A personal reading list for Earth Day

If you Google "best books to read for Earth Day," the first hits that come up are for children's books (including The Lorax by Dr. Seuss). That's great, because environmental education needs to start early before the habits of careless consumerism become ingrained and careless disregard of Mother Earth becomes a way of life. t's the adults who are okay with the dismantling of the EPA, or are okay with rollbacks of protections on clean water, and clean air who honestly believe that "global warming" is a hoax invented by China. The people who dismissed Al Gore's thoughtful documentary An Inconvenient Truth are not going to pay attention to True Activist's list of "Worst Man-Made Disasters of 2016 You've Probably Never Heard Of."

The thing is, climate change deniers really aren't going to be persuaded by logic or argument. But there are subversive ways to send a message. And books are the best delivery system for this message. Here are the books I recommend recommending to anyone who's still not onboard with saving the planet. (See the Atlantic Monthly's article on "Climate Fiction," which asks the question, Can books save the planet?

1.  Zodiac by Neal Stephenson. This was his secondnovel and it's the story of a charismatic jerk of an environmental activist who discovers that something has gone terribly wrong in Boston Harbor. It's laugh-out loud funny (and also short, which most of his more recent books have not been), and there's a sobering message about meddling with Mother Nature underpinning the hijinks. (You can read a synopsis of it here.)

2. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. This steampunk/science fiction story takes place in an alternate, 19th century  Seattle where a massive industrial accident (think Bhopal) has poisoned the air in the city's center and turned people into zombies. The novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and won the Locus Award for best science fiction novel.

3.  Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler. This is actually a trilogy--Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. In the book, the environmental disaster is nuclear, the result of an all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The book was published 30 years ago and remains a frightening cautionary tale while also delivering a thrilling science fiction epic.

4.  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.  Two words:  Dust Bowl. Most people are introduced to Steinbeck via his novella, Of Mice and Men, but this book, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, is his masterpiece. My parents were born into the Depression and it shaped their lives. They collected scrap metal for the war effort in the 40s and even in the country's post-war boom, they lived frugally. (My maternal grandmother cross-stitched a sampler with her motto:  Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without.)

5. The World in Winter by John Christopher. In this "new ice age" of a book (think Day After Tomorrow), a winter no one predicted coming just never ends after a very long and harsh season. For those who have lived through increasingly savage winters of "Polar Express" weather and snowfalls that last well into spring, this story will be particularly frightening.

6.  The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Give this book to horror fans because that's exactly what it is--a brilliant examination of just how badly humans have messed up. They will WISH it was fiction when they're done. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 and it should be on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about environmental issues. Donate a copy of this book to your library. Send it to your relatives. If nothing else, it might motivate a few donations to some environmental causes. And God knows, they can use all the private help they can get right now.

An Eccentric Easter Reading List

I've always wondered why Shakespeare didn't take a crack at writing a play about Jesus. Perhaps because it would have been seen as heretical. After all, D.H. Lawrence got plenty of criticism for his short work, The Man Who Died some three hundred years later. (If you've never read that, it's available from Project Gutenberg online.) Imagine the fallout there would have been had he kept the book's original title, The Escaped Cock.

 Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (1990).  I'm not a huge Terry Pratchett fan. I tend to think his whimsical humor is heavy-handed. I do like Neil Gaiman's work, though, and this novel--about two angels trying to prevent the apocalypse--is a romp through pop culture and religion and you name it.

Good Omens makes a good companion piece to Christopher Moore's Lamb. I loved, loved, loved christopher Moore's Practical Demonkeeping and also liked Coyote Blue quite a bit. I've read pretty much everything he's written and while Lamb is not my favorite, it's a lunatic piece of work detailing Jesus "lost years" as told by his friend Biff.

The Gospel, According to the Son by Norman Mailer (1997). One of my English professors, Reynolds Price, was a biblical scholar and he was pretty scathing in his review of Mailer's novel, which he didn't think was "inventive" 'enugh. (One of my other professors, Buford Jones, used to make fun of Price for his heavy-handed allegory in the novel A Long and Happy Life.)

King Jesus by Robert Graves (1946). Graves is  the man who gave us I, Claudius and Claudius the

God. He also wrote The White Goddess, a book on poetic mythmaking that was required reading, along with Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces when I was just starting out as a writer. The book views its title character as a philosopher rather than a messiah.

