Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
read by Merlin Sheldrake
2020

I adore this book! It is fabulous! It made various lists in 2020 and I’ve been sort of vaguely meaning to read it since then, but only just recently got to it when I was looking for an audiobook for a road trip. But it is so good!

Sheldrake is so deeply delightfully peculiar, surrounded by similarly peculiar researchers, that the most shocking point, beyond even his loving description of zombie ants as fungi who have temporarily become ants, or his musings on the heat produced by decomposition as he stewed himself at a fermentation spa, is when he refers to someone else as “eccentric”. I’m just like: “Sir!, you are not in a position to call someone else eccentric!”

He has a wide range of stories from his studies, his life, the studies and lives of his friends and peers, and from world history about how people think of and related to fungi, and they are all fascinating in ways I hadn’t previously imagined.

Sheldrake reads his book with a soft melodic voice that soothes the reader into an understand of the world from his perspective, from the fungal perspective, and makes a convincing argument for how important that perspective is.

He reminds us that there’s still a lot of unknowns in the world, and scientific theories are only as good as the phenomenon they explain. For any given law of nature that we think we know, there seem to be a variety of exceptions and ambiguities, and this book is focused on a huge category of beings that are pressure testing much of our current understanding of the world, and have been for as long as we’ve been aware of fungi as something to study. For example: the very word “symbiosis” was only created in 1876 to describe lichen, and “symbiotic” is even more recent as it became evident that the relationship was more common than just in fungal scenarios.

This book is fascinating and funny while giving an accessible overview of the current state of fungal studies. (Just take a moment to consider that sentence: fascinating! funny! fungal studies?) It also introduced me at least to the existence of a community of professional and amateur fungal enthusiasts I had not previously been aware of. They sound delightfully bonkers while still having some very real ideas and possible solutions to saving the environment and showing that both humans and fungi have a role in a sustainable ecosystem.

The entire audiobook is available for free online at the Internet Archive. I highly recommend it.