Book #12: Parable of the Sower
Imagining resilient futures with Octavia Butler.
Hi friends! This is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis in community. Meeting for this book is Sunday, April 24 at 1 pm EDT.
Everyone in the book club was hungry for more fiction, so we’re doubling it up this year. The first selection of fiction gives you a choice between two stories of revolutionary Black women confronting climate collapse: How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue (see my previous post about this option) and Parable of the Sower, a visionary sci-fi novel by the beloved Octavia Butler published almost 30 years ago. Read one book or read both—we’ll have two separate book club meet-ups to discuss each of them separately.
Parable of the Sower is the first book in Butler’s two-book Earthseed series. It’s about a story of a young woman living in a post-apocalyptic California where wildfires, water shortages, and drug addiction is rampant. She starts a spiritual movement where the core tenet is, “God is Change.” Octavia Butler has experienced a revival in recent years due, among many reasons, for both her prescient visions of the future and popularization by Adrienne Maree Brown. I read Parable of the Sower several years ago and I still think about this book just about every week. It’s one of those stories that has the capacity to settle into your body in a way that great writing can.
We’ll also be discussing this book alongside members of the Local Color Flowers Book Club, run by my dear friend, Ellen Frost! Local Color Flowers is a Baltimore-based florist that sources all of its flowers from within a 100-mile radius of Baltimore City, and it’s one of my absolute favorite things about living in Baltimore. Check out the link to discover other books LocoFlo will be reading this year and message Ellen if you’d like to join her book club, too.
As for our book club meet-ups, everyone is welcome to join, whether you’ve finished the book or not, and to engage in whatever way feels right to you. Maybe you’re coming to connect with others and work through these questions with a sympathetic sounding board, or maybe you’re coming to learn in a listen-only mode. You are welcome here! Our meetings last for about 1 hour, but it’s totally ok to come for the first 30-45 minutes if that works for you.
For those who are new to our meetings, here’s how it works:
A few days before our meeting, I send out a separate Mailchimp newsletter with a Zoom registration link. Please register so I can plan appropriately for the size of our expected group. If you have unsubscribed to that newsletter (life happens and my email inbox perpetually has over 5,000 unread emails in it, so I get it!), please also make sure to unsubscribe to this Substack as well so I don’t accidentally re-subscribe you to the Mailchimp newsletter when I’m updating the lists every other month.
That’s it, for now! Happy reading!