In Daisy Hildyard’s The Second Body, she shares this admission:
“In a technical way, I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do. (I take flights.) I don’t really inhabit it. I have never bought a book with Climate Change in the title because I feel that I wouldn’t find anything real inside it.”
The way that she works to embrace the contradictions, between what she believes and what she does? That inherently appeals to me.
These are tough questions. And, should she never change her mind, there are plenty of books about “climate change” that don’t include those words in their titles.
Like Berit Ellingsen’s Not Dark Yet (2015), which is published by Two Dollar Radio (a press Reese has remarked upon too).
As with Ling Ma’s Severance, the focus is on everyday life, quotidian details of work and memories of work relationships, against a backdrop of committed relationships, in short and scenic chapters.
The climate has changed enough that the crops suitable for growth in specific regions have changed, the cost of food is high, and even more people have been displaced from their homes recently, due to disasters.
Talk has shifted from conservation to survival, but there’s also talk of advances in tech and space—new opportunities in industry.
Protests and rallies against public budget cuts, reduced healthcare, dwindling pension funds, rising unemployment, water shortage, drought and famine provide the backdrop to a personal story about remorse, reconfiguring, and resilience.
(There’s also a couple of Christmas chapters, for those who enjoy holiday reading but prefer less traditional choices.)
Nina Munteanu’s novel Diary in the Age of Water (2019) will not suit every reader. Much of the narrative can also be read in her 2016 work of non-fiction Water Is….
It’s hard to resist identifying the author with Lynna, the most prominent character, who also works as a limnologist, although her employment is increasingly precarious, as her timeline hastens toward ecological devastation.
A predominantly female cast, a mythic framing narrative and, most saliently, the focus on water, all made this an interesting read for me.
The book’s epigraphs are from Maude Barlow and the chapters’ epigraphs from textbook definitions (sometimes excerpts from limnology texts), and there are even cutaway diagrams that you’d expect in a lecture hall.
Ultimately, it exists in an in-between place, some mystical elements of the generational tale possibly alienating the dedicated science-y readers and the instructional elements possibly alienating fiction devotees. And, yet, I read on: strangely compelling.
Nina Lakhani’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres? (2020) is published by Verso Books, an independent publishing house that releases a hundred titles a year. (Lakhani is the Guardian’s first environmental justice reporter.)
Cáceres frequently worked with indigenous Lenca communities across western Honduras, but it was their resistance to the construction of a hydroelectric dam, on the Gualcarque River in the community of Del Blanco, that preceded her murder.
Though just a year after winning the Goldman Environmental Prize, her renown offered no protection. “Seventy million people were killed across the continent for our natural resources, and this colonialism isn’t over. But we have power, compañeros, and that is why we still exist.”
Cáceres’ story also draws attention to the fact that 340 environmental defenders were murdered in the Americas between 2016 and 2019.
Business interests triumph over personal rights. It’s helpful to understand just how pervasive these attitudes are, how essential it is to speak up.
Watch Your Head—an anthology of poems and stories, essays and artwork—is a response to the climate crisis.
For instance, Barry Pottle’s series of photographs, De-Iced, calls attention to global warming from an Inuk perspective.
And Eshrat Erfanian’s series Tres-pass alternates addresses of Middle Eastern oil refineries with polluted landscapes in Ontario and Quebec from the 1950s.
Underpinning the collection is an awareness that “the extractive industrial practices driving global warming…are an extension of a historical colonization built upon the theft of the lands and bodies of Indigenous and Black peoples”.
The contributors are diverse and offer “warnings to be heeded directions given, field notes from the midst of the disaster, offers of refuge, shelter in the storm, high ground marked out, refugia demarcated and carefully tended, pleas, modes, and methods of survival”.
You can peek here. Something for every reader. (Edited by Kathryn Mockler and others.)
Catherine Bush’s second novel, The Rules of Engagement, was one of the first contemporary Canadian novels that I reread as soon as I finished. There’s a precision and density to her prose, consistently.
With four epigraphs for Blaze Island (2020), readers are signalled to anticipate allusions and echoes: T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare (from “The Tempest”, this is one of many Miranda stories), Elena Ferrante, and Tracy K. Smith.
