It’s been hard for me to figure out what to read since the 2016 election. While some people have doubled down on post-apocalyptic horror–witness the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show–I have been looking for books that keep my hopes up, without denying reality. I found what I was looking for in the more recent works of Kim Stanley Robinson. I have liked his books in the past, but New York 2140, 2312, and Aurora entranced me and lifted me up in exactly the way I wanted. These books all imagine plausible or semi-plausible futures, based on where we are right now.

New York 2140

The New York of New York 2140 is flooded by global warming, a new “Supervenice”, while outside New York many species’ futures hang in the balance–only assisted migration to the South Pole can save polar bears from extinction.

At the same time, a cooperative ethos has sprung up in New York City, and crowded apartment buildings operate as commune-coops, sharing and growing some of their own food, while their residents look after one another. The book has a slow build, following several different characters, some enthusiastic revolutionaries, and some more reluctant, as a new financial crisis looms, and just maybe, this time, the governments and the people can get it right.

2312

In 2312, humanity has spread out across the solar system, finding ways to live on worlds as disparate as Mercury and Saturn’s moons, as well as terraria built within the thousands of asteroids in between. Through genetic engineering, the solar-system dwellers have changed themselves into post-humans, while only Earth has been left behind.

2312 tells another compelling tale of non-violent revolution, but my very favorite parts were when Robinson describes the technologies that have enabled habitation of various planets and moons. Mercury’s city on rails, which stays on its dark, habitable side, while the sun heats the rails and the expansion pushes it forward, so it remains just before dawn, is an imaginative vision I will never forget.

Aurora

Aurora, set in the 25th century, has been described as less optimistic than Robinson’s other works, and it is, in a way, but it is a fitting cap for this loose trilogy that continues to imagine how humanity and its structures evolve and change into the future. The setting for most of the novel is a generation ship that is attempting to colonize a far-off earth-like planet. The settlers reach the planet as the effects of many generations within a small ecosystem are becoming more and more threatening, and then have to face a devastating choice: whether to stay or return.

Still, I found even this somewhat bleak portrait of interstellar travel optimistic for the ways it portrays different types of humanity, the way humans fight and reconcile, and finally the simple joys that we can find here on earth. If the first two books were about the exuberant possibilities of tomorrow, Aurora seems to be about the things that may not change, and the things that cannot change, but that we can and should embrace anyway.

I recommend these books to anyone who likes science fiction and is feeling bleak about the future. Robinson’s wonder at technology and love of humans, their foibles and their ingenuity, shines through in every sentence. It is hard to read these books without feeling both uplifted and determined at the end of the experience.

Back when I was soliciting ideas for blog posts, Bill Morrissey asked me about how to get young people to read. I don’t have kids, so take all this with a grain of salt, but like many of you, I was a kid once, and I haven’t entirely forgotten what it was like.

I was a late reader. Some of my fellow students showed up to kindergarten already able to read, but I did not. And when I was seven I went through a pretty severe rebellion where I refused to do my homework. I showed up, not having it done, and cried when it became evident to the whole class that I had not done it, but I hadn’t, and the next day the whole thing repeated itself.

My 2nd grade class was full of kids reading at a 3rd or 4th grade level, and I was not, so my teacher put me in a group with the fast six-year-olds, until I caught up. I’m not sure why reading was a struggle for me. My parents read to me a lot. My house was filled with books. I loved stories. I was very verbal from a young age. It probably was some sort of rebellion, a way to assert myself. I’m not sure what changed except maybe me being allowed to progress at my own speed, and by the time I was eight years old, I was reading everything in sight. By the time I was eleven, I was reading adult books (SOME OF WHICH I SHOULDN’T HAVE, MOM). Now I average reading about 80 books a year.

I’m actually not sure young people, by which I mean people under 18, aren’t reading. They’re reading texts and blog posts and tweets and fan-fiction, and definitely books and comics as well. If my generation was known for talking on the phone for hours, this generation is known for being on their smart-phones, and a lot of what they’re doing is reading.

However, I think we’re talking about reading full-length books, and particularly fiction books. Why do we want young people to read fiction? Though it’s important to learn to be a careful reader and a clear writer in this era of written communications, fiction teaches us more than that: it teaches us to see things from others’ perspectives, to value metaphor and symbolism, to look for themes, to analyze characters and meaning, and hopefully understand others and ourselves better.

So how should we get young people to read books? A better question might be to ask how we get young people to engage with narrative—and to remember that they already are, only that narrative might be on social media instead of in fiction.

