The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways.
In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption.
(My laugh came out more like a bark than a meow!)
And in Tara Kangarlou’s The Heartbeat of Iran: Real Voices of a Country and Its People, I met Sima Raisi, a young Baluch girl, who describes her love for the shores of Chabahar and the transformation of Lake Orumiyeh in northern Iran from being the region’s largest saltwater lake into a salty wasteland.
(An accessible and engaging primer on everyday lives in Iran: definitely worthwhile.)
Mostly, however, my climate crisis reading, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been part of a deliberate search.
Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water (2019; Trans. Lytton Smith, 2021) sports a blurb from Rebecca Solnit which calls him “the love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll”. Solnit fans who glimpse her name on the back cover likely register the endorsement first and the contents second—fair enough, as her works also combine a degree of erudition with an unexpectedly engaging style.
Unlike the Catapult anthology I recommended earlier this year, which I thought would be most enjoyable on a daily basis with a cup of tea, Magnason’s essays would be a perfect match for a weekly date on Sunday afternoons with a tumbler of whiskey. There are poems and statistics, philosophies and photographs: the combination of science discourse with personal ruminations and memories invites readers to the table with a more familiar tone than Elizabeth Kolbert’s but with a more substantive feel than Christiana Figueres.
His style reminds me of Anne Fadiman (for the underlying bookishness) and China Miéville (for the straightforward and somehow gutsy approach).
The linked stories in Ndè-Ti-Yat’a / Land-Water-Sky: A Novel by Katłià (2020) immediately captured my attention. At first, I’d planned to read just one story each afternoon with my lunch, but after the second story, I decided to read it as a novel and, partly through Deèyeh’s story, I simply had to finish. Some elements of Deèyeh’s story fit with Katłià’s life experience (working on an archaeological dig to unearth the history of a Dene settlement in the far north of the land currently called Canada). The author has written at length about other aspects of her personal experience in her memoir, Northern Wildflower (2018) (for which the author is identified as Catherine Lafferty) which I enjoyed a couple years ago.
These are survival stories, too, inspired by Indigenous mythologies, with many characters named in Wiìliìdeh for elements in nature (Yat’a=sky, Dahtì=dew, Deèyah=calm water, Goli=ice, Lafì=girl, Nąàhgą=bushman shapeshifter, Àma=mother). There is a lot of power in these stories; with further developmental editing, this collection would have been a contender for my favourites shelf. The scope of the novel is the most hopeful element, and choosing to situate her stories in past, present, and future does underscore that perspective:
“The scarred landscape was full of new life with patches of lush greenery and baby pines. It made Deèyah hopeful that the land was still flourishing amid the drought.”
Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) pulls readers into a fictional country in Africa (in a NYT interview, she explains that there were too many similar stories to identify only one as the basis for her novel) which has been targeted for resource extraction by a Western country. “Without our parents’ stories about their childhoods in a clean Kosawa, their days spent swimming in rivers that ran clear, how would my friends and I have known that the sporadic smokiness that enveloped the village and left our eyes watery and noses runny wasn’t an ordinary occurrence in the lives of other children our age?”
An ambitious story, crossing time and perspectives, Mbue boldly identifies the dynamics but situates them on a spectrum, so that the tale is more nuanced than one might expect. “They believe Pexton’s lie, and for a long time our parents did too, convinced that if only they remained patient the thing called ‘prosperity’ would arrive like a cherished guest for whom the fattest pig had been slaughtered, and all of Kosawa would live in brick houses like the one Woja Beki would eventually own.”
Not everyone is a cherished guest and not everyone has a brick house: everyone is affected by these decisions.
For all those readers who seek details about their recognizable but futuristic settings, who prefer another driving force while still delving into climate-crisis fiction, Doreen Vanderstoop’s Watershed (2020) is an ideal choice. Glacial melting and desertification have led to water scarcity in 2058 Alberta, so that pipelines previously used to transport oil now transport water, but what we have here is a mother-son story.
