Underland

Robert Macfarlane | 2019

I bought Underland after my advisor suggested that Macfarlane’s “fascination with lost, forgotten, hidden, weird, strange, subterranean” areas corresponded with my “inclination toward the places at the world’s forgotten edges.” This book gripped me from the introduction and held my enthusiastic attention until the last page. Each chapter describes a different excursion Macfarlane made to subterranean regions across the globe, transforming every place into a unique character by weaving together its physical properties, historical and cultural importance, mythic qualities, and his personal experiences there. If you’re looking for an insightful and fascinating book about the often-forgotten but vitally significant areas of Earth, then look no further.

“Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”

“For the labyrinth offered a space where Paris’s subcultures could go to grow. It became—and still is—what the anarchist-theorist Hakim Bey calls a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’: a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, becoming fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface.”