As in Lauren Carter’s Swarm and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, the focus is on character over plot, on world-building (re-visioning) over action.
Things do happen, but Bush prioritizes the interior lives of her characters; readers looking an emphasis on another kind of story would prefer Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Parenting trumps page-turning, but without the brazen brutality of Diane Cook’s novel (below).
Climate Chaos (2020) is a collection of ecofeminist essays more likely to be found on professors’ bookshelves than in the laps of enthusiastic readers.
Last fall, I started reading Ana Isla’s introduction and the first essay she’s contributed, with the subtitle: “Mother Earth under Threat”: they secured my desire to read on, but it took me about a month to work through the first essay.
Still, for those with an interest in social justice, this volume is an excellent resource for current scholarship; each essay is immediately followed by relevant endnotes and references, inviting those with a keen interest on that particular subject to explore further.
There are names I recognize and expect to find here—like Hannah Arendt, Mary Daly, Naomi Klein, Winona LaDuke and Vandana Shiva—but I’ve been introduced to many more activists and scholars too, and I particularly appreciate the global focus on indigenous protectors.
And now that I’ve adjusted to the academic tone, I can rely on the subheadings and bullet points, bolded text and list-making, to guide me through topics that I yearn to understand but would find overwhelming in a booklength work.
Love after the End (2020) is an anthology of nine speculative stories by two-spirt and queer Indigenous writers, edited by Joshua Whitehead.
Some established writers and some relatively new to the craft or, between, with publication credits in magazines and journals: a fresh and surprisingly hopeful collection to be discussed in this spring’s Quarterly Short Story post.
Impressed by her debut collection of stories, Man V. Nature (2014), preoccupied with questions of “sanctuary and exile, restoration and devastation, mortality and morality”, I was equally impressed and unsettled by Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (2020).
Cook plays with distance and intimacy, with power and alienation; at times, as a reader, I marvelled and, at times, I winced: “Dying was as common as living.” Okay, there was a lot of wincing.
I left the final section of the novel unread for weeks. (I didn’t forget anything. Even though part of me wanted to.)
This is one of those books that many might admire (it was on last year’s Booker shortlist, for instance) but a story that few will love.
Cook respects her characters, who are credible and complicated; they have embarked on an experiment, in the future, in an area of land demarcated as the Wilderness, but none of that matters because, in the end, they are unapologetically human. That makes for tough reading.
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have by Tatiana Schlossberg (2019) made me chuckle more often than the novel I kept in my stack alongside to lighten the mood.
Schlossberg writes: “I am nothing if not a savvy businesswoman, evidenced by my decision to become a journalist writing about the world’s most popular, easy-reading topic.”
Nobody yearns to read about the climate crisis; Schlossberg knows this and works to erode the natural resistance that readers have to this unpopular, heavy-going topic.
Readers can dip into a topic like Food or Fashion in a few pages or follow up with the endnotes or a booklength recommendation shared in the essay’s body.
Schlossberg exposes and contemplates contradictions, which I appreciate. She reveals her investigative (and ruminative) process, shares her facts, and admits when she’s gone as far as she can go (without getting prescriptive).
She doesn’t shy away from the need for systemic change coupled with personal responsibility:
“Living in a way that honors your values is important, even if your personal habits aren’t going to fix everything. We need to remember what is at stake, and the small sacrifices we make may help us do that, if you need reminding. If we know what our sacrifices mean and why they might matter, we might be more willing to make them.”
Even though my stack of current reading always has several options, something for every reading mood, I’ve adopted the habit of having only one or two books about the climate crisis in the mix simultaneously (usually one, but there’s always a non-fiction volume in there, too, and sometimes that’s on the topic of the climate emergency too).
Reading about the climate crisis is one way to narrow the gap that Daisy Hildyard identifies—the gap between what we say that we believe and what we do about it.
For bookworms, who sometimes feel more comfortable with books than with people, who have come to rely on books to bridge the gap between their insides and the world outside, reading can open the door to making other changes.
Hildyard’s quote at the beginning of your post is so interesting. I think a lot of us feel that way, but don’t necessarily recognize it or acknowledge it. And it’s probably one of the reasons I like readiing about climate change in the form of fiction – the nonfiction titles scare me… I’m afraid they’re going to be depressing and make me feel hopeless. Often the fiction gets me thinking – and usually gives me a hopeful ending – without crushing my soul.