(I taught a session of a high school creative writing class last year, and the teacher told me that it was amazing how many students had trouble telling stories that weren’t 99% autobiographical. I wonder if that is a consequence of this social media age where people are constantly creating their own public narrative. I’ve always found my own life to be pretty dull and would rather make up stories about people who are far more interesting than me.)

A good start to encourage any kind of new behavior is to meet someone where they are. I suspect a reason why many people end up hating literature after high school is that they are reading books that are too challenging for them, and even if not, their enjoyment of it may be crushed by having to prepare it for a test, rather than explore it. A way to meet young readers where they are is to find out what they are already reading and suggest similar things. The explosion of YA literature in the last fifteen years has made it easy to find books that young people can relate to in any genre.

And there’s nothing wrong with comic books or manga. It’s still reading, and there’s still a narrative to engage with. There is romance, and pulpy sci fi, and super heroes in the world of comic books, and among all of those, transcendent literature. There is also nothing wrong with fan-fiction. In fact, reading and writing fan-fiction can be one of the deepest ways to engage with a text. No one thinks more deeply about Harry Potter than the people writing novel-length fan-fiction for the pure joy of it.

It’s probably not a bad idea to limit screen time, TV, iPads, and smart-phones. I suspect one of the reasons I was such a big reader from age eight on is that we didn’t have a TV when I was growing up and my parents both worked more than full time. I spent a lot of time on my own, entertaining myself. I often had to wait for a long time for my parents to get off work and pick me up, and I always had a book with me.

And my parents reading to me and being big readers themselves helped. As did the transgressive elements of the things I read as a pre-teen and beyond. There are worse places to discover sex than in the pages of The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel. 

Not every young person is going to want to read, and they are also going to find ways to read and tell stories that are different than anything we could have imagined. But we can put the media and tools in their hands to get them started on their reading path.

I just finished reading Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll. I saw it mentioned in some article as a rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy, a massive bestseller that argues that Appalachian poverty is caused almost entirely by the bad decisions of its residents, and the way to cure it it is to be exceptional and have exceptional luck. A logically impossible conclusion (we can’t all be exceptional), but the American appetite for that sort of story, that elevates (or condemns) the individual, and erases the impact of history, government, and corporations, is bottomless.

Ramp Hollow is unlike any history book I’ve ever read before. It tells the story of Appalachia, as a region that was populated by Native Americans, then white “mountaineers” who lived as subsistence farmer-hunter-gatherers. It tells how foreign land-owners, and the concept of “enclosure”, which turns common land, like grazing forest, into private property, killed the ability of Appalachian residents to continue to live as they had before. It makes the strong argument, by comparing the land takeover in Appalachia to land takeovers elsewhere, that that common, undeveloped land, usually forest or marsh, is an ecological cushion, and necessity for more developed land, and when it is gone, the way of life falls apart. And also that consuming that land is one of the first ways that capitalism encroaches on a local peasant economy.

Far from the commons being always exploited by individuals who have access to it, Ramp Hollow argues that the real tragedy of the commons is how often it is taken away from those who need it. We can see that today with library funding on the chopping block.) In communities focused on a local way of life, the community itself often polices the use of the commons to keep it available for everyone. We see the traditional tragedy of the commons more in the air and ocean which are dumping grounds for corporations that do far more harm that individuals can do.

Ramp Hollow tells the story of how outside forces like government and corporations, were hostile to the peasant farming way of life, not only because they wanted the land, but because these mountaineers were not cogs in a greater capitalist machine. They used some money and did some trade, but most of their economy was local and barter-based. But when logging companies and extraction companies came in, not only did their work take away the commons, but they also purposefully tried to cut off workers from their family connections and other sources of sustenance to make them more dependent on the corporations.

I’ve never read a book of history that shows so many parallels to other similar events, that draws in art, literature, anthropology, political theory, and the evolution of all those fields as the region and the country changed over time. I’ve also never read a book of history that ends with proposed legislation to help return the idea of land held in common to the residents of Appalachia. It is a cry for a kind of democratic socialism that focuses on the local, on the needs of the people who live closest to the land, and wants to give them the ability to manage their own economy, that does not think the solution to every problem is more education and moving to cities with job. I think it’s a fascinating read for understanding how the US and the world became what it is today.

In 2017, I read 55 new books, and did probably 10-15 re-reads. (I don’t tend to keep track of re-reads, but I love re-reading books. Some books, comfort reads, I have read probably more than 50 times.) There was a time I read 80-100 books per year. There was probably a time when I read even more. I also read The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, which is not coming out until 2018–perks of being an author!

