Dune by Frank Hebert
Dune is one of the fundamental texts of speculative fiction and I have probably read it a half dozen times over the years. Why re-read it now? I saw the trailer for the movie coming out later this year (and if you haven’t seen it, find it online, it is fantastic) and realized I had not read it since my kids were very little. I thought I might have a different perspective now that my youngest is a teenager and that was certainly true. When […]
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
This book sat on my bedside table for six months. I looked at it every day, tucked it into my work bag on multiple occasions, and brought it with me on several trips but I was unable to open the cover. I was paralyzed by the guilt of being wrapped into the attention economy, and I did not feel like I was ready or able to give my meager time to “nothing” quite yet. I was wrong. I wish I had cracked it open the […]
AstroNuts Mission One: the Plant Planet by Jon Scieszka, Steven Weinberg
cbr11bingo – Birthday! Earth is now on the brink of being inhabitable, and she’s got no bones to pick about telling us why. Luckily, as she reveals to us in her narration of AstroNuts, NNASA (Not the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has been planning for just such an event, secretly creating four super-space soldier animal hybrids in their secret laboratory under Mount Rushmore. Blasting off in Thomas Jefferson’s Nose Rocket, AstroWolf, LaserShark, SmartHawk, and StinkBug launch their mission of finding an unoccupied Earth-like planet […]
Aquicorn Cove by Katie O'Neill
CBR11bingo – Science! Lana and her father used to live by the sea with her mother and Aunt Mae. But when Lana’s mother died, her father couldn’t bear to be near the place she loved most, so they moved into the city. After some time grieving, he brings Lana to visit Mae and the little fishing village they used to inhabit. Lana is ecstatic to be back, even though the nature of their visit is also a big somber: they are helping the town recover […]
Having done a deep dive on scholarly books about ecology, I was intrigued by Ashley Dawson’s argument in Extreme Cities: cities are a major epicenter of ecological and natural disasters. I had not thought about cityscapes as being susceptible to natural disaster, but Dawes unpacks several interesting instances of disaster to show how cities highlight deep stratifications in our society. Dawes defines extreme cities as those that reveal the greatest disparity in economics and stability, and act as a site of ecological and economic disaster. […]
I’m doing research on dystopian literature right now, and I’ve been trying to collect academic work that deals with climate change and natural disaster. I’m also from the Midwest, so I am familiar with the Great Lakes and the problems that have plagued them in recent years. Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is a highly engaging examination of these issues, written in a clear, journalistic style. I knew vaguely of the arrival of the zebra mussels to the Great Lakes, […]
