The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Available on Audio Book Available on MP3

A few weeks ago my wife bought an orchid plant. It promptly produced five spectacular flowers that are still around weeks later. Amazing. This stoked our interest in orchids and so I went out and found a number of how-to-grow-them. I also stumbled onto this non-fiction account of the Florida flower community; it reads like fiction. Ms. Orlean is a superb storyteller.

Much of the book is about the strange orchid community, colorful characters, and the amazing finances of the orchid business. It's also about Indians, poaching, and fortunes made and lost. Along the way there are some wonderful words.

About belief:

They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.

About value:

...or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anying as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want. It saved me all sorts of trouble knowing I wouldn't find a ghost orchid here, since then I didn't even need to look. It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don't have to look means you can't be disappointed.

About life in the swamp:

You never smell plain air in a swamp-you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant's roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and
unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hutry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if somone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.