PDX Science & Nature Book Club

In person, meet at Dick's Primal Burger: We're in the community room, to the right of where you order....

If you'd like to join remotely, send a message to the organizer.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025: A Collection of the Year's Most Insightful Essays on the Natural World, Climate Change, and the Wonders of Science Curated
by Susan Orlean, Jaime Green

Susan Orlean—the beloved New Yorker staff writer and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rin Tin Tin, The Orchid Thief, and On Animals—selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2024.

The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most popular—of its kind.

New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean selects twenty pieces that represent the best science and nature writing published the previous year and explores our ever-changing world.

In person, meet at Dick's Primal Burger: We're in the community room, to the right of where you order....

If you'd like to join remotely, send a message to the organizer.

# A Year in the Woods: Twelve Small Journeys into Nature

### Torbjørn Ekelund, Becky L. Crook (Translator)

free ebook here

From the acclaimed author of In Praise of Paths comes a humorous and modest Walden for modern times.

Like many people today, Torbjørn Ekelund dreams of spending more time in nature. But he’s so busy with city life that he has no desire to travel far or scale the highest mountain.

So, he hatches a plan.

Ekelund decides to leave the city after work and camp near a tiny pond in the forest. The next morning, he returns to work as usual. He does this once a month for a full year. What happens over the course of that year is nothing short of transformative.

Evoking Henry David Thoreau and the four-season structure of Walden, A Year in the Woods asks if the secret to communing with nature lies in small rituals and reflection.

As Ekelund greets the same trees, rocks, streams, and soil each month, he describes his changing relationship to the landscape. He observes minute signs of growth and decay around him. And he shifts his perspective on his role within the forest, and nature itself.

Theperfect book for readers who want a deeper connection with nature, but are realistic about time and money.

In person, meet at Dick's Primal Burger: We're in the community room, to the right of where you order....

If you'd like to join remotely, send a message to the organizer.

# The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity

### Claudia de Rham

A world-renowned physicist seeks gravity’s true nature and finds wisdom in embracing its force in her life

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, experimenting with her body’s buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, soaring over Canadian waterfalls on dark mornings before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, dreaming of the experience of flying free from Earth’s pull. And as a physicist, discovering new sides to gravity’s irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In The Beauty of Falling , de Rham shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life’s pursuit led her from a twist of fate that snatched away her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics.

While many of us presume to know gravity quite well, the brightest scientists in history have yet to fully answer the simple what exactly is gravity? De Rham reveals how great minds—from Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking, Andrea Ghez, and Roger Penrose—led her to the edge of knowledge about this fundamental force. She found hints of a hidden side to gravity at the particle level where Einstein’s theory breaks down, leading her to develop a new theory of “massive gravity.” De Rham shares how her life’s path turned from a precipitous fall to an exquisite flight toward the discovery of something entirely new about our surprising, gravity-driven universe.

In person, meet at Dick's Primal Burger: We're in the community room, to the right of where you order....

If you'd like to join remotely, send a message to the organizer.

# Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

### Jason Roberts

free epub copy here

An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth. Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?

Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting worldviews continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology.

In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts weaves a sweeping, unforgettable narrative spell, exploring the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon—as well as the groundbreaking, often fatal adventures of their acolytes—to trace an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.