Hello Sweet Summer! We made it! It’s the first long weekend of the summer, school is out and those beautiful long summer nights have been gracing our skies and hopefully our souls and imaginations too.
My friend Sarah organizes a “loose beach Monday nights” in the summer. It’s totally “loose” - come if and when you want, bring what food you want to share or not. It’s breezy, light, spontaneous and the vibe I’m hoping we can embody for our summer book club too. Zero pressure. Show up if you can. Read/listen/watch what you choose. Enjoy. Share time together.
The loose beach Monday vibe. Super chill. Super breezy. Super beautiful.
It’s time to slide into our summer “choose your own adventure” climate reads (which also include a film!) and connect with an iced tea and oracle card the first Wednesday of the month.
Here’s our Summer 2024 Reading List (choose your own Adventure):
The Overstory by Richard Powers: The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. A New York Times Bestseller.
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton: Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world…Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time— The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.
Parable of a Sower by Octavia Butler. In 2024, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future. Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others. When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.
And for some lightness, a love story: What you won't do for love: When artist Miriam Fernandes approaches David Suzuki to create a theatre piece about climate change, she expects to write about David’s perspective as a scientist. Instead, she discovers the boundless vision and efforts of Tara Cullis, a literature scholar, climate organizer, and David’s life partner. Miriam realizes that David and Tara’s decades-long love for each other, and for family and friends, has only clarified and strengthened their resolve to fight for the planet.
Thank you Catherine Daw for the suggestion and for offering free access through the Collingwood Climate Action Team (CCAT). Stay tuned for that!
So mark your summer calendars and see you soon! We will be gathering live on zoom the following Wednesday evenings at 8pm ET:
Wednesday July 3rd at 8pm ET,
Wednesday August 7th at 8pm ET, and
Wednesday September 4th at 8pm ET
To receive the live zoom link every month, please sign up for my newsletter. See you soon!
