Have you ever been reading a book and after being interrupted by something for a minute gone back, resumed reading, and after about ten seconds realized that you had just read the paragraph you're reading? You feel like an idiot because you were paying attention to what you were reading before the interruption but now you're seeing words, phrases, even entire sentences that you didn't notice before. It makes you wonder how much you get out of any book you read.
 [a:Robert Macfarlane|435856|Robert Macfarlane|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1369335601p2/435856.jpg]'s [b:Underland: A Deep Time Journey|53121631|Underland A Deep Time Journey|Robert Macfarlane|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597184024l/53121631.SY75.jpg|68561061] was like that for me more than any book I've read in months, maybe a few years. That's praise, as much as it troubles me.
 His prose is profound, literary and dense for a nonfiction work in the way [a:Helen Macdonald|314021|Helen Macdonald|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1400594607p2/314021.jpg]'s [b:H is for Hawk|18803640|H is for Hawk|Helen Macdonald|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1661766699l/18803640.SY75.jpg|26732095] is. You can read some books written with high literary aspects and get much out of them, but I think it would be hard to do with this one. The language and the narrative are so well intertwined.
 You'll want a dictionary when reading this, and even my decent ones didn't have definitions for some of the words Macfarlane uses, and others are British variants. A few of the words I didn't know: ammonite, swallet, kists, skyring, baize, halight, coppice, sinter, curtilage. Of those nine, just one, baize, was flagged as a misspelling as I keyed them in here. I would have liked it if he'd included a few simple maps to show where he traveled to but like most Americans I am deficient in my knowledge of geography.
 As the titles suggest, Underland would be an ideal companion to [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098.SY75.jpg|57662223], even though that's fiction.
 An excerpt:

 The Piave is heavy with silt from the mountains, moving with a pewter simmer, more stone than water to the eye. A sense of high peaks out of sight to the north, there in the darkening of the sky. Maize fields. Wild acacia groves in the lost ground under flyovers. Pale doves lifting in flocks off turned brown earth. Abandoned factories with pantile roofs, buddleia filling the window frames. Farmhouses lost in ivy. Everything wearing the heat like a cloak.