Gathering Moss

I wanted to love this book but unfortunately the way I read and think is completely dissonant from it. Probably one of those books that I should not have picked up as an Audiobook, because I also did not particularly enjoy the narration style.

It's hard to put into words something so subjective, but I think I grew weary of the fairy-tale tone - which I'm sure comes naturally to the author. My skeptic and perhaps unfortunately cynic world view made it hard to go through a whole chapter without discomfort whenever the author speaks of "plants come when they're necessary" and other traditional ways of thinking about the ecosystem. I appreciate very much getting more contact with the thought process of different cultures, but I was incapable of enjoying this particular opportunity. Maybe I was just too eager to learn the science on mosses and subconsciously grew impatient any time I got anything different; I had the wrong expectations about what this read was going to be.

I'm deliberately speaking of me in this review because I don't think these are problems that lie in the book. We are simply not meant for each other, at least not as I am today. Maybe books are like mosses and this one will show up again whey it's necessary and I'm ready for it.

I've always been fascinated with micro-environments, perhaps as far back as when Brainiac shrank the city of Kandor on Krypton and Superman put it in a bottle. I see a lot of Moss when I hike, but I only know a few basic things about it. This book is a fine simple introduction to bryology. The author is a bryologist, a Native American and a great writer. The chapters discuss some aspect of moss ecology, physiology or reproduction and tie this to a story about the author's family, neighbors or tribe. A thread of respect for the environment runs through it all. The book won the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing and I recommend it to any natural historian.
(Of some interest, I noted in my review of "The Life of a Leaf" that the author stated that the velocity of a viscous fluid is 0 at the luminal surface and that's why you can't just rinse off dirty dishes; Dr. Kimmerer essentially discusses the same thing in chapter 3 about the "boundary layer" - the place where mosses live.)