But I’m actually pleasantly surprised I read that many books this year. Because of politics, it was a hard year for me to get lost in fiction, though I always enjoyed it when I did.

Some stand-out books I read this year:

Arcadia by Iain Pears, which I wrote about here

The Round House by Louise Erdrich – the first book of hers I’ve read, but not the last. It is at once a literary coming-of-age story, a mystery, and revenge tale.

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar – the first book I read by an NYU classmate, but not the last!

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – a fascinating, and sometimes infuriating book about the history of humanity

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith – a wildly inventive novel about the end of the world brought about by giant bugs, but more importantly, a coming-of-age story about a dick obsessed bisexual teenage boy in the midwest

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw – another coming of age story, by the author of one of my favorite middle-grade books (Master Cornhill). I read this as a teen, but I don’t think I finished it then.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson – Pulitzer prize-winning and for good reason, this book is harrowing and impossible to put down

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemesin – the first book of The Broken Earth Trilogy. It was amazing and emotionally challenging, and I need to read the rest of the series before I write much more about it.

Alice by Christina Henry – a grim, spare, and inventive retelling of Alice in Wonderland, about magic, insanity, sex trafficking, and privilege. It’s amazing how much Henry manages to do in this short volume.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – I always knew I would read this someday, and I was saving it for the right time, which turned out to be Christmas 2017. A wonderful book to get lost in.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan – makes the argument that the history of civilization is much better told centered on the Silk Road than Western Europe, and then proceeds to do just that.

City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett – the conclusion to Bennett’s Divine Cities series, which I’ve written about here. Among the many wonderful things this book does is interrogate and undermine the idea of a singular hero, fueled by his pain.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but I’ve been having some hardware trouble. My computer is a Surface Pro 2, which I bought in early 2012, and has served me well and faithfully for all that time. However, the keyboard/cover, is a bit more touchy, and now it won’t let me type the letter “i” “o” or use the backspace button. o_O

So I have a new one on the way, but in the meantime I’m typing on a rather challenging wireless keyboard, and don’t really have a working mouse. This time, let’s blame my typos on that.

A month or so ago I read Arcadia by Iain Pears with my book group. It’s the first book of his I’ve read, though he’s most famous for The Instance of the Fingerpost. Like many of his books, Arcadia has a rather complicated structure, switching between several POVs and four(ish) different timelines.

It begins with the following events:

• An Oxford professor tinkers with his fantasy novel setting, but never really gets his plot off the ground
• A psychomathematician in a dystopian future plots her escape
• A young boy in a pastoral world has a strange encounter

Eventually all of these characters and plotlines intersect and recombine, exploring time travel, history, the effects of events on the future, the truth behind the beautiful Arcadias, for of course et in Arcadia ego. Along the way, it pays homage to J. R. R. Tolkein, Aldous Huxley, Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and John Le Carre, among many others I’m sure I’m missing.

One of the things I really loved about Arcadia was how it played with the notion of history, causation, and time travel. It posits time as a string, you can move a piece of string around, but it is always connected to the rest of the string. If you change past, the future will change, and if you change the future, the past will have to change to accommodate the cause and effect that connects future and past.

I’m sure someone could poke holes in that, but it is a pleasing way of handling time travel in a narrative. In many narratives, like the TV show The Flash, time travel is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Traveling in time to fix things has challenges, and causes unforeseen problems, but those problems often do not feel organic to the plot; they feel levers the writers can pull whenever they want.

But because Arcadia insists on cause-and-effect chains connecting future and past–in both directions!–the narrative feels much more satisfying. It also makes the book a special pleasure for a novelist to read. As I work on The Golden Wolf, and have a handful of events for which I need to come up with interrelated causes, I feel just like one of the characters in Arcadia, creating an effect in the future and then watching causes line up to create that effect.

The characters are also rather charming, especially the three main women, a plucky lass in 1960s Oxford named (of course) Rosalind, our psychomathemetician from the future, and a noblewoman in the pastoral fantasia. For a book that explores some dark possibilities, the experience of reading it is rather humorous and lighthearted. It sends up some aspects of pastoral fantasy (and Tolkein’s fantasy), though in an affectionate way, asking why a psuedo-medieval fantastical world would endure for millennia when in the real world, technology tends to progress. The answers make sense but are not always pleasant to contemplate. I recommend this book for any thoughtful reader of fantasy or dystopian SF.