True, rank anthropomorphism presents certain dangers if we abandon plant-centrism in favor of projecting human qualities onto fungi, Sheldrake concedes, we risk failing to understand an organism on its own terms. “This wasn’t sex,” he writes no genetic information had been pooled. Examining a plant’s roots under a microscope affords him a chance to glimpse the plant and the fungus grasping each other in an intimate embrace. An early chapter on truffle hunting begins with a line from Prince before delving into the mysterious world of fungal sex. He offers motley quotations, all of them enigmatic yet pertinent, from figures as varied as Tom Waits and the French feminist Hélène Cixous.

Sheldrake’s book is full of striking examples like these, prying open our cramped perspectives.

The biologist Merlin Sheldrake, whose new book is “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.” Credit. When thinking of plants and the fungal networks that sustain them, we too easily fall back on a “plant-centrism” that makes us “fungus-blind.” Though they often get lumped in with the plants that used fungi as root systems for tens of millions of years before the plants evolved their own, Sheldrake says that fungi are more closely related to animals. What’s more, fungi are not only everywhere they are doing things. The largest recorded fungal network is in Oregon, a network - or mycelium - that covers four square miles and is thousands of years old. (Sheldrake’s first name - Merlin - helpfully makes me think of a wizard and his enchanted toadstool.) But mushrooms are just the minuscule flowering tip of the vast fungal world. If you think about fungi at all, you might conjure an image of a mushroom, sprouting from a tree stump or ready to be eaten from a plate. Plants get so much human attention, but Sheldrake wants to direct our gaze at fungi, without which so many of the plants that we take for granted wouldn’t exist. It’s a fittingly eccentric end for “Entangled Life,” Sheldrake’s ebullient and ambitious exploration of a subject that surrounds us yet too few of us think about. Forget the trite literary pleasures of a gourmet meal or a champagne toast: Here is an author who marked the completion of his book by ingesting it. Taking another copy, he tore up the pages, mashed them up to release their sugars and fermented the solution into beer. He dampened a copy of the book and seeded it with spores, eating the oyster mushrooms that sprouted from its pages. For his new book, “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures,” the young fungal biologist Merlin Sheldrake decided on a ritual I had never heard of, much less fathomed. Finishing the manuscript for a book is usually the consummation of years of work, and when writers emerge on the other side, they often try to do something appropriately celebratory.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake