Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting & The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees by Robert Penn – review

A simple, elegant book about how to fell trees is this year's most surprising bestseller. In the age of mediated reality, wood is back in fashion

It is intriguing that for decades "wooden" has been a decidedly pejorative description. No actor or sportsman wanted to be called "wooden". Until a few years ago, there was no material or fuel as unfashionable as wood. In an age of dirt-cheap oil, open fires were seen on as labour-intensive and hastily bricked up. Very few sculptors - bar the incomparable David Nash - worked in wood, and only prophetic writers such as Bruce Stanley (Forest Church) or Roger Deakin (Wildwood) dared talk about the transcendence of woodlands.

Now, at last, wood is being rehabilitated. More than that: it is suddenly fashionable, and Norwegian Wood has become one of the most uplifting publishing stories of 2015. A simple, elegant book about how to fell trees - about how to move the timber and then split and stack the logs in the most efficient, aesthetic ways - it has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is one of those books, full of lush, earthy photos, about which people seem to become almost evangelical.