I love the variety of books you talk about in this post. I’ve read Blaze Island and Swarm – loved them both! – and I plan to read A Diary in the Age of Water, Watch Your Head, and Love After the End. I had The New Wilderness out as an ILL a few weeks ago, but didn’t have time to read it. Maybe I will try again soon. (I bought Watch Your Head, because my daughter and I both had it on our wishlists at Christmas time.)
The other great thing about this post is all the discussion it inspired in the comments (and recommendations)! I might even read it all again!
What I often tell myself, when I feel that way, is that the writer likely felt all of those things too, but they produced a book on the subject, so somehow they have found a way to manage that struggle and create a book; nobody writes a book if they have already given up, I figure. But that’s not to say that I always find hope in those NF (or F, for that matter) books, sometimes I find simply a willingness to keep trying, and maybe that is all we can hope for at some points? Especially if we are stuck. And everyone gets stuck, at least occasionally, if not every day. wry laugh
Technically, I could say that it took me a couple of months to read The New Wilderness, because I left a very short section unread at the end for aaaaages (I actually forgot that I hadn’t finished yet). It’s well done, but I’m not surprised you couldn’t finish it as an ILL. It would make for a very interesting Literary Wives discussion though, even though it’s a strange slant, given their way of life. But, if Rebecca’s reading this, she would probably add, and for good reason, that the other readers in your group might quit in protest afterwards.
It’s hard to talk about the things that scare us, eh? But it helps when you know that everyone else is scared too. Cuz pretending bad stuff isn’t happening…well, that never stops it, which means the fear will only grow.
So true. And good point… not many people would write a book if they didn’t feel any hope themselves. I mean, if the world was ending, there wouldn’t be anyone around to read their book. What a sad thought – the thought of no one around to read books anymore. That is a very good reason right there to save the world!
Well, now I have to know how The New Wilderness ends! Maybe I will recommend it to the group… evil laughter
Totally, we need people to hear stories (even if we need to start publishing them on bamboo or something more sustainable than wood pulp?! LOL) so here’s to that!
Oh, it’s not actually about the ending! It was just a sense of feeling overwhelmed by the pace/nature of life in the story and how unremitting it was; that made me anxious about finishing it. Which is not to say that it’s a “happy ending” either. Hunh, I don’t think I’m helping at all. snorty laugh Ok, the ending is all-of-a-piece. There, no spoilers. I hope?
Not at all! And I did notice yesterday at the library that someone had the book on hold without an ILL band – so we must have purchased our own copy. I will just wait until people aren’t reading it anymore, so I can renew it a couple of times!
What is it about other people’s holds that’s so fascinating? I mean, because of lockdown I can’t peek at them right now, but I am SO curious what others request/want/have! (Of course, you have a reason to look. I’m just nosy!)
That’s one of the best parts of my job! I LOVE seeing what everyone else wants to read. It can be surprising at times, but I’m afraid it can also be disappointing. Still fun, though! I was nosy, too, before working at the library. 🙂
Hah! At one point I remember being ridiculously excited about a row of movies another borrower had requested, a couple of shelves above my stuff (almost an entire shelf of movies for the same account, say what?!), and I was imagining, oh, I dunno what, like the whole series of Midsommer Murders on BBC or something, but it was a zillion different anime series. I was soooo disappointed but, at the same time, I knew that Oldest BIP kid would have been trying to swap some of those slips to snag some for themselves.
Haha! That would have disappointed me, too.
Some patrons come in just to borrow movies and I often think how fun it would be to do that sometime (there are a lot of good ones I haven’t seen!), but I never do it. I also wonder if they will ever get to the point when they have seen them all!
I was intrigued by Rebecca Foster’s comments. As a lifelong student of Natural sciences, stemming from a childhood in remote western Wyoming with contrasting cultural values of a Native American community instilled early on, my twilight years find me alternately hopeful and despondent regarding the human potential. Now living in rural NH doesn’t help, with neighbors daily target practice in their cleared fields, a Sons of Liberty clubhouse a half dozen miles down the road, and a well-heeled community of our cannibalistic society a dozen miles the other direction.
