Ape House, Sara Gruen

Marc Johnson, Smoking Monkey

(October 21) She had me at "Ape," plus I already loved Water for Elephants.

This book was worth it for the information about bonobos alone, but Gruen also kept a few plot-plates spinning with great flair.

The book did devolve a bit into TV-sitcom territory eventually, but I was fine with that since the alternative might easily have been animal abuse and too much drama.

There were ironic-twist sub-stories showing how an L.A. lifestyle compels people to change everything that's unique and lovable about them (for example, the parallel between two characters who get a lot of plastic surgery, one because of injuries from an explosion and the other because she's trying to make it in Hollywood) and questioning whether prestige and integrity go hand-in-hand in the media (a writer only finds himself when he stoops to work for the worst rag in the country).

But mainly, it was the bonobos.

The Global Forest, Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Laura Milnor Iverson, Nature's Bright Peace

(October 13) Heard her interviewed on the CBC and was entranced with her descriptions of the biochemistry of trees, wanted to read more.

And this book is interesting, eventually... but I had a hard time getting past the style at times. She wants to invest her remarks with "ancient wisdom" and tries all sorts of methods of doing this -- writing in the style of fairy tales, children's readers, the Bible, and so on. (She even tries an erotic style once or twice.)

A favourite style is to machine-gun you with a lengthy series of short declarative sentences. I enjoy a short declarative sentence, but more than 10 in a row and you begin to think a writer's first language is not English. Sample:

There is a new violence in the world. This violence stands apart from all the other familiar forms. This one is silent and it shows no mercy to the young and the old. It is in the air we breathe. The air is no longer clean.

The new violence is measured in microns, a size smaller than a pollen grain. The violence is particulate pollution. This form of pollution is composed of tiny fragments of matter that will become airborne. Anything can become airborne if it is small enough or light enough or has the right kind of aerodynamic form to fly. These tiny particles are now finding a new name depending on their diameter, expressed as particle microns, or PM for short.

Size matters. Any pollution particles that measure PM 2.5 or less are lethal to the human body. They are also lethal to much of the rest of the animal kingdom.

The book is billed as a collection of essays, so I guess this entitles a writer to try different techniques of infusing grandiosity, but since none of the essays repeat information, you know they were intended to be published together, so "collection of essays" just becomes a license to not have a more intrinsic structural plan.

Plus, overall, there is this cliché of "we are destroying the planet" at every turn. I could maybe forgive her if the book were five years old, but the publishing date is 2010, and, lady, we've heard this refrain.

Don't know why the biochemistry of trees can't be treated as interesting for its own sake.