The novel opens with a mother’s hope that her son’s career will proceed in a worthwhile and rewarding way, with a son hoping that his mother will not be too disappointed to learn that his definitions of those terms are not the same as hers. Her scenes are more reflective, rooted in the natural world, preoccupied with scarcity: she lives on the land. He inhabits a world with action and events, scenes fuelled by dialogue and open conflict, preoccupied by greed and exploitation. (It begins with his desire to earn and support his parents’ efforts to stay on the land, but this kind of work involves risk and requires compromise.)
Vanderstoop is a debut novelist and I was surprised by how skillfully she handles the stylistic shifts required to make these two characters and their different worldviews come alive; attention-to-detail, pacing, and scene-building contrast dramatically, so that the mother’s scenes move on land-time and the son’s on corporate-time. (She is a musician and an oral storyteller, so I’m guessing these were intuitive choices, based in rhythm and phrasing and arcing.)
Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2017; Trans. 2021) is likely to land on my list of favourite reads for this reading year. It landed on my stack because I read an anthology of short stories she edited, in combination with an encouraging review in the NYT. It languished on my stack because it’s about the Ebola Virus outbreak of 2014. Too much, I thought. And although I hate to return library books unread, I considered it as this novel’s duedate approached. Finally one afternoon, at the end of a long day, I decided I would leaf through the opening pages but return it the following morning.
That’s how it happened, that I was in motion, moving towards the small stack of loans I’d already finished, intending to deposit it there. That’s how I ended up standing to read the first forty pages of this book. I’m not kidding. Her language is direct and clear; every word is purposeful and her structure reinforces her theme; her scenes are compassionate but not sentimental. All of this impressed me—and it’s true that she employs one of my favourite creative techniques (I won’t spoil it)—but my reason for reading on is something else. There is an active and invigorating element to Tadjo’s style that propels this story; part of me wants to peer more closely, to examine her verb tenses and vocabulary, but part of me thinks that it’s simply a belief, an intention, that simmers beneath the work as a whole.
After I finished, I felt something I hadn’t felt for some time. It took me awhile to think of the word. Resolute. There are many kinds of contagion and here’s something worth catching.
Something like Christiane Vadnais’ Fauna (2017; Trans. Pablo Strauss 2020) might emerge, if you were to shelve Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011) together with Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love (2010) long enough for them to consume and collapse into one another.
Some others have compared Fauna to Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation; it’s an apt comparison for the lush overgrowthy setting and ominous undercurrent, but this is a woman-soaked story, with women’s bodies directing and containing the action.
Throughout, Vadnais centres the female experience even while she decentres the human experience; the world in these linked stories is one in which the dominance of the human species has unfolded into something recognizable but strange. This is an apocalyptic vision which straddles the line between horror and calm; while humanity recedes into a secondary role, the rest of the planet evolves and grows.
The lyricism of the language (and undoubtedly Pablo Strauss has executed his role exactingly) also allows readers to hold some of the more disturbing elements at arm’s length, so that “oh, what a beautiful sentence” distracts from the fact that the prose is nibbling on your toes.
For many reading this list, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky (2021) will be the one recognizable title here, but I nudged it up my list thanks to Rebecca, who recommended a 5×15 event with the author and David Wallace-Wells. For more than a decade, Kolbert’s writing about the climate crisis has held a prominent position in the field. In the past, she’s struck me as a little science-y (I prefer the Naomi Klein approach, where narrative seems to hold sway, boosted by science) but her new book is shorter and the chapters felt more like essays than texts to me.
I enjoyed the appearance of her discovering things along with the reader: “The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is twenty-three thousand acres in area, or roughly the size of the Bronx. Within its borders live twenty-six species that can be found nowhere else in the world. According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents ‘the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the second greatest in all of North America’.”
There are other personal angles here, too, for instance, the story about how one biologist, working for the California Department of Fish and Game, was called to rescue some fish whose habitat was disappearing at an alarming rate; he ended up carrying all the Owens pupfish left in Fish Slough, in two buckets.