Humankind’s increasing infrastructure and predominate differing subjective perspectives are hurdles our evolutionary baggage isn’t equipped to deal with. Such reminds me of another snippet, “Tell me this if you’re so wise, ancient one. Why do so many of us pray for relief from our immediate problems, while ignoring, even oiling the wheels of, increasingly more severe issues foreseeable in the near future? How does that make sense?”
As to Rebecca’s thoughts, even though my reading is eclectic there are a good number of eco-lit books I have no inclination to read for various reasons, but I welcome all efforts to illuminate the masses (different strokes for different folks, as it were). For example, I enjoyed Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean which Rebecca mentioned. On the other hand, I was annoyed at Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek because I found it reflecting an overly subjective view of the natural world that sustains us, especially in the author’s discriminatory view of insects.
Of course, the heart of Nature is change in adapting to ever-changing environmental conditions, seeking some manner of balance for the continuum of physical life, which varies in subjective shades of acceptance. But, the accelerated changes humankind is creating bring to mind the Mormon cricket, where in swarming phase the inner circle eat the outer circle.
Individual awareness varies with life experiences, which if one has an open mind can help us mitigate our evolutionary baggage issues. In the past, in my multi-acre natural garden (forest edge ecosystem) and our organic vegetable garden, when skunks and groundhogs seemed to become a population problem I would live trap them and relocate them to the well-heel’s golf club grounds. Since, I’ve come to understand that in doing so intensified the use of environmental poisons and diminishment of biodiversity.
Like all life forms we are a subjective species, and broadening our understanding of the natural world is the only way we can hope to leave a sustaining world for future generations.
Books are yet one of the few media that aren’t overly filtered, so read all you can for the sake of our and our children’s futures. And yes, temper that with interspersed distracting reading for the sake of your mental well-being.
“Live as if your Life has consequences far beyond your understanding. It does.” ~ Duncan Morrison
It’s so kind of you to engage with my comments! I grew up in suburban Maryland and now live in southern England, and my husband is an ecologist with a special love for entomology. I agree with you that different books (including some from genres that I avoid) will be effective at getting different people thinking about the climate crisis, and that can only be a good thing. While I would class Annie Dillard in literature rather than in nature writing, books like hers could perhaps transmit a sense of wonder about nature, which might also guide people towards wanting to conserve it. There’s been a resurgence of nonfiction that explores the spiritual connection to nature, at least here in the UK, and while for some who approach things purely scientifically that will be a turn-off, for others it could be a source of comfort and hope.
The two of you have now forced me to haul out my aged atlas to get up close and personal with the eastern U.S.-so thanks for that. Until today, I’ve been operating under the “right-hand side of the country” premise, not truly understanding where each of you were situated in relationship to each other, even while remembering your individual states (not currently, only historically, for you, Rebecca). [If you’re curious, Delaware was not where I expected, New Jersey has always confused, and it turns out that I’ve thought it was more of a straightaway down the coast than I realized, and states stretch more east-ward than expected in the north, which is the only part I’ve spent any time in myself, and I had the Virginias all wrong). And just to bring up the Whangdoodle again, that whole science/faith dilemma features there too, in 1974 kidlit (nuanced and unresolved, ASAIremember). Thanks for the great conversation, you two.
Even though I know it to be true, hearing about how the current polarization in American society plays out in an everyday way–the fact of your living so close to others with diametrically opposed views to so many of your own–in rural NH helps me comprehend the challenges differently. I know that wasn’t necessarily your priority here, but it’s helpful to have another instance of the no-group-is-a-monolith reality. It’s hard to have conversations about hard topics. It’s harder still when there are no more conversations.
Are you, then, the ancient one in the quotation? grins We can only assume so! (Kidding.) But it’s true…the problem of scale, the muddling of inconvenience with urgency, the relativity of privilege in terms of how different communities’ survival is more/less drastically impacted…there’s a lot we must make try to sense of.
