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This should have been two books. One could have been an academic treatise on the geology and botanic wonders of Taiwan in which the author could utilize her 5 dollar words. The other book could be the family memoir with the history of Taiwan woven through it.

Note to self: Look up 'triboluminescent flash' on YouTube, 'cause that sounds awesome.
Science! 🔬👨🏼‍🔬

I‘m glad I returned to this book for what it taught me about Taiwanese natural and social history, but I‘m still not a fan of Lee‘s style. She takes sentence structures I usually associate with purple prose and fills them with weirdly bland imagery.

It‘s possible she aims to strike a balance between the florid English-language nature writing of her youth and the starker Taiwanese mode. Clever, if so, but not something I can revel in as a reader.

A memoir that intertwines with nature. Jessica Lee tells us the history of her mother's family after she finds some documentation her grandfather left behind. She journeys to Taiwan to delve into her roots and realises how she has been skirting her heritage.
I also enjoyed the narrator of this audiobook but this book was a soft pick as the story itself was a bit flat.
Read this for #bookspin and #readingasia2021 for #taiwan
@TheAromaofBooks

Jessica Lee‘s family has ties to #Taiwan, prompting her to visit for a long stretch, exploring the natural world there. Here she recounts that visit alongside a bit of memoir and history of her family. It‘s interesting but a touch bland. I give it a soft pick.

#ReadingAsia2021

Finished this up in the car wash. This book is perfect in audio ❤️ I found it meditative, as I concentrated on her descriptions when she hiked and cycled in Taiwan, I felt taken away from my now ( continued lock downs) and immersed in the joy of exploring somewhere new. Hearing the Chinese words spoken was like listening to poetry

I walked over to a friend‘s yesterday on her work break time and we walked to Starbucks and had a face to face visit. We barely took a breath the whole time getting caught up. God I miss hanging out with my friends ☹️ ( this book isn‘t what I expected but I‘m enjoying it a lot, I feel like I‘m travelling)

This has popped up on a lot of lists. I don‘t know much about Taiwan at all

Yellow tea today. This camomile brewed up stronger than it looks.

I‘m 80 pages into TWO TREES MAKE A FOREST, and I‘m not sure if I‘ll stick with it. I suspect this is an unpopular opinion, but I don‘t find Lee has a strong authorial voice. The segments on Taiwan‘s natural history are all right, if a little bland, but I want more than what she offers in the memoir bits. Sadness.

Library haul! I‘m especially excited about TWO TREES MAKE A FOREST, which is the only Canada Reads title I couldn‘t get before the debates began, and THE SAFFRON TALES, which I learned about from Nigella Lawson‘s Instagram.

Canada Reads 2021 Finalists panel is happening !! Authors and their supporters are taking very few questions but I love hearing people gush about books!! 🖤🖤

This was a slow moving, meditative memoir/nature/ history book. The pacing had an almost dream like quality, once I got used to it I really fell into it. The intersections of Taiwan's history of multi-colonization, its distinct natural landscape, and Lee's family story made for fascinating reading.

And that's my third goal of the complete for #FabulousFebruary. Thanks for hosting @Andrew65 I love these low key Readathons!

Keeping my husband company during the playoffs.

History, natural history, and family history are intertwined in this articulate memoir. I‘m so susceptible to any book about delving into family history and cultural history as a way to better understand oneself and the world. This book added a botanical layer too.

So far 2021 has been a great year for reading approximately 1/3 of a book, liking it, and then starting a new one 🙄

In an articulate, wide-ranging mix of botany, geography, history, travel and memoir, Canadian author Jessica J Lee writes about Taiwan and her search for answers about her family. The title comes from her description of massive trees that have been saved from logging: two are big enough to make a forest. I‘m glad to have listened to the #audiobook narrated by the author, who explains key Chinese words related to nature.

The island is now building a DNA database of its trees, effectively creating a genetic footprint for samples of illegal wood, a forensic track to the forest in which a tree was felled, in hopes of increasing successful prosecutions. The situation for both poachers and police remains brutally dangerous.

(Internet photo)

The cedars in this forest were once abundant. Fossils of them have been found as far away as Alaska dating from more than 100,000,000 years ago and in Europe some 60,000,000 years ago. Once spread throughout the northern hemisphere, these lonely trees now stand endangered in the few places they remain.
(Internet photo)

… opening to a brush of fine filaments. They looked like those fibre optic lamps made from fishing line, with great feathered clusters of pink strands, yellow at their tips, and so lightly fused to the base of the flowers that the slightest disturbance showered the ground in a floral rain.
(Internet photo)

Last book of the year. Two Trees Make a Forest was recommend by the possum notes blog. It‘s about an environmental historian hiking Taiwan‘s mountains and coasts while exploring her families complicated past.

It was a pleasant read and marked my 4th biography type book for 2020 (which was one of my goals). A 3/5 stars for me. #nonfiction #Taiwan #nature

My father fled Hungary to become a refugee when he was only 8. This quote gets to the heart of why I moved there for a year as a new adult.