For many of us, summer is a time to catch up on reading that has accumulated over the year. But for those of you who are already caught up or looking for something else to read, why not try novels, stories and nonfiction related to climate change? Climate communication comes in many forms. The arts are one of them. They hold open a space for listening, imagining and multiplying familiar perspectives that can enlarge how we understand current conditions.
Reading is often thought of as an activity one does alone. But reading and debating shared works together underpins the community so vital to climate communication. It puts us in conversation with what we’re reading and with each other.
The works listed below model different ways of understanding time, ourselves and our world. Like all good reading, though, my hope is that they will lead readers to more books, books that unstick and jolt readers into new ways of thinking, feeling, responding and acting in these climate times.
1. The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
In the opening pages of The Book of Records, the narrator, Lina, and her father reach a place called the Sea. The reader quickly learns that the Sea is a mysterious building, a dwelling composed of hundreds of rooms and passages, staircases and winding hallways, endlessly built and rebuilt as travellers arrive and leave again. Like the rest of this stunning novel, this strange building on the boundary between land and sea is both fluid and firm. The novel bewitchingly embraces migration, cyberspace, familial relations, displacement, history, storytelling and time in a climate-changed world. The writing is gorgeous, taut and magical. I loved entering the immersive, uncanny world this suspenseful yet somehow quiet novel created.
2. The Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
McConaghy’s The Wild Dark Shore also begins by the sea. But in this case, a mysterious woman washes up on the shore of a remote island. The island had long been used for seedbank research but is now deserted, save for one family, because of rising seas. Each of the finely wrought characters harbours secrets, and McConaghy’s beautifully paced plot makes it hard to stop reading. I appreciated McConaghy’s rendering of the island’s weather and terrain. Its storms, coast, paths and deserted buildings all become characters slowly revealing their secrets. There are many surprising turns in this novel, and the ending will leave readers eager to pass it along to discuss with others.
3. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
McEwan’s new novel, What We Can Know, centres around a missing poem. A poet in a period much like our own writes a poem as an expression of love for his wife on her birthday. But the poem goes missing that night. McEwan deftly allows readers into the thoughts of the dinner guests and keeps us guessing. The present-day story is interleaved with a story of an earnest young academic who, over a hundred years later, in a world much transformed by climate change, is searching (along with many others) for the poem in the hope that he will find the answers he seeks in his life. In both time frames, romances inform the action. What is the role of art in the climate crisis? What can we know? What does knowledge offer? What does it withhold? What does knowledge itself mean? The novel won’t answer these questions, but it will make you think.
4. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Rehearsals for Living is not a new book, but it always bears revisiting. It’s a good reminder, if one needs it, that the impacts of the climate crisis are not evenly distributed. The book’s format — letters exchanged between Maynard and Simpson during the pandemic — speaks to the power of conversation in moving climate thinking in new directions. As Maynard says, we don’t have to understand the climate crisis as the end of the world, but only the end of this world. The entire book is a powerful call to open avenues to more livable and just worlds.
5. What If We Get it Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Johnson is a respected climate scientist, but, like so many others working in climate, she understands the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in this moment. Bringing together poets, artists and leading thinkers in the climate field, What If We Get it Right? Visions of Climate Futures provides some of the building blocks for crafting collective visions and material infrastructures for climate action. It includes 20 interviews that are more like conversations. They model the give-and-take rapport and tenacity that “getting it right” will likely demand. I appreciated the book’s inquiring tone as it begins to imagine what a future could look like outside of the oil and gas energy systems that so often dominate current proposals.
6. End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World by Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein
Strictly speaking, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World is not a summer reading book since its publication date is mid-September. But I like the idea of an elastic summer reading list that stretches summer’s relaxed reading mode into the fall. That said, from what I’ve read of early reviews of the book, it will be more galvanizing than relaxing. It illustrates the role of many of the ultrarich players who have sought to increase their fortunes with little regard for the wider consequences. Confronted now with the climate disasters they have hastened, they are using their money to protect themselves. Taylor and Klein tell these stories to catalyze a different world rooted in collaboration, care and love for this planet. Both Taylor and Klein have always been good at describing what is happening in the world with gripping stories and unforgettable phrases (think of their titles alone: This Changes Everything; The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart). End Times Fascism promises to provide an equally incisive and spirited account of this moment.
7. A Cluster of Books on Water
Summer is a good time for reading about water. The following books offer poetic and beautiful treatments of water: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us; Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?; and Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water. I also loved Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: The Unsettling of the New American Shore, which combines thoughtful commentary with firsthand accounts of coastal change. And I have Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros’s The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis on my to-read list.
8. A Cluster of Books on Pipelines
As our government continues to invest heavily in pipelines, this summer might also be a good time to get new perspectives on what this investment means. Nicole Burton and Hugh Goldring’s graphic novel, The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet (edited by Patrick McCurdy), has only grown more relevant since its publication in 2018. Couple this book with another graphic novel, Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which traces one East Coast woman’s experience working in the Alberta oil sands. John Vaillant’s Fire Weather also offers another unflinching account of the implications of our government’s ongoing support of the oil and gas sector. Summer might also be the time for reading Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, a book that many argue has informed some of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s policy decisions. I recommend coupling it with Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell’s Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future for a useful counterpoint. See, too, Re.Climate’s webinar on this topic.
9. A Cluster of Books That Help Us Practice Thinking About Better Futures
Because we can probably all use some help exercising our future-thinking muscles, one could do worse than to turn to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Paradises Lost or The Dispossessed (and indeed all of her work). Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden and M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 resonate with Le Guin’s work and offer inspiring (in the former case) and possible, but sometimes grim (in the latter case) visions for livable futures. All of these books also show different ways people could share power and resources fairly in future societies. Despite — or perhaps because of — heat, fire and floods, summertime seems like a great time for imagining these better futures. For insightful comments related to these topics and additional reading recommendations, see Mandy Brown’s A Working Library.
10. “What Are We Doing, What Have We Done” by Nathan Englander
For people who are looking for something shorter, this story might fit the bill. Grappling with a beetle invasion and his feelings about imminent fatherhood, Alex goes for a drive. He finds himself in a snowstorm, unable to call his wife. “What Are We Doing, What Have We Done” offers a moving and gentle account of familial relations, past demons and the struggles many of us face in a world where the climate is changing but those around us look away. Englander is a New Yorker who has now made Toronto his permanent home. My son works in the Toronto café where Englander often writes. I love Englander’s writing and asked my son to find out what he was working on. Something about climate change, my son told me. A few months later, he sent me the link to this lovely story.
. . . . .
As you read, consider talking to others about the books you’re reading, passing along the ones you’ve liked, and gathering further reading suggestions. You might also want to read some of these books, or others, in community with friends, followed by conversations about the role of reading in your climate communication practices.
Please feel free to share additional reading suggestions with the Re.Climate team or comment on any of the books you read above, by sending us a note at editor@reclimate.ca.
Happy Reading!
Barbara Leckie is Re.Climate’s Academic Director