As a lifelong rereader, I’m not only interested in how specific books do (and do not) speak to individual readers, but also in how a specific book can reach a reader differently once their experience of life has altered. I know there are books which fundamentally impacted my understanding of the natural world and the risk of degradation years ago, which I expect wouldn’t strike me as meaningfully now. This is not a fair example, but as a child I read (and absolutely LOVED) Julia Andrews Edwards’ The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles (circling around questions of extinction, but in fantastical terms) and I probably wouldn’t have quite the same response now. 🙂
So, in short, we should all read keep reading and reading and reading some more, for as long as we can. inserts oversized checkmark in the margin Yup, I think we can do that! At least, we’ll try…
For Lee, re: insects, do read Dave Goulson’s books if you can find them in the USA. He’s such an effortlessly engaging writer. Bees are his specialty, but he also writes about insect-friendly gardening in general.
I don’t mean to butt in when you’re speaking directly to Lee, but I wonder if you’ve read E. O. Wilson’s stuff on ants? His novel about them used to be in the collection of my local branch (but their collection has been drastically weeded during COVID and I see it’s no longer on their shelves) and I noticed he’s written a bunch of other ant books (NF) in my search online this morning.
My husband has read Anthill; I bought it for him secondhand some years ago. We haven’t explored Wilson’s nonfiction much, but I’m sure he’s a source of much wisdom.
As in so many other instances, once I’ve started poking around in the library (and it’s not the first time that one of Lee’s reco’s has sent me into the catalogue LOL), I’ve only become MORE interested, far beyond a single book. happy sigh
I’d been meaning to ask you how this project was going, but I have been useless about e-mailing so far this year. Are these the books that made the cut for your article, or the leftovers? I imagine it’s been very hard to set limits!
I suppose I should appreciate Hildyard’s honesty about her hypocrisy, since we all share it to an extent, but her book is one that I reacted rather violently against, for how abstract she rendered very real threats. I’m reminded of an interview I did with a debut novelist recently (Jackie Polzin, author of Brood). I asked her about a quote from the book where the narrator admits that, even though she keeps chickens and loves them as pets, she still eats chicken produced via factory farming — she doesn’t like to think about how these birds have been treated … so she doesn’t think about it. I really appreciated Polzin’s response: “Generally, we’re conditioned to shut our minds to everyday horror and the suffering of others to protect ourselves from the real suffering we feel via consideration. It’s a completely understandable mode of operation, but not free of consequence. I think caring outside our comfort zones is the great challenge of our time.”
I tend not to read nonfiction about climate change anymore because at this point I find it overfamiliar and depressing. (I don’t need convincing about the science behind it, or about how bad things are and will get.) Has your reading been dispiriting at all? When I do read environmental nonfiction, I want it to be realist, yes, but also hopeful. Some of my reading from the last few years that would fit that bill includes: Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places by Julian Hoffman, Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones, This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook, Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty, and Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier. That said, I do like the look of the Schlossberg here, for its practicality and sense of humour.
So maybe that means I’m more open to environmental themes in my fiction, though the dystopian takes again can seem well-trodden and bleak and I mostly avoid them. You’ve been aiming for a real diversity of approach and perspective, though; I can tell. The recent environmentally minded novel that I would most recommend to you is The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan, one of my favourites from 2021 so far. You might also like Maja Lunde’s novels, and, if you haven’t read it yet, do try Weather by Jenny Offill. So honest; so funny. Another one I’ve heard about but won’t read myself (because I’ve not go on well with her previous books) is The High House by Jessie Greengrass. Eric’s review is very thorough: https://lonesomereader.com/blog/2021/3/27/the-high-house-by-jessie-greengrass.
And I know I’ve mentioned to you that I would try to share my individual reads backchannel for it, too, knowing your (and your partner’s) interest, but I’ve not kept up with my intentions there either!
I had the opposite response to DH’s book; I wanted to buy it in bulk and thrust copies into the hands of other reading friends because I found something about it invigorating. (Obviously, had I done so, you would have thrust it right back! LOL) It’s like she articulated something I’d longed to articulate. But, even in saying that, I’m not sure it’s really about what she articulated but about how it landed for me. Maybe, then, it’s a work that connects with readers conceptually but maybe not mechanically, if that makes sense.
