Seven titles overgrown with plants

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2014; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and elsewhere. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835. She lives in New Orleans.

[Writers Read: Katy Simpson Smith (March 2020); My Book, The Movie: The Everlasting; The Page 69 Test: The Everlasting]

Her new novel is The Weeds.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven "books where botany is part of the plot device," including:

The Nature Book by Tom Comitta

Admit it: you sometimes skip a novel’s nature descriptions to get to the action. The wind’s whistling through the beech leaves—yes, yes—but is the housemaid going to elope with the doctor? In their mind-bending compendium of just the nature parts from 300 novels, Comitta asks what makes narrative, what merits attention, and whether humans have any business in this literary world at all. This is the novel to read conspicuously in your garden so the plants know you’re on their side. It’s only a matter of time before the weeds shall inherit the earth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue