The Living Sea of Waking Dreams | Richard Flanagan #AUSfiction

 

I know there is a lot of love for The Living Sea in Waking Dreams out there already. 

It's not that I didn't love it, or even admire what Flanagan was trying to achieve, but it's not easy to read a book where you feel like you're being smashed over the head, not just with a hammer, but with the biggest, heaviest mallet that Flanagan could find, on every single page, at every single turn. With such a convoluted title, I was expecting more nuance and intellectual word play. Instead I got whack after whack of anger.

Flanagan has a lot to be angry about.

Last summer was ghastly for all of us in Australia. The bush fires were the worst we'd ever experienced. Our skies were grey with smoke and ash for month after month. The smell was inescapable, the heat was oppressive, the news catastrophic. It was easy to feel like it was the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning.

Writing a book while all of this is happening around you, can take its toll. It can be hard to find perspective. It can be hard not to rave and rant in absolute frustration. It can be hard to resist a good old preachy sermon. Flanagan did not resist.

There was nothing subtle in his story about vanishing body parts, a dying mother and a world in flames. The ghastly siblings, Anna & Terzo, who refused to let their mother die with any dignity or grace, were so implausible, I struggled to spend my time with them. Their brother, Tommy, was much nicer company and more realistically drawn, as was Anna's son, Gus. But then, Tommy was the actual carer. He was on hand in Tasmania to care for their ailing mother, while the other two simply jetted in and out whenever there was a problem to be solved. And Gus' response to a world on the brink of catastrophic climate change is to withdraw into a world of gaming and Youtube videos. 

Flanagan ranted several times about social media and smartphone use. Clearly he is not someone who properly understands these online tools. Nothing about the way his characters engaged with their online world actually reflected anyone I know. He had all the right words, but just like Mr Books & I discussing Tiktok or Snapchat or memes with our boys, we show our ignorance at every turn, much to their amusement.

I feel like I'm the one ranting now!

I didn't not like the book. 

It was an interesting read and an interesting concept, with all the vanishings that nobody noticed, that spoke for, or to, something even bigger and scarier that nobody is noticing either. However I felt no emotional connection to anyone in the story, except pity - a huge amount of pity, in fact - for the undying, lingering, suffering, decaying mother. I found myself talking out loud to Flanagan throughout the book, telling him to get out of the way of his own story.

I love it, though, when I discover the title in the story.

It wasn't enough for Terzo that their mother had not died. It wasn't enough that she lived in her sea of waking dreams. In Terzo's view, she had to live like us, rationally, in a rational universe.

Except of course, Terzo's world, or his idea of living, were not as rational as he thought.

In the end, though, the occasional insights and beautiful writing were not enough for me to rate The Living Sea of Waking Dreams particularly highly. 

It astonished her that he had a view as deeply held felt as hers and yet entirely opposite, and which he held with an equal conviction. And in the face of someone who would not be persuaded by her, she did not seek to see the world for a moment as he saw it but instead was simply angry with him that his world was not her world.

I'm in the process of putting together my best 20 reads of 2020. This one will not make the cut.

Epigraph: 

John Clare | Remembrances

To the axe of the spoiler and self-interest fell a prey;

And Crossberry Way and old Round Oak's narrow lane

With its hollow trees like pulpits, I shall never see again:

Inclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain,

It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill

And hung the moles for traitors - though the brook is running still,

It runs a naked brook, cold and chill.

Opening Lines:

1.

Her hand.

2. 

It's impossible to say how the vanishing began or if it was already ended, thought Anna.

Other Opinions:

• The Conversation | 8th Oct 2020 | Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

The brilliance of Flanagan’s story and the deep power of this novel is in our witnessing of the end of the world. The death of Francie opens up a black hole in the family drawing Anna, Terzo and Tommy into its implacable singularity.

• The Guardian | 16th Oct 2020 | Beejay Silcox

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams [is] at its best when it balances its vehemence with its beauty, when it leaves space for the reader to wander and wonder – eucalypt leaves swinging down like “lazing scimitars”; a moth thrumming its “Persian rug” wings.

• Lisa @ANZ Lit Lover found more to like than I did.

UK Cover

I've been trying to take a photo of the beautiful green textured feather design on the hard cover underneath the glossy black dust jacket, that would do it justice. You'll have to take my word for it. It's much more interesting than the dust jacket image. The next time you're in a bookshop, carefully open the jacket and take a peek for yourself.

