novel explores the very real science behind the connections that trees and other living things in an ecosystem have with one another, so you just might learn a thing or two along the way. It’s the kind of book that could be excellent to listen to as a family during a long summer road trip, as the audio version of the book is very well done. (Note, though, that it is a YA book, with a handful of salty words.) Alternatively, you might read it with a group of friends who enjoy a bit of magical wonder and who deeply know what it’s like to lose someone or something important.
By the way, the author has a Masters in Environment Security and Peace, with a specialization in climate change from the University for Peace. She has written at least 24 books, most of which are environmentally-themed books for children, so be sure to check to see if your local library carries other works by her.