I’ve written or edited thousands of science and engineering proposals, blog posts, and reports, and in the past decade, disaster resilience has become a major subject of these documents. I’ve come to realize that while it’s possible to be ready for disasters, few people truly are. In the books I’m recommending, something vital to life has been stolen and the disasters are so overpowering that mere survival is a nearly impossible goal. This forces the characters into unusual and heroic action. Their choices are sometimes surprising and always compelling, and I loved sharing their journeys.
No one seems to know why the waters are vanishing from the Northwestern United States. Crime and chaos reign as society collapses. Marella Wells, a young employee at a worldwide chemical company, thinks she may have discovered what is happening to the water. But there is no way to alert authorities and no time to spare. With her mentor-boss and a displaced college student, Marella travels through the depleted regions of the Pacific Ocean to stop the run-away Climate Machine. The small band of unlikely warriors must battle for survival through unprecedented droughts, storms, and fires, and to make matters worse, a violent religious doomsday cult is at their heels. If Marella and her companions fail in their mission, all life on Earth will perish.
What stood out to me about Severance, aside from the witty-without-trying-to-be writing, was the dynamic between the characters.
In the group of nine or so people still healthy after a devasting virus, one man appoints himself as the leader, and the others allow him to do so, following him on a questionable journey. It spurred me to ponder why people award others status.
Why do people follow others so faithfully, even when they don’t deserve respect? Also, the alternating chapters of pre- and post-disaster expose the many things we stress about in our daily lives that just don’t matter. That may sound tragic, but I found it liberating.
Read this book to immerse yourself in the post-apocalyptic world, but also enjoy the vivid detail and great writing.
Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.
"A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." ―Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review…
It’s a mark of a good book that years after reading it, scenes from it still play out in your mind.
In Station Eleven, after the world grinds to a halt (again, a virus), a girl can’t get hold of her desperately needed medication. I still visualize her wandering off into the woods, never to be seen again.
If society collapsed, we would profoundly miss many things that are more than just basics. It begs the question of whether we can ever be truly disaster resilient.
At one point in the novel, a character protests, “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?” Another responds, “…it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?”
This compelling book, which imagines both society’s collapse and its resurgence years later, is well worth reading.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
It fascinates me how in a disaster, from one day to the next, nothing is ever the same again.
In Bird Box, where something is turning people violently suicidal, “…it definitely begins when a person sees something.”
At first there’s a rumor in a faraway country, but later the world abruptly changes. Nobody can be outside without a blindfold, millions are dying, and society collapses.
It would be bad enough to literally never see the world outside of your house, but then Malorie has to take a journey on a river…while blindfolded...with two blindfolded children…amidst creatures she knows almost nothing about.
That’s pure insanity that makes for a riveting, absorbing book, and Malorie’s determination is beyond inspiring.
You might think this classic was written in the 1930s because of the panic-causing radio drama, but it was actually published in 1898.
How astounding it must have seemed back then, and the tale of Martians causing utter destruction has endured the test of time.
What stood out for me was the difficulty of disseminating information in the late nineteenth century, and the in-depth descriptions of the English landscape, the Martians, and their machines: “…vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat.”
Books like this are wildly entertaining, but that’s not all. Our ability to imagine disaster, and envision overcoming it, is a step toward disaster resilience.
But planet Earth was not only being watched - soon it would be invaded by monstrous creatures from Mars who strode about the land in great mechanical tripods, bringing death and destruction with them. What can possibly stop an invading army equipped with heat-rays and poisonous black gas, intent on wiping out the human race? This is one man's story of that incredible invasion, from the time the first Martians land near his home town, to the destruction of London. Is this the end of human life on Earth?
This nonfiction book is jam-packed with astonishing facts and captivating personalities from the time of the Dust Bowl.
The disasters were many and varied during the 1930s on America’s Great Plains. “The weather might display seven different moods in a year, and six of them were life-threatening. Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hailstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes…”
Not to mention the dust storms: “thick like coarse animal hair…with an edge like steel wool.” At least two monster “black dusters” traveled 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers), taking topsoil from the midwest all the way to Washington DC.
The impact on society was terrible, but brought about great change in the country’s approach to conservation. This book is excellent for writers. Having read it helped me write more truthfully (I hope) about disasters in my fiction.
In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
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