The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain (1953). I read this book when I was in high school and liked it a lot. (I also loved the author picture, which depicted Costain and his very fluffy white cat.)
It's about a Greek artisan named Basil who crafts a silver chalice to house the Holy Grail. I don't remember it being a "prequel" to the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail, though, so I may re-read it.

reading Road Trip...Illinois

You could probably read one Illinois-related book a day and go for years. for poetry, you've got Carl Sandburg and next to his line about "the fog coming in on little cat feet," the poem every school kid in America had to learn was "Chicago." Who could ever forget the first lines?

    Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders.

"City of Big Shoulders."   That's such an elegant line. And then there's Chicago-born John Dos Pasos, whose monumental USA Trilogy really is "the great American novel" times three. (And he also infuenced E. L. Doctorow, whose books I devoured in high school.)

Illinois is a complicated state and the three books I most associate with it are Richard Wright's Native Son, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, and Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. It is also the setting for Erik Larson's brilliant book about H.H. Holmes, America's answer to Jack the Ripper--The Devil in the White City. Anyone who has trouble wrapping his/her head around #BlackLivesMatter needs to read Wright's novel, which is a searing character portrait and a time capsule of life in Chicago in the 1930s. "Bigger Thomas " is one of the most compelling characters ever created.

Cisneros' novel is a coming-of-age story that should be as widely read as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (Am I the only person who never really liked that book? Maybe I read it when I was too old.) The heroine and narrator of The House on Mango Street is Esperanza Cordero, and she is a sympathetic and believable girl.

Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury's semi-autobiographical novel, is an idyllic portrait of the same sort of America that painter Norman Rockwell chronicled. It's a book that evokes a childhood so (mostly) happy that it almost seems like a fairy tale.

I read The Devil in the White City for a client and loved Erik Larson's writing. What really entranced me about the story was not the true crime it detailed, though. I fell in love with the idea of the Chicago World's Fair that was its backdrop. The World Columbian Exposition of 1893 was well-documented in photographs and drawings and I was fascinated by the temporary buildings and wonders put up for the occasion. I so wish some of them had been left behind, the way the Seattle Space Needle is a permanent reminder of the 1962 World's Fair.)  If time travel were possible, that's a place I would have loved to go.

Reading Road Trip ... Idaho

I drove to Sun Valley once with my roommate, a former professional ice skater. We were going there to see an ice skating competition. The mountains were lovely, but I chiefly remember that trip because we stopped to get gas along the highway and a couple of yahoos tried to convince us that some random part of the car was so worn down it was a danger. 'I wouldn't let my daughter get on the road with a car in that shape." We chose to ignore the warning but I was completely paranoid that the guys had done something to the car that would cause it to break down. (I know, I've seen too many horror movies.) But as it turned out, we were fine and there was no problem with the car. I haven't been back to Idaho since, although a friend of mine used to live in Boise and loved it there, despite the extreme weather both summer and winter. (Idaho's a red state but it Boise mayor Dave Bieter sounds pretty progressive. But somehow Idaho is a state that feels like it has a dark underbelly. The Boise Weekly used to have a Historical True Crime feature and the stories in it were fascinating.

The best book I've read set in Idaho is C.J. Box's taut thriller Blue Heaven. (You can read the first chapter here.) Blue Heaven was a stand-alone novel--Box writes the popular "Joe Pickett" series, and won the Edgar in 2009. The story revolves around two kids who have seen four retired cops commit murder. They're on the run in the Idaho wilderness and their only hope for safety is a rancher on the brink of losing everything. Good characters. Great local color. A smart plot (if somewhat farfetched) plot. Blue Heaven is a great read.

Reading Road Trip...Hawaii

Aloha!  You can't really take a road trip to the Hawaiian islands, but let's not be too literal here. I lived in Honolulu for a year in my twenties, sharing a one-bedroom condo that belonged to my roommate's uncle in a place called Nuuanu Towers. We had a view of Diamond Head in the distance and the Iolani Palace (aka,the headquarters of the classic Hawaii 5-O starring Jack Lord). The year I lived there, everyone my rooomate and I had ever met wanted to come visit us and they always wanted to go to the Iolani Palace. Because the show was still in production, tourists would often get to catch glimpses of the show's stars. James MacArthur was known to be particularly gracious and would often mingle on his lunch breaks. (And because life takes strange detours, one of my former landlordes is now the producer of the reboot of the show.)
I actually started one of my first crime stories while living there. It started with the word "Pau," which is Hawaiian for "finished" but pronounced as in "pow" like the gunshot.  I still have that story somnewhere although I'm pretty sure I'm never going to finish it.
Myster writer Toby Neal has a whole series of "Lei Mysteries" set in Hawaii (well into the double-digts by now) as well as a grittier series called "Paradise Crime." She also has a couple of one-offs.
The books cover topics as trendy as the "farm to table" movement and as classic as artifact looting. There's a real "island feel" to the books--not something you could pull off after taking a cruise and then watching a lot of YouTube videos. Toby is currently living in Northern California due to family obligations, but you can tell her heart belongs to Hawaii. (In my stay in Honolulu, I learned just enough Hawaiian to be able to say, "My heart belongs to Hawaii."  Ko'u naau no i Hawaii. Pronounce every letter and you'll get it right.