I also enjoyed the occasional literary reference, like Genedrive technology being compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a single shard of which is enough to freeze all the water in the world”. And I hadn’t heard of Camp Century, which holds the same eerie fascination for me as the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine.
You can’t browse for long on the shelf of eco-fiction without running into copies of Emmi Itäranta’s The Memory of Water (2014), but then Lee specifically recommended it. The story is quickly immersive and delicately balances that sense of familiar-past elements with likely-future elements. So the pace of life and community relationships present scenes which seem to reach back to Kristin Lavransdatter’s time, but the policing and distant reality of cities with different technologies and opportunities hint at contemporary science-fiction.
The scarcity of potable water dictates a newly complex hierarchy but the human capacity for corruption is age-old. The friendship between two young girls keeps the political side of the story at bay; you keep reading because you want to see how their relationship changes when unexpected events and information emerge. It’s this relationship, too, which keeps the story from being as devastating as some other elements of Itäranta’s world- and plot-building.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) was recommended by both Andrew and, I think, Stefanie. Thanks to Mel, I’d already fallen hard for Ghosh’s fiction. Ghosh’s slim volume explores the science of climate change in the context of the literature of climate change, on how/whether writers engage with the subject and how/whether readers and society respond to their stories.
He questions how many writers resist fiction as a vehicle to explore transformation, like Arundhati Roy—an accomplished novelist who has published non-fiction on the climate emergency but reserves fiction to explore other matters. Still, he insists on the important role that artists play in shaping and nourishing change because “we have come to accept that the front ranks of the arts are in some way in advance of mainstream culture”.
We expect “that artists and writers are able to look ahead, not just in aesthetic matters, but also in regard to public affairs” and artists and writers have embraced this role “with increasing fervor through the twentieth century, and never more so than in the period in which carbon emissions were accelerating.”
Late to the party, as usual. But your posts are all the better with everyone’s comments!
The only one I’ve read here is Watershed, and I agree that it’s excellent and more people should be reading it.
The first two books on your list call to me because of their watery covers.
I liked the science-y nature of Kolbert’s last book, so I think I’d like this one too. Maybe because she’s well-known it will be made into an audio book for me!
Fauna’s in my stack and I’m excited to get to it eventually. The other eco-novels also intrigue me. I can get Memory of Water through the library, but not In the Company of Men.
The last eco-book I read was The Day the World Stopped Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon. I recommend it!
Watershed reminds me a little of Station Eleven in that the story couldn’t be told without the crisis but it’s actually all about the relationships, so I really hope it gains an audience steadily.
There’s nothing here that I don’t think you’d appreciate but, at the same time, none of the others screams NAOMIREAD either.
You’re still enjoying the audiobooks? Have you almost run out of listening options? Ohhhh, I think I made a note of an audiobook service with Bill in mind and then learned that it was only for North Americans…I’ll have to see if I can find my note!
Oh, riiiight. Because I wasn’t a huge fan of The Hundred Mile Diet (the book, I mean, I do prioritize local), he just dropped off my reading radar and I really must adjust my thinking; I need to take a look at his previous book too. Thanks for the encouragement! I’m on the hold list for Shopping now.
I love the sound of In the Company of Men! That’s a great way to feel after reading any book. But there are some others to add to my list too, like Land-Water-Sky and How Beautiful We Were. Thanks as always for the recommendations!
Thanks for your receptivity, Andrew. I hope you’ll enjoy these, whenever you get to them. I’m behind online, but I’ll catch up with your reading shortly and will no doubt be adding to my own TBR as a result!
What an amazing list you have put together here. I’ve heard on only couple – the ones you would have expected.
I have just been sent a book, Tim Flannery’s The climate cure: Solving the climate emergency in the era of COVID-19. He’s an Australian who has been writing about conservation and climate change for a long time. Now I just have to read it.
