February is global disaster month

My goodness, I am really confronting my global disaster fears this month! February is a dreary month in Ontario, and it’s challenging even for a milestone birthday to cheer it up. It seems, with few exceptions, that my February book selections reflect this.

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Now, THIS is how you write a dystopian climate change novel. No aliens, no weird paranormal abilities bestowed on random people that can be used to control other humans. The most unbelievable part of this book is that people (eventually) realize the only way to survive the climate catastrophe is to stop doing the things that are ruining the earth, like oil drilling and raging consumerism, and start spending money on things to slow and eventually reverse the effects of climate change, like pumping water out from under the Arctic and Antarctic glaciers and creating re-naturalized “half earth” zones for animals to run free. Haha as if.

But seriously, if you are looking for a reasonably possible and thorough exploration of how humanity might actually win the fight against climate change, look no further! Robinson has covered all the angles about how to slow and eventually reverse the impacts of climate change, calling on some very detailed knowledge of economics, political systems, currency and lending practices, covert global agencies, and the science of climate change itself. It’s dense with detail but pays off in the long run with a much-needed hopeful outlook.

Rating 9/10.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

Then again, perhaps you like your dystopian climate change novels to be more, well, dystopian. Like a nice little mash-up of The Walking Dead, Children of Men, The Road, and I am Legend. Parable of the Sower paints a depressing picture of what people might become when all hope is lost, although it takes a fictional drug that makes its addicts want to set things on fire to really amp up the random destruction and fast-track the story to a group of wandering survivors looking for a new home. Along the way, the heroine invents a new religion called Earthseed that is founded on the principle: All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God is Change. Then there was this prescient verse, written, not yesterday, but *32* years ago:

“Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.”

Rating 8/10. I could have used a bit less invoking of God (even though she argues that God is just Change)

The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A tiny little book that is packed with goodness. The Serviceberry (google it, it goes by many names) serves as a metaphor for abundance in a world that believes in scarcity and hoarding. Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, draws heavily on the philosophies of the First Nations people, which embody the principles of reciprocity and distribution of wealth. When her orchard of Serviceberry bushes bear more fruit than she can use, she gives the excess away, with the understanding that when fortunes are reversed, she will likewise be given gifts of her neighbours excess. This is a world I want to live in, truly. The hoarders of wealth can, frankly, suck it.

Rating: 9/10

A Tiding of Magpies, by Steve Burrows

Oh my goodness, the poor recurring characters that live and work in Steve Burrow’s Saltmarsh community. Relationships are crumbling, recently freed murderers are on the hunt for vengeance, families are creating career-ending problems, past cases are being questioned. I know I said previously that I wanted things to shake up a bit or the characters were going to become a bit tiresome, but jeepers! Maybe just a nice sit-down at a local pub with some honest conversation and mutual soul searching, or a little holiday in the Cotswolds!

Rating: 7/10.

Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue

In 1876 in San Francisco, a young woman was shot dead and her murder never solved. True Story. Here, Emma Donahue has compiled an exhaustive collection of historical information from that time and written a fictional account of a possible, or one might say even probable, solution to the mystery. The historical detail includes researched origin stories for songs referenced in the book. A very enjoyable book, made more phenomenal when you realize the research that went into it.

Rating: 8/10. A bonus point for sheer research effort.

The Premonition, by Michael Lewis

I fell in love with Lewis’s writing with Moneyball, a stats-heavy book on how to win at baseball, and god love him for not shying away from the math AND making it interesting. I moved straight into The Big Short which is quite a bit more of a mindf*** but somehow still (mostly) engaging. In The Premonition, Lewis tackles the science of how pandemics work, how they spread, how models are built to predict them, how they can be stopped in their tracks with the right social distance protocols (close the schools, people! CLOSE THE SCHOOLS!) and how, ultimately, the Trump administration laughed in the face of it all and let half a million people die of COVID, while much of the rest of the world followed his “lead”, because America. But the best part of this book isn’t the fascinating science of disease vectors and propagation, it’s how Lewis celebrates the small number of unrecognized should-have-been heroes and how they actually had all the right answers, if only someone had bothered to listen.

Rating: 9/10. Hot tip, world leaders: there’s an actual manual on how to stop a pandemic. Might I suggest some light bedtime reading?