When I was living in Hawaii, there were a number of issues that were starting to bubble up, including the rights of people with Hansen's Disease (more commonly known as leprosy) to be "mainstreamed." (My roomate attended the church where Father Damien first preached in Hawaii, before he went to the island of Molokai (one of the most beautiful of the islands) to serve at the leper colony there.)
There were also tensions among the native Hawaiians and the military population stationed there, among them the Marines and Navy men on the island of Oahu. That's nothing new, one of the most crimes in Hawaii history, the Massie case, occurred in 1931 and involved the rape of a white woman and the lynching of one suspect, Joseph Kahahawai by the victim's husband, mother, and two sailors. the case was fictionalized in the novel Blood and Orchids, which was made into a television movie.
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To my mind, the best book about Hawaii is probably The Shark Dialogues, written by Kiana Davenport, who traces her ancestry back to the first Polynesian settlers on the islands. It's a richly layered family saga-type book (much like James Michener's book Hawaii), and  though set in contemporary Hawaii, it's filled with myth and legend. IN some ways, it reminded me a lot of Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, although Kingston's book is a very different genre.

Reading Road Trip ... Georgia

John Berendt is a terrific writer. His book, The City of Falling Angels, is so seductive in its story of the destruction of the city's famed opera house that you almost feel like you're there (with side trips to some glass-blowing factories. The book that made his name, though, was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Not only was the book a runaway best-seller, spending four years at the top of the New York Times bestseller list (longer than any work of fiction or nonfiction before), but the photo used on the cover sent so many tourists to the Bonaventure cemetery in Savannah where "the bird girl" statue was located that the family had it removed. (Ironically, the photographer who took th iconic shot used on the cover is buried in the same cemetery where the sculpture used to stand.)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is true crime of the very best sort. It reads like fiction, full of quirky and multi-faceted chraacters, with a brooding sensibility that is dripping with Southern Gothic trappings. It's a great read.

If you're looking for a great crime fiction set in Georgia, check out Karin Slaughter's Undone. Set in Atlanta, the book is number three in her series about Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent. It's paced like a movie thriller and it just does not stop. I like Slaughter's work a lot, and this is one of my favorite of her novels.

And finally, there's Melissa Fay Greene's Praying For Sheetrock, a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award and a New York Times "Notable Book." The story of how one black man took on the racist power structure and prevailed is as timely now as it was two decades ago.

Reading Road Trip ... Florida

Florida...long before Portland, Oregon embraced the mantle of weird, Florida seemed to be the source of all the weird news. For me Florida means the Space Coast and the home owned by my parents' friends, Les and Mary Gross, Miami Vice, and Disney World.

I'm not a fan of the Disney brand and I share that opinion with my favorite Florida-based writer, Carl Hiaasen. I've been a fan since Tourist Season (after living in Honolulu for a year, I'm not that fond of tourists) and particularly loved Native Tongue.  I also highly recommend the fantastical novel Swamplandia, tom Dorsey's Florida Roadkill, which I picked up because of the flamingo on the cover. (Flamingos say "Florida" to me, whether it's the actual birds of plastic pink flamingos in a trailer park.)

Other great books set in Florida include Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch,  Jennine Capo Crucet's collection of short stories, How to Leave Hialeah, Charles Willeford's Miami Blues, Joan Didion's Miami, and Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie.


I know that everybody always mentions The Yearling in lists of books set in Florida, but I never read that. Nor did I ever read Where the Red Fern Grows. I read enough sad animal stories as a kid to last me a lifetime. Old Yeller???? I bawled for days. And I wasn't the only one. My grandfather had to kill a dog when he turned on my father and it put my dad off pets for life.