Love The Bell of the World? Readers share 100 books like The Bell of the World...

Rooted in memoir and science, this book explores forest ecologist Suzanne Simard’s decades-long research to discover that a tree in a forest is a forest in a tree. The daughter of a rural, working-class, logging family in British Columbia, Simard knew it was possible to log a forest yet leave it capable of regenerating, something that wasn’t occurring after massive clear-cutting tore away old, big trees only to leave seedlings struggling to survive.

I appreciated how Simard took me along as a reader as she described, step-by-painstaking-step, groundbreaking scientific research into the underground fungal networks that link together a community of trees sharing water and nutrients and communicating warning signals. Even more, I loved how her work as a scientist was intimately grounded in her life as a sister, mother, wife, and breast cancer survivor. 

There is a purity and grace about this book that is deeply moving; it tells me about the love of a good man, as he explores his own life in the face of death. All he has to leave his small son is not money but the possibility of dedicating oneself to a good life.

It is set in middle America, in 1956, when I, as it happens, was ten years old. Everything that matters to me is captured here in this exquisite book. It is written beautifully, not ever weighed down by mind-numbing cliches. If only everyone would read this book, I thought as I sobbed my way through it, there would be no wars, and there would be time and inspiration for healing the planet. I take it with me wherever I go.

I discovered Wohlleben’s book when I was writing about my own emergent relationship with trees. I was learning to think with quantum field theory and new materialism, and very conscious of the way some of my writing was sounding like I was teetering on the edge of madness.

Wohlleben offered me insights into my own relations with trees, and he enabled me to articulate not only my love of trees but the Earth’s dependence on them as they grow together in old-growth forests. At the same time, Wohlleben makes horribly clear the motivation of politicians globally to destroy old-growth forests out of their own ignorance and greed, intensified by the loggers who lie to them and hide the truth from them. 

I come back to Karen Barad again and again for the theoretical clarity she offers. Her book is like the Holy Bible is to some Christians. I can dip into it again and again and discover new insights. Barad, too, has experienced resistance to her take on quantum physics. But I believe her writing to be essential to the development of a new ethics, that is vital if the Earth is to survive.

Her ethics is based on an understanding that we are not simply, or solely, the ego-driven and greedy individuals of neoliberalism. We are beings in relation with each other and in relation with the more-than-human world. Not just in relation with, but emergent with the world, in our intra-actions with it. 

Yes, history is important. This is a recurring theme in my courses, because if we don’t know how we got here, then our efforts to address the urgent problems we face will be hampered by our inability to understand the root causes of those problems. 

Public intellectual Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz once again does us a great service with her latest book in revealing the deep roots of racist oppression against citizens and noncitizens. She explodes the foundational myth of the United States as nation of immigrants, showing how this country is instead defined by settler colonialism—the efforts to destroy Indigenous civilizations to build a new, permanent society with the exploited labor of enslaved Black people, and migrant workers of all kinds. Her book crucially helps us understand how Native people and immigrants are not opposed to each other, but are instead subjugated by the same forces and thus share struggles for… show more.

Anita Heiss is an Australian academic and author of a number of insightful books on what it’s like being Indigenous in Australia. Her novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray begins in 1852 with a catastrophic flood that is a metaphor for the disastrous effects of European colonisation. Told mainly through the eyes of a young Wiradjuri woman, the novel is a powerful exploration of the clash of cultures that followed European settlement and appropriation of the land. It is a vivid and moving depiction of the unbalanced power relations between the races as well as between men and women.

This travel diary by the Nobel Prize winning French writer was published in 1927 and expertly translated by his lifelong friend Dorothy Bussy. Gide dedicated his book and its sequel, Return from Chad, to Joseph Conrad, whose Congolese itinerary Gide retraced in part. In 1926 and 1927, the Frenchman spent ten months in Equatorial Africa with his lover Marc Alégret, making no secret of his sexual preference for young men and boys. In these travelogues, Gide fiercely criticized French colonialism and especially France’s “concessionary companies,” the large monopolistic firms that cruelly exploited Congolese laborers forced under inhuman conditions to harvest raw rubber. France’s Congo colony reproduced the excesses of its Belgian counterpart, despite the efforts of Gide and other prominent French figures to reform it.

A great voice, an interesting take on fantasy, a non-white hero and heroine, rich mix of traditional fable and myth, and lots of Austeneque language. This story also takes on colonialism. I loved this book so much. It was a delight from start to finish and I’ve gone on to read other books by this author and I went to a coffee talk at the World SF Convention in Dublin. I was so thrilled to meet her.

In this tour de force history of Great Britain’s 19th century ‘liberal empire,’ Elkins demonstrates the glaring contradiction between the official claim that British society and its colonies were governed by liberal principles of ‘the rule of law’ and the systematic violence that lay at its core. “Violence,” Elkins argues, “was not just the British Empire’s midwife; it was endemic to the structures and systems of British rule.”

In an age when liberal rights were ostensibly universal, race became how the empire was able to exclude black and brown people (which included ‘racialized’ groups such as the Irish and Afrikaners) from the ranks of ‘civilized’ peoples. The so-called ‘civilizing mission,’ in which ‘uncivilized’ peoples would be welcomed into the ranks of the ‘civilized’ at some unspecified point, was draped in the trappings of noble enterprise and moral duty. However, while this thinly veiled ideology may have served the interests of… show more.

Whenever I see suddenly this remarkable book on my bookshelves, I wonder how the author, writing in later years of his life, was able of combining his practical experience in Africa with his theoretical engagement of Africa. The author narrates sympathetically how African political elites who embraced Western alien institutions and state ideals failed to reconsider the reconfiguration of the nation-state on their continent.