Book #5 + #6: Recap
Climate fiction and imagining new futures.
Hi friends! I’m Jess and this is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis and solutions, together.
I hope this note finds you and your beloveds healthy and well as we summersault into the downhill slide of summer. After two truly incredible book club meetings for Gun Island and Ministry for the Future, and in the midst of an intense summer graduate course, I used up all the free time I had to slurp up novel after novel, letting my mind and book selections meander where they will. No agenda, no curriculum, no to-read list. Just joyful, summertime reading for pure pleasure. I’ve also discovered the thrill and addiction of thriftbooks.com and have been filling my bookshelves to brimming with beautifully worn mass market paperbacks and other hard-to-find treasures.
Summer reading
Here’s what my brain has been up to:
Deeply grateful that I finally read Motherhood by Sheila Heti, which reflected much of my own struggles and anxieties of considering parenting against the backdrop of Jacob’s wrestling with an angel (G-d).
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett was just delicious, especially the audiobook narrated by Tom Hanks.
Louise Erdrich continues to be a gift as I read her books slowly, just one or two a year, and The Round House was no exception. CW: sexual violence against women.
One of our book club members suggested Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and while there was nothing that surprising about the plot, the characters in this post-apocalyptic landscape felt very real and relatable and the backdrop of art and music was powerful. CW: pandemic that wipes out most of humanity.
I have very visceral memories of seeing The Red Tent by Anita Diamant on my mother’s bedside table in the 90s, and now, I get the hype. I was utterly absorbed.
Robert Macfarlane’s voice is magical as he finds endless ways of describing nature and landscapes, especially landscapes that most of us will never see and experience. It took me forever to finish reading Underland: A Deep Time Journey, but I’d recommend it for every Book Club for the Planet member!
I am convinced that J.K. Rowling has, among her other many faults, ripped off Ursula K. Le Guin entirely from A Wizard of Earthsea, a young adult fantasy that felt like anything but. Includes an explicitly Black protagonist and a fantasy story rooted in Taoism and a very nuanced and mature ethical framework. One of my new favorite books of all time.
Most recently, I’m reading even more Ursula. Just finished The Lathe of Heaven (transcendent) and picked up the rest of the Earthsea trilogy as well as Always Coming Home, a novel slash anthropological study of the imagined Kesh people, set in the future after the collapse of our current civilization. Features drawings, sheet music, and even an accompanying music album of electronic music.
The role of climate fiction
Ursula has been on my mind a lot lately, because she, like our other climate fiction writers and sci-fi novelists—like Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Emily St. John Mandel—help us collectively imagine alternative futures from the one we’re fed by pop culture, news media, and our social media feeds. New stories allow us to envision new ways of being in and relating to the world and embarking on new shared journeys of behavior change. Story is a culture-creating activity. Importantly for us and this book club, the growing genre of climate fiction, or cli-fi, is a well of critical source material for all change agents looking to navigate new modes of organizing across all systems.
In her acceptance speech of the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Ursula said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” I recommend watching her full 6-minute speech below.
I hope you enjoyed reading our cli-fi selections this summer as much as I did, and I have more planned for our 2022 book list. If you weren’t able to join our meetings for our last two reads, however, I’m happy to (belatedly) share our guiding questions with you here.
Book Club Questions - Gun Island
This was our first book of fiction about climate change! How did reading it make you think or feel differently about the climate crisis, especially when compared to the non-fiction books we’ve read? What themes, questions, or ideas surfaced for you?
The main character and narrator, Deen, is a rare-book dealer and is supposedly deeply knowledgeable, but moves through his life as anything but. He is portrayed as socially awkward, bumbling, unmotivated and out of touch with others’ lives and circumstances. Why do you think Ghosh created this kind of character to be our guide through the story?
The two women in Deen’s life—Cinta, an Italian professor, and Piya, a Bengali-American marine biologist—have very different reactions to improbable natural occurrences that happen to Deen throughout the book. On one hand, Cinta’s response is open to magic and the unexplainable; on the other, Piya’s response is rooted in science and logic. What do you think Ghosh might be trying to say about human limitations and what science can, or cannot, tell us about climate change?
The Bengali myth of the Gun Merchant echoes throughout Deen’s life during the story. What do you think Ghosh is trying to communicate about the role of myth and storytelling in shaping our understanding of climate change or the unexplainable?
Gun Island moves across multiple locations—New York City, Kolkata and the Sundurbans, Los Angeles, and Venice, Italy. What do you make of Deen’s constant movement throughout the story and how it intersects—or doesn’t—with Tipu and Rafi’s stories of migration?
Manasa Devi, a goddess who rules over snakes and poisonous creatures, reappears throughout the book as an adversary, a messenger, or a warning. What do you make of her presence throughout the book? Is she a secondary character? Something else?
Spoiler alert—the story ends with a supernatural event out at sea that changes hearts and minds and allows safe passage for a boat of refugees. Shortly after this event, Cinta dies. What do you make of this ending?
Book Club Questions - Ministry for the Future
In the first chapter of the book, the Indian heat wave serves as a tipping point to push the globe towards mass action against climate change. Do you think a mass casualty event like this is necessary to inspire meaningful action towards lowering emissions?
After Frank and Mary’s first encounter in her apartment and his imprisonment, Mary begins visiting him. Why does she do this? Without their friendship, do you think Mary would have been ultimately successful in her role at the MftF?
MftF uses a range of tactics in shifting the world towards drawdown, including traditional diplomacy, legal action, and a terrorist “black wing.” Which of these tactics did you find most believable or effective? Was the violence of the black wing necessary for the other “above board” tactics to succeed?
KSR uses this book as a sounding board for a range of ideas to tackle the climate crisis, including carbon coins, half-earth, pumping water out from under glaciers, salary caps and floors, “YourLock” encrypted social media, and universal citizenship for refugees, to name a few. Which of these ideas was most exciting to you?
The book travels all over the globe, but the primary characters and storyline take place in Switzerland, which in many ways seems untouched by the effects of climate collapse. And even though KSR is an American author, very little of the story takes place in the U.S. Why do you think the author chose to set the story where he did?
The tone of the book experiences a gradual but significant shift from collective doom to universal hope. Do you find this believable? Why or why not?
What we’re reading next
Our next book club meeting is for The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, originally planned for August but due to community request (and my general belatedness) will be pushed to early September. Even more time to pick up your copy and join us! We’ll meet up on Sunday, September 5 (during Labor Day weekend).
A survey!
If you’ve joined one, or all, book club meet-ups, I’d love your input into thinking about how we evolve the book club and what we read next year. Link here. Thank you for sharing your time and thoughts with me!