This is the third year for Palisades Reads, a community-wide book club sponsored by the Friends of the Palisades Library that seeks to foster connections, spark conversations, but above all celebrate reading.
This year’s selection, “The Overstory,” was the 2019 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, TIME, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune and Kirkus Review.
A panel will discuss the book on Wednesday, September 22, at 7 p.m. via Zoom. The conversation will be led by Zibby Owens, author and award-winning host of the podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” (and part-time Palisadian).
Joining the discussion will be Cindy Kervin, Chair of the Community Council’s Palisades Forestry Committee, and Cindy Montanez, CEO of TreePeople.
This is Richard Power’s 12th novel and his website states: “The novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.”
Author Ann Patchett wrote, “Autumn makes me think of leaves, which makes me think of trees, which makes me think of ‘The Overstory,’ the best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels period.”
Author, educator and environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote: “This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.”
The Palisades Reads program began in 2019 with Laura Diamond’s novel, “Shelter Us.” Last year, author Dana Johnson, an associate professor of English at USC, discussed her book, “In the Not Quite Dark.”
To receive Zoom information, people can sign up through Friends of the Library (friendsofpalilibrary.org) or through Resilient Palisades (resilientpalisades.org).