Superlatively deep, funny and informative

On Trails: An Exploration
by Robert Moor

Take a topic: trails. Sounds simple, no? My immediate thought would be deer trails through the eastern forest, bighorn sheep through the Grand Canyon, Oregon Trail, Mormon Trail, the Trail of Tears....

And I wouldn't have written a book one-millionth as fascinating as this. He has a brain-bending essay on the difference between trails and roads; a description of the oldest living trails in fossils rock and you'll  never guess the creature that made them; a personal story of the Appalachian trail and what it meant to him and other people; the potential of extending the Appalachian trail through Greenland and down its companion mountain range in Europe; and tons of other stuff.  I'd have to read this book three times to get it all.

Great quotes:
When researchers tasked a slime mold with connecting a series of oat clusters mirroring the location of the major population centers surrounding Tokyo, the slime mold effectively re-created the layout of the city's railway system.

[on watching sheep]
..The better one gets to know sheep, the less sheep-like they appear.

[on losing the sheep he was supposed to be watching:]
In my mouth had grown a cat's dry tongue.

[on the difference in meaning of 'place' between European and Native American culture]
The full ramifications of the Removal, and the pain it inflicted, are difficult for non-Native Americans to grasp. As Belt made clear to me, our two cultures have a drastically different "sense of place." To Euro-Americans, places are most often regarded as sites of residence or economic activity--essential blank backdrops for human enterprise. As such, Euro-American places are largely ahistorical, replaceable;  they change hands, and their names can change, too. By comparison, the Cherokee conception of place is more fixed, specified, eternal. "In the native world, places don't change identity," Belt said. "We are more in touch with place as where things have happened, and where things are, as opposed to where we are."

[on our own trails]
in the end, we are all existential pathfinders. We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us.

[said another way]
The same rule applies to our life's pathways: collectively we shape them, but individually they shape us. So we must choose our paths wisely.