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How I Became a Tree

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How I Became a Tree

By: Sumana Roy
Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
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About this listen

An exquisite, lovingly crafted meditation on plants, trees, and our place in the natural world, in the tradition of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“I was tired of speed. I wanted to live tree time.” So writes Sumana Roy at the start of How I Became a Tree, her captivating, adventurous, and self-reflective vision of what it means to be human in the natural world.

Drawn to trees’ wisdom, their nonviolent way of being, their ability to cope with loneliness and pain, Roy movingly explores the lessons that writers, painters, photographers, scientists, and spiritual figures have gleaned through their engagement with trees - from Rabindranath Tagore to Tomas Tranströmer, Ovid to Octavio Paz, William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. Her stunning meditations on forests, plant life, time, self, and the exhaustion of being human evoke the spacious, relaxed rhythms of the trees themselves.

Hailed upon its original publication in India as “a love song to plants and trees” and “an ode to all that is unnoticed, ill, neglected, and yet resilient,” How I Became a Tree blends literary history, theology, philosophy, botany, and more, and ultimately prompts listeners to slow down and to imagine a reenchanted world in which humans live more like trees.

©2021 First published in India in 2017 by Aleph Book Company. First published in the United States and the United Kingdom by Yale University Press in 2021. © 2017 by Sumana Roy (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing
Botany & Plants
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wanted to love it but really struggled

I enjoyed some of this book but ended up giving up on it as I was struggling to stay engaged. It just felt too long and too niche. it was well narrated though and would be of interest to someone else potentially!

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A spectrum of love not often spoken about

Roy invites readers into her fascination, orientation, Fertility + history of trees through wisdoms, woes + whispers. It is both eccentric and softening in its anecdotes and references. This book will be welcomed by beloved kin of the plant world, often knowing their belonging exists in the primary experience of the oxygen, language and network of tree kingdoms. It also educates the reader on the ceremony and stories of special trees in India, such as the Bodhi and Banyan, and takes you on a voyage of their importance to those that visit them.

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