Another Summer Reading List!

More climate and apocalypse reads for you

It is the last couple weeks of the school year, which means in parent-world, it’s the last two weeks of having guaranteed guarded time during the day before we enter a world of summer camp shuffling and weird schedules. BUT it also means that vacation is coming. And with vacation comes reading!

So I’m going to continue my annual tradition and give you my recommendations of favorite climate and apocalypse books of the last year.

I admit that a lot of my reading ended up being a very strange mix of romantasy, rom-coms, dark mysteries, and cozy stories that featured the English country-side. All consumed to give me just a moment of respite from the real world. Because we all know what transpired in the last year and there was much need for distraction in between the action.

Turns out, though, that when I looked at my StoryGraph that I still read a lot of climate and dystopian fiction just like a good climate writer should. And so you get a snapshot of my faves.

My Oceans by Christina Rivera

Each essay in this beautiful collection by

Christina Rivera (Author)

left me sitting silently in reflection. Rivera calls the book fragmented in that it’s not chronological, but every single essay is connected in some way. Connected to womanhood, motherhood, and loving and caring for this planet. It’s deeply vulnerable and, as a fellow mother and woman, it spoke to me in so many ways.

I wrote about My Oceans in my Earth Day post a couple months ago in that it brought up so many relatable guilty feelings about caring about this planet, the people and living beings on it, while also actively participating in its destruction. The 21st Century human condition. And Rivera does such an incredible job at relating the experience of being human and navigating all the human things and loving this planet but also mourning what we’re losing.

(I also had the pleasure of moderating a panel Christina was on for my organization

Scribente Maternum

and you can watch Christina read in this clip here!)

The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush

Motherhood is becoming a theme in this post because The Quickening also overlays motherhood—particularly Rush’s desire to become a mother—with the author’s voyage with a ship full of scientists to the previously unexplored Thwaites Glacier on the Western edge of Antarctica. On this journey, Rush and the scientists on the ship witness almost real-time affects of climate change. While the results and scientific evidence captured is nuanced, it leaves the reader, and Rush, wondering about the future of this planet at the people on it. And it puts Rush’s desire to bring a child into a world faced with climate change that much more dramatic.

Tilt by Emma Pattee

Now to round out the motherhood theme, let’s go to fiction. Emma Pattee’s Tilt is a propulsive disaster story about a nine-months pregnant mother who is attempting to buy a crib at a Portland IKEA when the Pacific Northwest’s Big One hits—the “Big One” being the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. The book puts us squarely in the middle of a disaster so many of us in the Pacific Northwest have been envisioning (some of us preparing for) since Kathryn Schulz’s viral New Yorker story about it in 2015. It’s a quick read that, at the end, you’ll definitely want to start making your go-bag.

If this book sounds familiar, I wrote about it a couple months ago after devouring it in a very short period of time (an unheard of thing for a mom).

The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin

I have been wanting to read this forever because, well, it’s about fire, the climate, and living in the combustible West. All my jam, so to speak. And Martin delivers! The Last Fire Season is a memoir about Martin’s experience in the epic fire season of 2020 that burned 4.2 million acres in California (and a million in Oregon). She and her partner lived in the increasingly threatened wildland-urban interface (WUI — pronounced wooey, how fun!) in a rural town in Sonoma County. From the moment they moved there, fire surrounded them, but the 2020 fires were the worst of them. The story puts that whole season—and the whole notion that there is even a “fire season” at all anymore—into perspective.

Having been socked in by wildfire smoke-induced 500+ AQI air for a week in Oregon that same September Martin write about and, while not directly threatened by the fire itself, reading her experience was a reflective process for me. I hadn’t really taken stock of the smoke-and-fire season that year and thinking about how dominant it still is in my mind, it’s hard to believe it was just five years ago. Makes me wonder what is to come in the years to follow.

Hum by Helen Phillips

Okay I guess we’re not done with motherhood themes, because Hum is also a novel about motherhood. It’s a story that takes place in the near future where everyday work is done by AI robots, the climate is changing, and there’s a very thin line between dystopia and the daily grind. It’s a long weekend in the life of a family, through the eyes of the mother and brings up so many themes mothers are quite familiar with today (the guilt, the societal shaming of how we mother, and the constant daily worry about whether we’re doing right by our kids) but also placing those in a near-future world that looks different enough to feel unreal, but similar enough to realize that we might not be that far off. It’s unsettling but also quite beautiful.

Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice

I was so excited to see that there was a sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow. Taking place on a remote First Nations reservation in Northern Canada, the world suddenly descends into electronic darkness which throws the entire region into chaos. It’s an unquestioned apocalypse. You don’t know in the Crusted Snow what actually happened to cause the power outage, but you do see what happens in the aftermath in that one place. Moon of the Turning Leaves takes place several years later when the people who survived decide to leave the area to find more people so as to continue their existence. In this, you learn more about what happened and what occurred in the outside world in the aftermath. And like Crusted Snow, the Native main characters bring a perspective in dystopian fiction that we don’t read enough of.

Honorable Mentions

I honestly like every book I end up reading because I don’t tend to keep reading if I’m not into it, so all of these are in the category of really enjoyed for various reasons, but don’t have the time or energy to write up a blurb about them:

• The Last Bookstore On Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold: An interesting take on cli-fi for young adults.

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro: I always love Ishiguro’s work—this one has a similar theme as Hum but through the perspective of the AI robot itself.

• The Past is Red by Catheryine M. Valente: another young adult book that is quirky but also thought-provoking.

• How the World Eats by Julian Baggini (you’ll read a write-up of this I wrote in Civil Eats in short order as it’s part of their summer reading recommendations).

• A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy: A great read if you’re trying to understand how an anarchist society might actually function.