That quotation is so thought-provoking: thank you for sharing it here. I do think it fits perfectly with the kind of question, revolving around dissociation or denial, that settle at the root of all this. Even just discussing it contains the possibility of making small changes, however. I still remember listening to someone describe their decision to move from full-on meat-eating to plant-based food, based on the way that his cat’s hind quarter felt one day when he was stroking its fur, on the similarity to the chicken legs in Styrofoam trays that he bought at the supermarket weekly and his understanding that he could redraw the line of cultural consumption at the personal level (connected to his understanding that there are other cultures in which cats and dogs are considered as food first, as chickens and cows are in North America). Sometimes the most ordinary conversations can strike people at the exact moment to inspire change. And, other times, un unh–nothing can budge us.
Thank you for making so many relevant recommendations and for explaining your reading style on these topics, so that anyone else reading here will be able to better predict whether they could match their reading preferences too. Yes, it can be challenging to read in this vein. Last year, I started moderately to research for these essays, and it was fine; over the holidays, I read an extraordinary amount, and found it overwhelming at times.
While reading the Diane Cook, for instance, I wanted to discuss it with you because I’d recalled that you hadn’t liked it at all, but even though I admire and respect what she produced, I couldn’t bring myself to immerse myself in the story any longer, just to discuss it alongside the research reading and note-taking. All together, and especially on the holidays, I felt it all, and all at once. wry laugh at self (Also, the Cook won’t fit quite as well with my pieces, so I didn’t feel compelled to chat about it for that reason either.) Lee, if you’re reading this, I think you’d find Cook’s book really interesting though; it definitely fits with some other thoughts and ideas you’ve explored. (But, these aren’t new ideas.)
I’ll look forward to your other roundups through the year, and I hope you’ll share links to your finished pieces, too.
Thank you for offering so many great recommendations, Rebecca, here and backchannel. Your suggestion of the Elizabeth Kolbert and Daniel Wallace-Wells event was much appreciated, for instance. My pieces will be in print, unfortunately, but I’ll share the publication info if you’re interested. 🙂
No ‘unfortunately’ about it; print is the holy grail!
🙂
You’ve got a great roundup of books which would be perfect for upcoming Earth Day! I am currently reading The Sixth Extinction which deals with how humans are now the greatest force launching us into the next extinction due to our behaviors. Fascinating topic and definitely would like to read more. Of the books you mention, I’m also curious about the Berta Caseres book.
Elizbeth Kolbert is a great place to start, although her style makes for slow reading. I’m curious about her new book too.
The Berta Caceres story is so compelling. I hope you order a copy and share in my respect for her work. Another activist in the Lenca community was also murdered just a few weeks ago. Here’s a link to BBC reporting on it.
Hoping not to sound rude, I would recommend that a great place to start is trying to understand the essence of the serious problems we face. To my mind that can be best approached by reading The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson
My review is at : https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3558867147
Thanks for the recommendation; I don’t know how I overlooked it via GR. Consilience is the only one I’ve read and more than twenty years ago (I still have my copy tho). TMoHE is listed as the second of the Anthropocene trilogy; I wonder if the the order matters. All three are available via other library branches in the city and, also, that there’s a new Library of America volume, which contains three of his books (at least?), just published a couple of weeks ago. You’ll be pleased to hear that all the copies are out for readers who were waiting and there’s another full set of readers for the next borrowing period, so Wilson still has loyal followers. I’ll revisit and explore some more myself too (the older stuff). (Also, for those who are keen on the graphic form, there’s a 2021 illustrated biography too!) Later this year I’ll have three more posts like this too. By then, I’m sure you’ll have more rec’s as well.
I’m just working on my review of Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez now (have you read it?) and climate change is the trigger that seems to change this society into one of fascism and terror. It’s a new level of disturbing actually, to think that climate change will not only disrupt our outside world, but the ways in which we treat others, and how our society is built. It’s a whole new level of climate change anxiety!
I’ll look forward to reading your thoughts on Crosshairs. I have read it, and it’ll feature in the pieces I’m writing, but after they’re done I’ll include it in another eco-fiction roundup. It’s quite a wake-up call for the more privileged to realize that oppressed communities have been engaged in a struggle for survival historically, whereas the climate crisis introduces vulnerability into everyone’s experience.
