2024 Reading List
Five books to carry us through the year.
We’re Book Club for the Planet, a book club dedicated to reading about the climate crisis in community. Want to see all of the 2024 book picks and recommendations in one place? Check out my shop link at Bookshop.org. Need a refresher for how book club works? Right this way.
This is going to be a really good year of reading, friends. I’ve changed this list at least a dozen times and decided that ultimately, less is more. For me, a deep lesson of 2023 was to slow down, not over-commit myself, and leave lots of breathing space to just be. With that lesson in mind, I’ve selected five books instead of our usual six to eight, and each one promises to be something to savor. Our first read of the year will be Stolen in January, a carry-over from 2023 (details here). Cheers to a year of reading, deep engagement, and growing friendships with each other.
If you need a refresher about book selection or how book club works, read this. Please note that book club dates listed below are subject to change, and in-person book dates will be added to this post at a later date. I’m a human with a shifting schedule, but do my best to provide updates on book-specific Substack posts. Thanks in advance for your understanding!
March
The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush’s first book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, so when I learned she was writing a new climate book about Antarctica and motherhood, I knew it would be the top of our list. This one is for everyone who has grieved calving glaciers, struggles with parenthood during the climate crisis, loves scientific expedition stories, and craves a little hope.
Book club dates: March 17 (virtual); in-person to come
For continued reading, check out Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 short story, “Sur”; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy; Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons by Joe Shute; and Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua. And follow Esther Horvath on Instagram!
May
Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito
I first heard about Kohei Saito through his first book, but he popped up on my radar again through a New York Times profile. His latest book, Capital in the Anthropocene, isn’t new; it was published in 2020 in Japan and sold over 500,000 copies, but it’s just now being released in English this January. Saito joins a growing chorus of other writers interrogating capitalism’s goal of constant, endless growth and consumption and exploring how “degrowth” could actually be the key to climate solutions.
Book club dates: May 5 (virtual); in-person to come
For continued reading, please check out Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy by Kohei Saito; Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel; Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe by Michael Löwy; and Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism by Aja Barber.
July
The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
Of all of the books for 2024, this one feels the most urgent. Estimates warn that we could have 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, a number that’s too staggering to really comprehend. We’re already seeing communities displaced by climate crises, whether from rising seas, hurricanes, wildfires, erosion, heat, and more. What will the future map of the United States look like as climate and migration reshape us?
Book club dates: July 21 (virtual); in-person to come
For continued reading, please check out Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush; Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant; The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells; and Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert.
September
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
Anyone who knows me knows I’m the founding member of the Ursula K. Le Guin Fan Club, and her science fiction novella, The Word for World is Forest, has been on my shelf for some time. This will be the oldest book we’ve read yet—it was published in 1972—but (hopefully) as timeless and relevant as all of her other books I’ve read. Like many of her books, The Word is a story set in her Hainish universe. The inhabitants of a peaceful world, the Athsheans, are conquered and colonized by an invading force from Earth (known as Terra) for their natural resources, which spurs them to resist and break their traditions of non-violence for the first time.
Book club dates: September 22 (virtual); in-person to come
For continued reading, please check out some of Le Guin’s greatest hits, including The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and A Wizard of Earthsea. Also check out a gaggle of other sci-fi, dystopian, or speculative fiction stories that weave in eco themes, including Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead; The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins; Dawn by Octavia Butler; Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich; The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss; and Liquid Snakes by Stephen Kearse.
November
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy
I had been reading Alicia Kennedy’s Substack, From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, for a couple of years before she announced she was writing a book. She writes a lot about veganism, but that’s not why I followed her; I followed her for her writing, which is very, very smart. She just happens to write about food, often vegan, with a lot of grace, awareness, and originality. Our first book club book was about the future of food and took a high-tech approach to solving the coming crises; I have a feeling this one will be quite different.
Book club dates: November 17 (virtual); in-person to come
For continued reading, please check out We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer; An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler; Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson; Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino; and Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing by Luz Calvo.