This was a good choice for a book club as it touched slightly on a lot of different aspects of mushrooms. It definitely made me want to learn more about the biology but I got all I needed about food and mushroom foraging culture. The chapter about mushroom foragers was weirdly racist. The chapter about using mushrooms to lose weight was very eating-disorder-y. Unexpectedly I got the most out of the chapter about psychedelics, because the author was a skeptic and her experience as described was interesting but not really life-changing. That’s much more interesting to me than people who are very enthusiastic. I wish there were more diagrams of mushrooms, instead of just blurry black-and-white photographs. I did learn some fun facts and I will definitely be seeking out more books about mushrooms, but not more books about this author (who I'm sure is a very good food writer). ( )

Chatty tour through mushrooms with a focus on edible mushrooms and the people who collect them. I would’ve appreciated a bit more science and a bit less about her mushroom collecting fandom/travels, though it was funny to distinguish the scientists from the “belly” fans, that is, those whose main interest was eating mushrooms. ( )

The wonderful world of mushrooms. So much fun. Spans quite a lot of the fungus universe. The writer mentions how strange the people are in this world and then tells you all about it. I enjoyed the mix of data and anecdotes. ( )

I've been reading single subject info books for a while (Salt! Feathers! Rust! etc). This book has lots of information on mushrooms, but feels like 50% mushroom memoir. The memoir parts are frequently interesting or funny. But I would really prefer more mushroom facts and less memoir. ( )

Part memoir, part mushroom science book and part insider view into the cult of mycophilia I found this book to be really informative if somewhat overblown in some places. Unlike some reviewers, I didn’t find Bone’s personal asides and insights annoying. A book like this is supposed to have that kind of thing in it, although after a while the litany of mushroom dishes and elbow-rubbing vignettes with mushroom “royalty” was a bit repetitive.

Bone begins her book by telling us that she’s not much of an outdoors woman (and boy does it show later), but that by finding, eating and loving some wild mushrooms she found (or maybe it was someone else) she bit the bullet and started sleeping in tents in the middle of nowhere so she could find more. I only hunt mushrooms for food casually. Most of my mushroom fascination goes into photography not my kitchen. But I admit I got a bit entranced by her description of candy caps and the fabled matsutake. Some of the chapters went on a bit too long, like truffles and her brush with the “magic mushroom people”, but overall it’s breezy, diverse and interesting.

So what did I learn from this book? That the reason I found so many varieties and specimens in an old growth forest is because of the symbiotic relationship mycorrhizal mushrooms and trees have. Older, established trees have had the time to accumulate a large and intricate network of fungus underground. Through this webbing and their own roots they can better do things like nutrient uptake. If a forest is logged heavily too many trees die and the mycorrhizal network is damaged or destroyed, leaving saplings to struggle and possibly die because of it. I already knew about the importance of fungi in soil from my connection to biodynamic farming and how many farmers are abandoning the traditional soil tillage methods for ones that don’t break up the fungus network. It’s more labor intensive, but the soil is a much better substrate for whatever they plant.

I also learned that mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of fungus, don’t grow so much as expand. The cells of a mushroom are fixed as soon as it forms. From button stage to disintegration, no cells are added to the structure. They merely fill with water and inflate, like balloons filling with air. Crazy huh?

Oh and there’s a type of fungus that invades the head of a certain caterpillar and when it sprouts it shoot straight up and basically hollows out the caterpillar; absorbing its entire insides replacing it with mycelium. In parts of Asia this is a delicacy and mushroom and worm are collected and sold for hundreds and thousands of dollars, proving once again that Asians will eat practically anything.

In America though, mushrooming is a fringe thing, practiced by lunatics. Indeed when I told some people that I’d found some gorgeous chanterelles they looked at me like I grew another head and said that wild mushrooms were scary. True, many are, but once you come to know certain species, it’s very hard to be fooled by impostors and while I probably won’t join local clubs or forays I will continue to pick from the groves of chanterelles I’ve already found and keep my eyes peeled for the glorious hen of the woods. ( )