In mid-January, one of our local theaters screened the film Call Me By Your Name. I knew it was a queer love story starring Armie Hammer and some new kid, but that was about it. I didn’t know there was a novel even. I spent the first half hour of the film skeptical, but I was absolutely in tears by the end of it. I put the novel on my TBR afterward, because I wanted to see how it stacked up against the film—normally, I […]
35: A beautifully depicted dystopia with religious leanings
I have the book club pick coming up in July, and I decided to read something that had been on my TBR for a while. So I went with Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. I had read Kindred last year and really liked it, plus I was intrigued by the dystopian aspects of Parable. So it was to my delight and surprise that I found myself really connecting with this novel and pondering many aspects of it. Lauren Olamina is our protagonist, […]
31: A new look at cities as ecological danger sites
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. […]
30: An investigative glimpse at a beloved and endangered natural resource
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, […]