I have always felt most at home looking out a window. I should specify I’m not an outdoorsy person - take me hiking and I will simply collapse - but I’m at my happiest when there’s a view out to something green. Reading about the climate and reading fiction that centers landscape both offer me that view, and while I’m not an expert in the particulars of climate change, I am an expert in this: finding books that connect me to the natural world, and books that express the grief of always being a little bit separate from it. The selected books are some of my favorites.
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her.
It started slow. First, the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning their bodies strange and foreign. Now, cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves on their island home, the girls don't dare wander outside the school's fence, where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure they were promised as the Tox seeps into everything. But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie beyond the fence.
David Wallace-Wells’s book is the only non-fiction on my list - perfect for you if you’re finding yourself trying to get a more factual grip on exactly what will happen to the world as climate change continues unabated. But rather than presenting you with a list of statistics, Wallace-Wells explores different scenarios with a frankness that makes reading his book feel like talking to your most informed friend, someone who knows what questions you might have and is eager to answer them. Early sections of this book are especially hard-hitting; when I read it I had to take breaks every twenty pages or so because it made me so anxious, but coming back to the text felt grounding, sobering, and entirely worthwhile.
**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'An epoch-defining book' Matt Haig 'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this' David Sexton, Evening Standard
Selected as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Sunday Times, Spectator and New Statesman A Waterstones Paperback of the Year and shortlisted for the Foyles Book of the Year 2019 Longlisted for the PEN / E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
It is worse, much worse, than you think.
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says…
I first read Annihilation after finishing a draft of my debut novel, Wilder Girls, and found it massively inspiring - not just because it’s impressive on a craft level, but also because seeing VanderMeer weave together themes of personal grief and ecological horror really opened my eyes to what fiction can do in this particular space. If you’ve seen the movie, rest assured there is lots more to be found in the book (and if you haven’t seen the movie, it makes a great chaser after you’ve finished the novel). It is a melancholy and introspective look at living in a landscape that has become a stranger to you, and how we as humans fit into the larger scope of things.
THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE EXTRAORDINARY SOUTHERN REACH TRILOGY - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ALEX GARLAND (EX MACHINA) AND STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC
For thirty years, Area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border - an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate Area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic.
If you don’t have much time to read, this is the one for you. Offill is known for her brevity - her 2014 novel Dept. Of Speculation (equally worth your time) is similarly short, and similarly shot through with humor - and for the punch she can pack into a limited space. In Weather, she brings together the mundane grind of daily life with the larger existential terror many of us experience when we think about climate change, and bridges that gap, forcing her characters to confront how their daily lives are in fact not separate from these bigger concepts at all.
From the beloved author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation—one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year—a “darkly funny and urgent” (NPR) tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink. For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment,…
I am almost certainly not the first person to recommend The Fifth Season to you, but in the event that I am, yes, you should read it. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is set in a world that, every few hundred years, experiences a season of cataclysmic climate change referred to as the fifth season. Jemisin makes the metaphor literal in The Fifth Season, writing about people with an ability to connect with the earth and manipulate its energy living in a society that reviles them. Over them all hovers the specter of the fifth season and the coming destruction. While you may not be able to relate to the specific plight of a magic-user, Jemisin’s characters will feel familiar as they struggle to go on in a world that feels doomed.
At the end of the world, a woman must hide her secret power and find her kidnapped daughter in this "intricate and extraordinary" Hugo Award winning novel of power, oppression, and revolution. (The New York Times)
This is the way the world ends. . .for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
This book has practically nothing to do with climate change. Instead, it’s about space, and fathers, and memory. But more than that, it’s about grief, and loss, and the effort to preserve something that’s already gone, which makes it a pretty perfect fit. This book was my favorite read of 2020 and made me sob (and sob and sob and sob). It feels like such a true expression of how it feels to watch the possibility of a “normal” future get further and further away, and how it feels to want to, in turn, look to the past, and hold on even more tightly.
A Long Island Reads 2020 Selection * A Real Simple Best Book of 2019
From the bestselling author of The Book of Speculation, a “tender and ambitious” (Vulture) novel about time, loss, and the wonders of the universe.
Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach--if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda's newborn brother several…
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Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?: Plan Now to Safeguard Your Health and Happiness in Old Age
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to help you or not, growing old does not have to be an inevitable decline into helplessness. It is possible to maintain a good quality of life in your later years, but having a plan is essential. WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF ME WHEN I'M OLD? equips readers with everything they need to prepare on their own:
* Advice on the tough medical, financial, and housing decisions to come *…