I’ve got some of these books on my list but I have now added a couple more. Thanks! I just finished Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, a novel that is about climate change without actually saying climate change. It even includes a civil collapse due to climate change. All told from the perspective of a teenager. The adults in the novel do not come off looking very good. I’m in the midst of a nonfiction book right now called Radical Homemaking, super good with lots of fascinating historical bits about consumerism and capitalism and women.
Lydia Millet’s fiction has always felt like a lot of work to me, so I’ve only read her in small bursts; she reminds me of Joy Williams-insightful, clever, bold, and slightly odd (which I don’t mean disparagingly). I must give The Children’s Bible a try (when it’s less in demand at the library). I was surprised to find two books in TPL with that title: who wrote the one you have? And do you think it would suit the kind of changes I’ve been pursuing, based on our chats about zero-waste goals on your blog? (Or is it more about the aspects that I’m not prioritizing currently, given my current address?)
Yes, A Children’s Bible is simple and straightforward on the surface but there is so much going on underneath. Sorry I got the title wrong, it’s Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes. In the first half it takes a feminist historical look at the concept of homemaking, is anti-capitalist and anti-consumerism. In the second half it presents research/interviews Hayes did with about 20 or so families who are currently following a radical homemaking kind of life, what it looks like, why they do it, how they do it, etc, while also continuing to provide wider context for their choices. So it’s very much a brain book and not a how-to kind of book. I suspect you would find it interesting.
That’s one of the two that I was eyeing and now that I look more closely they are both by that same author (one more recent, with very different artwork/cover design, which looks like a chattier kind of follow-up?). The copies are on loan and there is a very small waitlist (which doesn’t necessarily work into a short wait with quarantining and transfer times but no complaints) so I plan to have a look. Thank you! (Side note: we’ve now switched to all-homemade nut butters, another set of glass jars not hitting our bins–whee!)
Oh yes, Homespun Mom? I plan to read it after Radical Homemakers. I just checked her website and she has a new book coming out in August called Redefining Rich. I have the same quarantining transfer thing at my library too. So whenever they arrive, I hope you enjoy them! Also, awesome about the nut butters! I think fresh made at home nut butters are soooo good. Just the nuts! Enjoy!
Yup, that’s the one! It has such a different vibe in appearance, but it’s her. I’ll let you know what I think (maybe it’ll end up in one of these posts, later in 2021). We use nut butter for so many dishes, from noodle sauces to pancake topping, that it’s been a bigger step on our zero-waste household project than I’d expected (but, still, lots yet to work on, of course).
I think Daisy Hildyard is probably dead right about people doing and saying different things. Perhaps we’re all a little guilty of that. I can’t remember reading anything specifically about climate change, but a novel I read a few years ago has really stayed with me. When the Floods Came by Clare Morall is set here in my home city in an imagined future after extreme weather/viruses has changed the way people live.
So true. For starters, we’re all discussing this here, on the internet, many of us using mobile devices running on components extracted with horrendously devastating effects on native communities and the Earth. We’re all a mass and a mess of contradictions! That Morrall novel is on my TBR and I’m glad to know that it’s stuck with you after some time.
I like the sound of the Schlossberg which seems to take a realistic approach to pointing readers at ways they can change their behaviour without preaching.
It’s also very pickup/putdown-able; one could easily read a single piece daily (even though one could also read an entire book on whatever that topic is, too). She’s obvs American, but it was all still relevant to me as a Canadian, and I believe that would be true for English readers also.
Wow, what a great roundup! So much here that caught my eye, but I think Diary in the Age of Water is the one I’d most like to read. As for recommendations, well I enjoyed Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, and I have his novel Gun Island on my Kindle to read soon.
Ahhh, thank you for reminding me about the Ghosh. It keeps slipping off my plans, despite having loved his Ibis trilogy, And you know that I was impressed by Gun Island. Did I ever mention Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain? Multiple POVs, so it requires some attention to appreciate the connections between narrators, but even though he’s not super plotty, it’s an engaging read.
Yes, you mentioned that recently, but I can’t remember where 🙂 I’m glad to hear that you found it engaging—I was a bit put off by some other reviewers who found the connections too loose. But perhaps I’ll give it a try!