But, I did like your opening comment that “The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways.” I’m finding that too. It’s a good thing eh, because it means that it’s seeping into the consciousness. Whether it will result in change is another thing …
Flannery has written some fascinating books, I’d like to explore his work more. The only one I’ve read (but I’d have to check my log, as I’m not sure if I read it straight through) was The Weather Makers. I have a couple of others on my TBR. There’s one with Hope in the title that interests me, because I think the language used is interesting, in addition to the information therein. I was only planning on doing one more of these round-ups, but maybe I’ll reconsider.
The climate crisis is inconvenient. We have become accustomed to certain actions and ideas, and changing some of them actually requires very small adjustments but they’re “inconvenient” (in comparison). Walking more than driving, using reusable bags for purchases, eschewing take-out packaging, considering the provenance of your food and goods–all remarkably simple changes to make a better future…but even these are seen as impositions. Why should I do it when my neighbour is not? Why should I do it when governance does not reflect that value set? But the other angle is just as valid: why shouldn’t I?
In lockdown I’ve been researching some more things I could do – particularly in the recycling department. I know the idea is to reduce and reuse, but there are some things you just have to use – like blister packs for medications (husband in particular), pens, textiles that eventually wear out, toothpaste tubes – and I have found ways of recycling these! Woo hoo!
That’s awesome, Whisper. Thank you for sharing and encouraging along the way. I’m continuing to whittle down both trash and recycling (as, over here the % of recycle-able materials that ends up in a landfill anyhow is startlingly high), and there is always another item to work out with determination…I’ve not reached a block yet, or, rather, I reroute and try another direction. For pens (as you can imagine, they’re something I make daily use of), I’ve been able to find a few different refillable options that suit me very well. Not available at the corner shop but, still, options!
Fauna intrigues me!
I think you would love Watershed, a real page-turner about family bonds–and how we adapt and accommodate, for people and circumstances–but I imagine it would have to be an ILL or special order through an indie shop.
Glad you liked the Ghosh! I have several of the books you mention in my holds queue at the library already and I am patiently waiting 🙂 But I have now added Fauna and In the Company of Men to my wishlist.
I just finished Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis, sort of a history of environmentalism through people and the animals they fought to save. I am a good way into The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann. And I started reading The New Climate War by Michael Mann but returned it to the library because he insisted in the introduction on the importance of using war as a metaphor. I understand where he’s coming from but war of any kind never actually solved a problem and I think approaching the climate crisis as a war will only serve to make things worse.
I think you’ll enjoy both of those; Fauna features prominently in my article for reasons that I didn’t go into here, reasons that I’m sure will make the story even more appealing to you.
The Nijjuis was in one of my earlier round-ups, I really liked it. It’s kinda all over the place, in one sense, but in another sense, it’s all related in broader terms, so I really enjoyed that expansiveness. I’ve got another one of Michael Mann’s books in my queue I believe? I agree with you about the need for a paradigm shift, so I might not be on the same exact page as he is either, but there are probably some people who appreciate that framework to galvanize them into action. Transforming denial and fear into action is a big hurdle (which I know you see similarly, so I’m just chattin’ with the choir).
Just butting in here to say that The New Climate War is on the Wainwright Prize longlist, which ordinarily might lead me to read a book, but I agree that the title (and whole framework, it sounds like) is a total turn-off.
You’re not butting in! And that only makes me more curious about the book. I’m keenly interested in how people are talking about the climate crisis as that’s a big part of the question of how we engage with (or avoid!) solving the problems. Also, I now realize that the book I have on hold is not one of his (probably some other Michael!) so I’ll put a hold on it to investigate further.
I had to laugh at the thought of Japanese cats doing something to reduce their environmental impact. My cat would be too dumb and selfish to change his ways 😉
I’d pick up any of these, but the Tadjo is the one calling to me most.
It was a rare moment of global awareness on their parts. Heheh
It has that very spare style that doesn’t always suit your taste, but there’s one part of it that I think you would really love.
