Of bees and wolves, and a fickle wind: tales of rediscovery

To be called interesting is still a compliment, no doubt, but the adjective is hardly a superlative nowadays. It seems to have lost both muscle and panache; when's the last time you saw a book jacket with the blurb ''Interesting!" placed prominently above the title? No, ''interesting" is more often employed as cocktail-party filler (''Hmm, interesting . . ."), or tempered with sarcasm, or -- worse -- it signifies disinterest: ''Oh, Tim's book on newt reproduction? Yeah, it's interesting, I guess."

But to call something interesting means that it provokes thought, engages you, ignites curiosity, and, most of all, attracts and holds your attention. Aren't these the hallmarks of the best books? The best people?

For one humble column, I propose we reinvest ''interesting" with all its meaning -- as praise of the highest order, perhaps the highest accolade a reviewer can present. A truly interesting book is one that makes your room, the ache in your back, and the bills on your desk fall away, until only the world of the book remains, a tightrope of sentences, a lamp in the darkness.

Well, here are two pretty interesting new books. ''Wolves and Honey," by Susan Brind Morrow, is a regional history of the Finger Lakes area of New York. Sort of. It's also a personal narrative about the deaths of two friends. Sort of. It's also a riveting compendium of observations from a very curious, very interesting mind.

From beavers to coyotes, to a history of grafting, to an absolutely beautiful chapter on the lives of bees, Morrow's memoir consistently subverts the ''I" in favor of tracing the infinite connections between the modern self and the larger world beyond.

''It can accurately be said," Morrow writes, ''that everything is made of light, and that death and decay are nothing more than the freeing of trapped energy." Her book is full of sentences like this, tightly wound, precise, their phrasing slightly unfamiliar. She manages paragraphs as poets manage line breaks, surprising her reader with the unexpected image, the well-timed swerve.

Part of this impression comes from her extreme care with words, and a classicist's sensitivity to etymology. Nectar, we learn, comes from ''nek tar," ''that which overcomes death." Atom means ''that which cannot be cut up." Language, she continually reminds us, is a ''great mirror that contains the reflections of everything that ever lived."

A reader can't help but be compelled. Describing her two friends, Morrow unwittingly offers a perfect description of herself: ''They worked at a lost connection as intermediaries between the settled and the wild, tracing a vertical line, backward in time."

Another interesting read is Scott Huler's ''Defining the Wind," a chronicle of the author's quest to learn more about the Beaufort wind scale, the accepted measuring stick of wind that runs from ''0, calm; smoke rises vertically," to ''12, hurricane; devastation occurs." Huler first encountered the scale as a dictionary copyeditor, and his ardor for it gradually inflated into obsession. The Beaufort scale, he argues, is ''the ultimate expression of concise, clear, and absolutely powerful writing." He goes on to call it ''the best descriptive writing I'd ever read," ''a spectacularly sharp tool," and ''nothing if not poetry."

Huler's own prose is not, I'm afraid, poetry. His writing is easy, clean, and serviceable -- what a reviewer might be tempted to call conversational. ''Yes," he writes, ''Francis Beaufort slept with his sister. Yes, his full, actual, same-mother-and-father sister, and yes, that kind of slept with."

But his story, replete with all its digressions, is very compelling, as it becomes less and less about Huler and Beaufort, and more about curiosity and simply paying attention -- letting yourself explore the things that strike you as most vital, most fundamentally interesting. Huler tracks the scale through time, noting its alterations as it appeared in various publications (in a 1993 dictionary, for example, ''telegraph wires" were changed to ''overhead wires," and ''moving cars veer" was added to force 8), and he concludes, quite plausibly, that the scale serves as a kind of ''living history, recording not just the force of the wind but the details we observe to judge it."

Because, as Huler notes, wind is invisible. ''To describe clouds, trees, or anything else, you focus in on that specific thing, ignoring everything else. To describe the wind, you do the opposite: you look at everything else."

Both ''Wolves and Honey" and ''Defining the Wind" are reminders of why we read science books. Read Morrow and the honey in your cupboard will taste different, more powerful; read Huler and you'll pay more attention to the air moving through your backyard, fluttering leaves, rattling windows. We read to learn, to refine our perceptions, to strip away the familiar and subject it to inquiry, to deepen our experience in the world. The invisible becomes visible, and the visible becomes changed somehow, deepened, enriched. We get only one trip through life, and these two books, like so many others, are consummate examples of how a writer with enough determination can mine a deep vein of curiosity and use it to produce a compelling, powerful, and, yes, interesting book.

Anthony Doerr's new novel, ''About Grace," will be published this month.