by Linda Martinson

“Everything is connected, absolutely everything.”
Sm’hayetsk Teresa Ryan, forest ecologist, The Mother Tree Project

I read dozens of books last year running the gamut from Ben Okri’s poetry (oh my!) to Code Girls, a surprising book about the brilliant, dogged women who accomplished most of the critical code breaking efforts that helped the U.S. win World War II, to several excellent environmental/naturalist books, many recently published.

So here are some recommendations for Pandemic winter reading. Start with Code Girls. It’s a quick and compelling read and a good lesson that freedom isn’t a given and that the significant efforts that helped us win World War II were not straightforward or obvious! When you finish the book, ponder whether World War II could have been won without the Code Girls?

Next, I recommend diving in and out of Wild, a book of poetry by Ben Okri which is also about freedom. One review of the book noted that, “Freedom is the most precious commodity in the world…” and that in his book, Okri “explores the freedom of our spirit, the child within.”

“So long as you start with your chaos. Order from the chaos you find. The chaos of now, today; of which the order and standards and classics of the past are a part. The way a ruin is part of a forest.”