Usually when I finish reading a thick book as full of knowledge and wisdom as [a:Richard Powers|11783|Richard Powers|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1263155076p2/11783.jpg]'s National Book award-winning [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] my primary feeling is one of accomplishment. In this case, however, that's overshadowed by regret that I won't be able to read it for the first time again.
I'd be awful at describing it to anyone I know without turning them off to the idea of reading it. It's about nine people and the relation they have to trees. See? Trees. Uck. For most of them, the relation is an intense one that fills their thoughts and days. For the others, trees turn out to be what their lives hinge on in a variety of ways. But this is where I have to shut up because I'm going to start sounding like if you're not nuts about trees this book will have nothing to offer you and that's completely wrong.
The Overstory makes you realize a how dumb it is that this site and others and things that aren't sites echo the idea that the more books you read the better. Anyone can read four short books in the time it takes to read this 502-page one, but it's like pointing out that you can get the same number of calories by eating three bags of potato chips as from a nutritious meal.

It's Indiana, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget. The parking lot she sleeps in was once an orchard, its trees planted by a gentle, crazed Swedenborgian who wandered through these parts n rags and a tin pot cap, preaching the New Heaven and extinguishing campfires to keep from killing bugs. A crackpot saint who practiced abstinence while supplying four states with enough fermentable apple mash to keep every pioneer American from nine to ninety half cracked for decades.