I see the Tadjo was already on my TBR. I can’t remember why, but it may have been on one of the environment-themed lists we passed back and forth. Spare writing can go either way for me. I do often associate it with novellas in translation, for some reason. The medical theme is a big draw. Now I’m curious to find out what the creative technique is…
It landed on mine via a NYT review from last year. You might have seen good reviews by either HeavenAli or AnzLitLovers too. Ah, yes, there are definitely a few scenes that would fit with that interest of yours, although perhaps not quite as many as one might guess. It’s a technique you also appreciate, so hopefully that’s just enough to avoid spoilers. 🙂
As you know, I’ve read a few of these books too, but I must say that reading this whole list of yours, top to bottom made me a little anxious, just because it’s really bringing home this idea of how urgent this is becoming. The climate crisis is permeating all genres, all kinds of writers, all kinds of books. What will change people’s minds? What will start to shift the mindsets of consumption to conservation? As I write this, the fires are burning even worse in BC, and people are always remarking on how much worse the smoke is getting year after year. I’m in Victoria BC on vacation, and it’s so dry here, the grass is completely brown everywhere. I’m hopeful that as the Covid pandemic slows, people will turn their attentions back to the environment…
I’ll add links to the two that I recall that you’ve read: On Time and Water and Watershed…was it accidental that they both had watery titles? LMK the others you’ve read and I’ll link to them as well.
The pandemic is presented as a convenient excuse, but if we can’t hold more than one important issue in our minds at the same time, I think it’s worth considering whether our species has merit. 😉
Such an interesting selection of books, each with its own individual focus and merits. In the Company of men sounds particularly intriguing, especially given your teaser about the use of particular creative technique!
PS I couldn’t help but laugh at your opening paragraph. The images of those cats pawing at the lights switches…priceless!
You’d appreciate that one, I’m sure. Perhaps a candidate for your WIT reading!
Hah, yes, normally they are much more preoccupied by jockeying for alpha-cat positioning in the family, so it was a nice change to see their concerns expand outward. Hee hee
You are a much more disciplined reader than I am, my reading is more a matter of which book is calling the loudest to me. And climate change reading is usually via news and science stories. I should explore some eco-fiction though.
Do you have a favourite source/author/journalist? I’ve been asking around. I’d been avoiding climate reading for years, but landed a pitch for an article so I couldn’t turn back (it’s in the final stages of production and due out in September). I trick myself like this and continue to fall for my own tricks reliably. 🙂 (PS Yay, your comment worked!)
All of these sounds marvellous and I’m always impressed by the breadth of your reading! I have not read enough about climate change, because it scares me too much, although I do have a copy of The Silent Spring…
Carson is awesome, but I recommend this one–one of the first in my stack, but the 63rd book I read, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I read the last page first and CRIED because her approach is so so exactly what I need/ed. Don’t recommend starting at the end, though, as the whole book is great…I was desperate. 😉
https://www.globaloptimism.com/the-future-we-choose
Link to UK retailers including indie options and multiple translations. You can read it in a couple of hours and then buy copies for younger kin. 🙂
Thank you!
So many extraordinary books, it says a lot about the crisis the earth is facing that so many writers are compelled to write about it. I have read In the Company of Men, it’s beautifully written, it is tough going, but the poetic writing becomes hypnotic. Glad you revised your opinion and read it after all.
Because I was focussing mostly on female writers and Canadian writers, I was restricting myself (for the article I was working on); I’ve added another 30 books to my library list since, mostly international and male writers, and I suspect my list will snowball (hurricane? forestfire?) now.
It really did feel that way. I can’t remember the last time I’ve stood around, just reading, in my own home! Yes, she hypnotized me, that’s it!
I’ve had the Mbue on my list for a while having enjoyed Behold the Beautiful Dreamers. It sounds very powerful
The structure, moving around in perspectives and timeline, interests me; I wonder if she tried that in her debut. The policies of extractivism are driving the story here, but behind the scenes-the actual focus is on everyday people’s lives, so it’s fairly engaging!