Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. This short book tells me everything I want (and far more than I need) to know about mushrooms and their earlier stages. The author, it seems to me, tries to keep a sane perspective on mushrooms, though at times I wonder. Regardless, it easily wins "The Most Fascinating Book That Ought to Have Sucked Award." The last chapters about the potential uses of fungus (including as a replacement for plastic) were compelling enough for me to start searching for "mushrooming" pubic companies that I could invest in.
The best parts of the book look at "fungal knowing" (my term). Fungus knows how to do things that no other organisms (including humans) know how to do. The examples he gives are bizarre and, to be honest, a bit unsettling and exciting.
There are serious parallels between fungal knowing and UFO knowing. They're both bizarre, unsettling, and exciting. I suspect fungal knowing is something we need to explore much more deeply and UFO knowing is something, well, that just might be from the devil. I really don't know and probably never will know, but I will continue to ponder.
