Readalikes: If you liked September's selection . . .

If you enjoyed Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs, then you might also enjoy these books and film recommended by our discussion group members:

• The Moon by Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats, Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales by Diane Ackerman
• The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser
• The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey
• Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller
• The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
• A Whale for the Killing by Farley Mowat
• The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson
• The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
• My Octopus Teacher documentary by Craig Foster

September Not Fiction Book Discussion

"There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change ... Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours."

From the vastness of the stars we turn to the depth of the oceans and their largest inhabitants with the poetically written and deeply reported Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs, winner of the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and shortlisted for the Stella Prize. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? Fathoms blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore these questions. 

Giggs writes about how people feel toward animals in a time of ecological crisis and technological change. What do you think? Why do we seek out encounters with other animals? What are our obligations to other animals? 

We hope you will join the discussion:

When and Where?

Tuesday, September 7, at 6:30 p.m. virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the September meeting: 

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: Sep 7, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you liked August's selection . . .

If you enjoyed The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant, then you might also like these books, radio shows, television shows, and documentaries recommended by our discussion group members:

Books

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Radio shows

StarTalk Radio hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson

TV shows and documentaries

StarTalk television series hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series written and produced by Carl Sagan

One Strange Rock television series hosted by Will Smith

Overview short documentary directed by Guy Reid

August Not Fiction Book Discussion

With The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant, we turn our attention from the underland to the heavens. Marchant's interest is broader than mathematical astronomy. She is interested in a cosmology that is human-centered, that "describe[s] the broad philosophical and spiritual endeavor to make sense of existence, to ask who we are, where we are, and why we're here." She tells twelve stories that show how people have seen the heavens over time, from prehistoric times to the virtual future, myth to science, with the goal of encouraging us to once again look up with awe and feel connected to the universe.

What do you think? Is it possible to reintegrate subjective meaning into our scientific understanding of the cosmos? What would that look like?

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, August 3, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the August meeting:

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: Aug 3, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you liked July's selection . . .

If you enjoyed Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, then you might also enjoy these books recommended by our discussion group members:

• The Findings Trilogy (Findings, Sightlines, and Surfacing) by Kathleen Jamie
• The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
• The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland by Nan Shepherd

July Not Fiction Book Discussion

The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree. . . . Its crown flourishes skywards into weather. Its long boughs lean low around. Its roots reach far underground. . . . Near the ash's base its trunk splits into a rough rift, just wide enough that a person might slip into the tree's hollow heart--and there drop into the dark space that opens below.

So begins Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, a smooth yet portentous transition from last month's book, The Overstory by Richard Powers, into a multifaceted exploration of the Earth's underworlds through myth, art and literature, anthropology, and science. Macfarlane notes that "[t]he same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful." It is this "deep time" perspective which gives urgency to his exploration because he asks us to consider, "Are we being good ancestors to the future earth?"

A book discussion member said, "This book has provided me with an entirely new way of thinking about the underground. . . . every step I take on the grass seems like it's a roof to somewhere else and every subway journey hits a bit differently now." What do you think? Has Underland given you a new perspective on our collective fears and loves and the shared responsibility of being good ancestors?

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, July 6, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the June meeting: 

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: Jun 1, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed June's selection . . .

If you enjoyed The Overstory by Richard Powers, then you might also enjoy the following books and films suggested by a variety of readers and reviewers.

In a review for Booklist (March 7, 2018), Donna Seaman lists some classic works of ecofiction, including the following:

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
• A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle
• The Living by Annie Dillard
• The Tree-Sitter by Suzanne Matson
• The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
• The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass
• Barkskins by Annie Proulx
• At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

In the DC Swarthmore Book Group Blog, Professor Bolton notes two works of nonfiction and two documentaries that he says inspired Powers' novel:

• The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• The Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Hill
• Intelligent Trees (documentary)
• If a Tree Falls (documentary)

In a By the Book (March 28, 2019) interview with the New York Times, Powers says he read over 120 books about trees and mentions several:

• A Natural History of North American Trees by Donald Culross Peattie, 
• Magnificent Trees of the New York Botanical Garden by Todd A. Forrest
• To Speak for the Trees: My Life's Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger

And our discussion group members suggested the following titles:

• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, on whom the character of Patricia is based
• The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
• Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty
• Serena and In the Valley by Ron Rash

June Not Fiction Book Discussion

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Richard Powers, The Overstory

In The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers, a paradigm-shifting story of activism and resistance, nine people who know how to listen are brought together by five trees to protest the destruction of our forests.

