The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

How I Found:  Honestly, I liked the cover and the title.  As well as a voracious reader, I'm a closet botanist. Plants and their abilities put me in awe, so Alma and I were kindred spirits from the start. As her inquisitive mind and unrequited sex-drive reveal an awakening akin to that of other repressed 19th century women, she uncovers not only truths about herself, but the natural world she studies and revels in its realities, "You see I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me.  I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others--why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond their dominion..."
Why You Might Read:  Alma takes us through the whole of her life, and it is truly like living another. Along the way we travel from Pennsylvania to Tahiti to Amsterdam, coming into contact with perhaps the greatest influencer of the 19th century, Charles Darwin. Then, we are left with the sense that, "We are all different, I suppose. All I ever wanted was to know this world. I can say now, as I reach my end, that I know quite a bit more of it than I knew when I arrived."