The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways.

In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption.

(My laugh came out more like a bark than a meow!)

And in Tara Kangarlou’s The Heartbeat of Iran: Real Voices of a Country and Its People, I met Sima Raisi, a young Baluch girl, who describes her love for the shores of Chabahar and the transformation of Lake Orumiyeh in northern Iran from being the region’s largest saltwater lake into a salty wasteland.

(An accessible and engaging primer on everyday lives in Iran: definitely worthwhile.)

Mostly, however, my climate crisis reading, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been part of a deliberate search.

Andri Snær Magnason’s On Time and Water (2019; Trans. Lytton Smith, 2021) sports a blurb from Rebecca Solnit which calls him “the love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll”. Solnit fans who glimpse her name on the back cover likely register the endorsement first and the contents second—fair enough, as her works also combine a degree of erudition with an unexpectedly engaging style.

Unlike the Catapult anthology I recommended earlier this year, which I thought would be most enjoyable on a daily basis with a cup of tea, Magnason’s essays would be a perfect match for a weekly date on Sunday afternoons with a tumbler of whiskey. There are poems and statistics, philosophies and photographs: the combination of science discourse with personal ruminations and memories invites readers to the table with a more familiar tone than Elizabeth Kolbert’s but with a more substantive feel than Christiana Figueres.

His style reminds me of Anne Fadiman (for the underlying bookishness) and China Miéville (for the straightforward and somehow gutsy approach).

The linked stories in Ndè-Ti-Yat’a / Land-Water-Sky: A Novel by Katłià (2020) immediately captured my attention. At first, I’d planned to read just one story each afternoon with my lunch, but after the second story, I decided to read it as a novel and, partly through Deèyeh’s story, I simply had to finish. Some elements of Deèyeh’s story fit with Katłià’s life experience (working on an archaeological dig to unearth the history of a Dene settlement in the far north of the land currently called Canada). The author has written at length about other aspects of her personal experience in her memoir, Northern Wildflower (2018) (for which the author is identified as Catherine Lafferty) which I enjoyed a couple years ago.

These are survival stories, too, inspired by Indigenous mythologies, with many characters named in Wiìliìdeh for elements in nature (Yat’a=sky, Dahtì=dew, Deèyah=calm water, Goli=ice, Lafì=girl, Nąàhgą=bushman shapeshifter, Àma=mother).  There is a lot of power in these stories; with further developmental editing, this collection would have been a contender for my favourites shelf. The scope of the novel is the most hopeful element, and choosing to situate her stories in past, present, and future does underscore that perspective:

“The scarred landscape was full of new life with patches of lush greenery and baby pines. It made Deèyah hopeful that the land was still flourishing amid the drought.”

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) pulls readers into a fictional country in Africa (in a NYT interview, she explains that there were too many similar stories to identify only one as the basis for her novel) which has been targeted for resource extraction by a Western country. “Without our parents’ stories about their childhoods in a clean Kosawa, their days spent swimming in rivers that ran clear, how would my friends and I have known that the sporadic smokiness that enveloped the village and left our eyes watery and noses runny wasn’t an ordinary occurrence in the lives of other children our age?”

An ambitious story, crossing time and perspectives, Mbue boldly identifies the dynamics but situates them on a spectrum, so that the tale is more nuanced than one might expect. “They believe Pexton’s lie, and for a long time our parents did too, convinced that if only they remained patient the thing called ‘prosperity’ would arrive like a cherished guest for whom the fattest pig had been slaughtered, and all of Kosawa would live in brick houses like the one Woja Beki would eventually own.”

Not everyone is a cherished guest and not everyone has a brick house: everyone is affected by these decisions.

For all those readers who seek details about their recognizable but futuristic settings, who prefer another driving force while still delving into climate-crisis fiction, Doreen Vanderstoop’s Watershed (2020) is an ideal choice. Glacial melting and desertification have led to water scarcity in 2058 Alberta, so that pipelines previously used to transport oil now transport water, but what we have here is a mother-son story.

The novel opens with a mother’s hope that her son’s career will proceed in a worthwhile and rewarding way, with a son hoping that his mother will not be too disappointed to learn that his definitions of those terms are not the same as hers. Her scenes are more reflective, rooted in the natural world, preoccupied with scarcity: she lives on the land. He inhabits a world with action and events, scenes fuelled by dialogue and open conflict, preoccupied by greed and exploitation. (It begins with his desire to earn and support his parents’ efforts to stay on the land, but this kind of work involves risk and requires compromise.)

Vanderstoop is a debut novelist and I was surprised by how skillfully she handles the stylistic shifts required to make these two characters and their different worldviews come alive; attention-to-detail, pacing, and scene-building contrast dramatically, so that the mother’s scenes move on land-time and the son’s on corporate-time. (She is a musician and an oral storyteller, so I’m guessing these were intuitive choices, based in rhythm and phrasing and arcing.)

Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men (2017; Trans. 2021) is likely to land on my list of favourite reads for this reading year. It landed on my stack because I read an anthology of short stories she edited, in combination with an encouraging review in the NYT. It languished on my stack because it’s about the Ebola Virus outbreak of 2014. Too much, I thought. And although I hate to return library books unread, I considered it as this novel’s duedate approached. Finally one afternoon, at the end of a long day, I decided I would leaf through the opening pages but return it the following morning.

That’s how it happened, that I was in motion, moving towards the small stack of loans I’d already finished, intending to deposit it there. That’s how I ended up standing to read the first forty pages of this book. I’m not kidding. Her language is direct and clear; every word is purposeful and her structure reinforces her theme; her scenes are compassionate but not sentimental. All of this impressed me—and it’s true that she employs one of my favourite creative techniques (I won’t spoil it)—but my reason for reading on is something else. There is an active and invigorating element to Tadjo’s style that propels this story; part of me wants to peer more closely, to examine her verb tenses and vocabulary, but part of me thinks that it’s simply a belief, an intention, that simmers beneath the work as a whole.

After I finished, I felt something I hadn’t felt for some time. It took me awhile to think of the word. Resolute. There are many kinds of contagion and here’s something worth catching.

Something like Christiane Vadnais’ Fauna (2017; Trans. Pablo Strauss 2020) might emerge, if you were to shelve Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011) together with Joanna Kavenna’s The Birth of Love (2010) long enough for them to consume and collapse into one another.

Some others have compared Fauna to Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation; it’s an apt comparison for the lush overgrowthy setting and ominous undercurrent, but this is a woman-soaked story, with women’s bodies directing and containing the action.

Throughout, Vadnais centres the female experience even while she decentres the human experience; the world in these linked stories is one in which the dominance of the human species has unfolded into something recognizable but strange. This is an apocalyptic vision which straddles the line between horror and calm; while humanity recedes into a secondary role, the rest of the planet evolves and grows.

The lyricism of the language (and undoubtedly Pablo Strauss has executed his role exactingly) also allows readers to hold some of the more disturbing elements at arm’s length, so that “oh, what a beautiful sentence” distracts from the fact that the prose is nibbling on your toes.

For many reading this list, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky (2021) will be the one recognizable title here, but I nudged it up my list thanks to Rebecca, who recommended a 5×15 event with the author and David Wallace-Wells. For more than a decade, Kolbert’s writing about the climate crisis has held a prominent position in the field. In the past, she’s struck me as a little science-y (I prefer the Naomi Klein approach, where narrative seems to hold sway, boosted by science) but her new book is shorter and the chapters felt more like essays than texts to me.

I enjoyed the appearance of her discovering things along with the reader: “The Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge is twenty-three thousand acres in area, or roughly the size of the Bronx. Within its borders live twenty-six species that can be found nowhere else in the world. According to a brochure I picked up at the visitor center, this represents ‘the greatest concentration of endemic life in the United States and the second greatest in all of North America’.”

There are other personal angles here, too, for instance, the story about how one biologist, working for the California Department of Fish and Game, was called to rescue some fish whose habitat was disappearing at an alarming rate; he ended up carrying all the Owens pupfish left in Fish Slough, in two buckets.

I also enjoyed the occasional literary reference, like Genedrive technology being compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a single shard of which is enough to freeze all the water in the world”. And I hadn’t heard of Camp Century, which holds the same eerie fascination for me as the abandoned town of Pripyat, Ukraine.

You can’t browse for long on the shelf of eco-fiction without running into copies of Emmi Itäranta’s The Memory of Water (2014), but then Lee specifically recommended it. The story is quickly immersive and delicately balances that sense of familiar-past elements with likely-future elements. So the pace of life and community relationships present scenes which seem to reach back to Kristin Lavransdatter’s time, but the policing and distant reality of cities with different technologies and opportunities hint at contemporary science-fiction.

The scarcity of potable water dictates a newly complex hierarchy but the human capacity for corruption is age-old. The friendship between two young girls keeps the political side of the story at bay; you keep reading because you want to see how their relationship changes when unexpected events and information emerge. It’s this relationship, too, which keeps the story from being as devastating as some other elements of Itäranta’s world- and plot-building.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) was recommended by both Andrew and, I think, Stefanie. Thanks to Mel, I’d already fallen hard for Ghosh’s fiction. Ghosh’s slim volume explores the science of climate change in the context of the literature of climate change, on how/whether writers engage with the subject and how/whether readers and society respond to their stories.

He questions how many writers resist fiction as a vehicle to explore transformation, like Arundhati Roy—an accomplished novelist who has published non-fiction on the climate emergency but reserves fiction to explore other matters. Still, he insists on the important role that artists play in shaping and nourishing change because “we have come to accept that the front ranks of the arts are in some way in advance of mainstream culture”.

We expect “that artists and writers are able to look ahead, not just in aesthetic matters, but also in regard to public affairs” and artists and writers have embraced this role “with increasing fervor through the twentieth century, and never more so than in the period in which carbon emissions were accelerating.”

What have you been reading about the climate crisis? 
Which of these appeals to you most urgently?