At the beginning of the book, a woman sits in a park: "A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning. The pine she leans against says: Listen. There's something you need to hear." Powers brings to life Robin Wall Kimmerer's vision of a communal, reciprocal relationship between people and plants. It is a work of fiction imagined with the help of many works of nonfiction and containing within it a fictional nonfiction work. In a By the Book interview with The New York Times (March 28, 2019), Powers says he has "a large bookshelf devoted to trees and their allies." Powers' research for the novel literally changed his life, leading him to Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains, where he now lives. 

What do you think? Has The Overstory changed your perspective on your place in the natural world and your responsibility to it?

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, June 1, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the June meeting: 

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: Jun 1, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed May's selection . . .

 If you enjoyed Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, then you might also like these books suggested by our discussion group members:

• The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry by Wendell Berry
• The New Wilderness: A Novel by Diane Cook
• The Signature of All Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
• Prodigal Summer: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
• Language of Landscape by Anne Whiston Spirn

May Not Fiction Book Discussion

Jenny Odell, author of last month's book, How to Do Nothing, acknowledges the influence of this month's book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, to her own thinking about the power of our attention. Kimmerer, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, brings together these two points of view, the scientific and the reverential, to awaken our ecological consciousness. With a lyrical blend of precise detail and engaging storytelling, Kimmerer helps us to see the world around us with new eyes.

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, May 4, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the May meeting: 

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: May 4, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you liked April's selection . . .

 If you liked How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members:

• World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry
• Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials by Malcolm Harris
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross
• Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen
• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
• The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

If you enjoyed Nomadland by Jessica Bruder . . .

If you enjoyed Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, which we read together in 2018, then you might enjoy this interview with Bruder from Esquire that a discussion group member shared: Nomadland Is a Real Human Story That's Not Over Yet by Adrienne Westenfeld. Bruder tells us how some of the people she featured in her book are doing, what life on the road is like during the pandemic, and what it was like for her book to be made into an award-winning film by Chloé Zhao featuring some of the actual nomads she profiles.

April Not Fiction Book Discussion

Last month's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, informed us of the threat posed by internet platforms for the benefit of a few technology entrepreneurs and their iconic companies to the economy, to democracy, to society, and to our right to define our own personal future by how we use our time and attention. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell  is a guide to taking back our time and attention. It is a political manifesto for resisting the limited future planned for us by what Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism." With her entertaining and subtly subversive ramble through ancient philosophy, stories of political resistance, art and literature, and nature, Odell encourages us to disconnect from the online world and its message of efficiency and productivity and reconnect to the actual world around us.

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, April 6, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the April meeting.

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 

When: Apr 6, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed March's selection . . .

If you enjoyed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, then you might also like these books and film suggested by our discussion group members:

• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty
• The Social Network by Ben Mezrich, book; Aaron Sorkin, screenplay; and David Fincher, director

March's Not Fiction Book Discussion

 

In this month's discussion, we'll talk about the evolution of capitalism as described in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, argues that through internet platforms we interact with every day, our private lives have become a free raw material that "surveillance capitalists" exploit without regulation to predict and shape human behavior. They are the new conquistadors and Gilded Age industrialists of the 21st century.

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, March 2, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the March meeting:

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.  

When: March 2, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed February's selection . . .

 If you enjoyed Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story by Marie Arana, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members:

• In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
• What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forché
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, The General in His Labyrinth, and others by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann
• Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, The Feast of the Goat, and others by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf

You might also enjoy listening to this podcast suggested by a discussion group member:

• There Will Be Bananas. Throughline. NPR 1/9/2020

February's Not Fiction Book Discussion

 

This month we continue reading about the forces that shaped the Americas with Silver, Sword and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story by Marie Arana. Arana tells the story of how exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone) have influenced Latin America by interweaving history with the lives of three contemporary Latin Americans.

We hope you will join the discussion:

When? Tuesday, February 2, at 6:30 p.m.

Where? We will meet virtually on CCPL's Zoom server. Here is a link to register for the February meeting:

Hi there, 

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.  

When: Feb 2, 2021 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

 

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqceisqjkvGdQlXPa0Wx5dyNGMbiuz9u5K 

 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Readalikes: If you enjoyed January's selection . . .

 If you enjoyed The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by our discussion group members:

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance by Carolyn Forche
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer