Torbjørn Ekelund, A Year In the Woods
Canada has just lost the Olympic gold-medal hockey game to the US (remember: sports are no more than games with an audience!); materials from the Epstein circle continue to prove that the wealthy learned nothing from the French Revolution (don't stop at Andrew); and fake-AI keeps getting boosted by the ignorant and the corrupt (resist, people!).
I'm not going to pretend this book will save the world, but it's a wee gem. Admittedly, its genre is that of the self-absorbed neoromantic treehugging mini-memoir, so it's the kind of book whose fans will like it a lot but which will be utterly unfathomable to anyone else, but of its kind, it's very much a gem. (Here's an actual review, unlike whatever it is I've posted here.)
In essence, Ekelund decided one year that he would spend one night a month in a forest near Oslo; mostly he went alone, most often he camped at precisely the same spot, and he was wild-camping rather than in an official campground. He learned small things along the way (how the light changes, the details of how plants respond to seasonal change, the inevitability of failure for inflatable bedrolls), and he didn't try to make it any bigger.
Late in the book, he does worry that he should've come up with something grander, but then he remembers that these were small journeys with no objective behind them in well-travelled locations near cities. It's just important to live your life the right way. We don't need grand. If being out in the woods feels right, you should do that.
As Ekelund remarks toward the book's end, humans are a relatively late entrant into nature; it's been here longer than we have, and some version of nature will still be here after we're not what we are right now. Respect nature, read more, reduce your screen usage, look after each other, and be better.
Also, trust survivors and resist AI. Don't be distracted, by sparkly objects like the Olympics, into forgetting how badly we need something revolutionary.
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