I remember hearing that criticism; I enjoy the process of fully drawing across the dashed line of a connection in my mind, that I’ve made while reading, so I’m predisposed to linked stories. When I feel like an author has created a space for a reader to discover something on her own (i.e. they’ve not tightly drawn the ribbon into a bow for me), I enjoy that. Rather than an issue with construction or inexperience, I believe the space afforded to readers and characters in Sudbanthad’s debut is a matter of design, but it does require some effort/investment from readers for sure. And not everyone enjoys that kind of relationship with a book. 🙂
Yes, it can be fun to draw those connections, and I definitely like it when the author leaves some space for interpretation and line-drawing. It does require an investment, though, so I can see why some readers were put off. For me, the success of that kind of book also depends on my mood and how much I have going on in my life. Sometimes, if it’s late and I’m tired and preoccupied and don’t have any energy, I just feel like screaming “Oh, tie the damn bow already!”
Heheh Yes, sometimes! I’m a moody reader, too. That’s the main reason for my unwieldy stack…that way I always have a book underway that suits my mood in that moment. And there are definitely authors whose works I enjoy and admire but approach with a particular sort of concentration (Michael Ondaatje for instance, though more because of the language than any puzzle factor).
Bravo!
Reminds me of a bit from another book, “Understand his frustration, Kay, with so many of our species’ subjective avoidance of inconvenient problems they are causing.”
“A common hindrance in life is our own thinking.” ~ yt
We’ve got a lot of evolutionary baggage to shoulder, aggravated by our explosive population bursting at the seams. Ask an ecologist what that means and you get an earful 😉
What I look for in a book is not whether it is traditionally or self published (there are good and bad reasons for both), nor what nationality the author is, but rather how well it is written and edited, if the subject matter intrigues me, and if it makes me think. Eco-lit tie-ins are a plus (seeing where others care), and strictly commercial themes (romance, horror, etc.) are avoided. Unless something else catches my eye, I also bypass books with excessive commercial hype that tend to coincide with exorbitant pricing (money grubbing, too many hands in the pot, … ?). On a rant, other games different economies play are also telling — like not being able to purchase an ebook version of Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle in the US.
As to what I read, nonfiction Natural sciences to keep abreast. In fiction I’ve recently enjoyed Lesley Thomas’s Flight of the Goose: a Story of the Far North, Jean Giono’s The Man Who Planted Trees (Robert J. Lurtsema’s reading listened to multiple times), Kim Heacox’s Jimmy Bluefeather, Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Ivan Doig’s The Sea Runners, Dalene Matthee’s Circles in a Forest, and on and on. Currently I’m reading The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich.
And thus again, I’ve said too much 🙂
So many great recommendations, Lee: thanks so much for taking the time to share several stand-out reads. And your quotations made me smile, in understanding and recognition. The word ‘inconvenient’ stood out for me, also, in that it’s the title of one of Thomas King’s well-known volume of NF, An Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
He’s an author I enjoy reading as much for the substance of his books as for the way that he invites readers to examine our thinking (and assumptions and priorities, etc.) from a different angle. He gets me thinking.
But, I don’t mean to go on about that, grins because I know you’ve had difficulty sourcing his works in a format that you can access. Now, THAT is inconvenient! 😉
The Matthee novel I read on your recommendation last year and it’s certainly worthwhile. You know I’m a huge Erdrich fan. And I’ve been meaning to read Olga Tokarczuk for a couple of years now. Did you know that her publisher in Europe is the same indie press that publishes Daisy Hildyard (whose quotation opens my post here)? They put out some very interesting material for sure. (I have Karen/Kaggsy to thank for bringing them onto my reading radar; I don’t think I’d’ve stumbled onto The Second Body otherwise.)
ALL of that to say, I appreciate the recommendations here and the discussion about how challenging –and necessary– it is to engage with these stories. It’s helpful to know how other readers are struggling, persevering, trying again.
I haven’t read anything specifically about climate change recently, but Robert Macfarlane’s Underland had much to say about the state of the world and what we’re doing to it. It was never preachy, and had a fairly wide remit, but the points were certainly made very clear and I ended up wanting to go off and rescue the planet.
Hahaha, I just LOVE that feeling. brushes off satin-lined cape Thanks for this!