The End of the World is Bigger than Love | Davina Bell #AWW

I recently read an interview with Ann Patchett where see was asked about hard it was to scrap a piece of writing that wasn't working and to start again. The interviewer thought it might almost be like a little death to let go a hard-won piece of writing, but Patchett was more pragmatic. Her reply was that writing was like baking a cake. Sometimes you burnt the cake and had to make it again. But before you did, you could cut open the burnt cake and still eat the warm, gooey, soft bits in the middle that weren't burnt.

With that in mind, I jettisoned the over-cooked post I had been labouring over for a couple of weeks for this book. It was a relief to let it go.

I enjoyed The End of the World is Bigger than Love by Davina Bell so much, that my desire to write a response that did it justice, had got all messy and complicated with too many ingredients. If you promise to read on, I promise no more cooking metaphors!

This young adult novel will not suit everybody's tastes.

Lots of readers do not like dual narratives, so be warned, this book is narrated by twins, Summer and Winter.

Our two protagonists are also unreliable narrators, another love/hate device for many readers. Personally, I loved the mixed messages we were getting from Summer and Winter throughout the book. Who was telling the truth? Who wasn't? And why?

The story also jumps time and place fairly regularly as the girls remember all sorts of stuff about their childhood from their current position, stranded on a deserted island, without their father, after the world has gone to shit rather suddenly and dramatically. And rather presciently given current Covid-19 events.

This is a story about memories, feelings, thinking and relationships, therefore, not at all suitable for those seeking adventure and action.

Then there's the mix of cyber-terrorism, eco-dystopian, speculative fiction and coming-of-age themes with a whiff of romance that might put some readers off. This rather unconventional mix, however, worked beautifully for me. Even the ambiguous ending wasn't enough to deter me from my glowing, gushing feelings for this book.

Finally, Summer is pretty verbose. She uses lots of words instead of just a few and her energy levels and enthusiasm for everything is pretty high. In fact, she comes across as one of those rather annoying teenage girls who talks very loudly, very fast and thinks that everyone wants to know every little thing about her, and they want to know it right now! In real life, this would annoy me no end, but here, I found Summer to be rather endearing. 

Perhaps it was all the books.

Both Summer and Winter are great readers, thanks to the library left to them by their mother. Their list of desert island books was truly impressive. Why did they never try to leave the island for two years?  I say the books! 

Why would you need the rest of the big bad climate-mess world and the deadly greying, when you could read and reread books like Anne of Green Gables, The Diary of a Young Girl, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Outsiders, The Secret Garden, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to name just a few.

This book may not be for you, and that's okay, but for those of you like me, who love to fall headlong into a bookish world of words and ideas, uncertainty and mystery with two strong characters, then this is the book to dive into. 

Love can sometimes feel like the end of the world, and the end of the world may be bigger than love, but if you have to face down the end of the world as you know it, then it's much better to do so with love by your side.

Obviously, my time with Summer has affected me more than I thought!

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book, and it's not an easy book to describe, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Summer and Winter, even when I wanted to shake them or give them a good piece of my mind! Being a teenager is not an easy thing. Books like this remind of us how awkward and uncertain and fearless this time can be and can also make us grateful for how short a period of time this phase actually is in the scheme of a whole life, even though it doesn't feel like that at the time.

Favourite Quote:

We live on a blue planet that circles around a ball of fire next to a moon that moves the sea, and you don’t believe in miracles?

Davina Bell has had an interesting career trajectory. From working in publishing/editing to writing award-winning picture books for children and primary school aged kids, and now, The End of the World is Bigger than Love.

Facts:

• Our Australian Girl: Alice Stories
• The Underwater Fancy Dress Parade (illustrator Allison Colpoys)
• Birthday Baby (with Jane Godwin and illustrated by Freya Blackwood)
• Hattie Helps Out (with Jane Godwin and illustrated by Freya Blackwood)
• Oh, Albert! (illustrator Sara Acton)
• Under the Love Umbrella (illustrator Allison Colpoys)
• Lemonade Jones (with Karen Blair)
• The Corner Park Clubhouse series
• Baby Day (with Jane Godwin and illustrated by Freya Blackwood)
• All the Ways to Be Smart (illustrator Allison Colpoys)
• All the Factors of Why I Love Tractors (illustrator Jennie Lovlie)

Book 4 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham

City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest by Sophie Cunningham was one of the books I took on holidays a couple of months ago (along with Richard Powers, The Overstory) to Far North Queensland on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest. Both books seemed very appropriate for the occasion. And except for the last two chapters, I had all but finished City of Trees whilst surrounded by all those beautiful tall stands of trees.

I finished those last two chapters during the week.

The two books complemented each other perfectly. As I finished each of the nine origin stories in The Overstory, I needed a break to absorb their content. It was constantly amazed how often the next chapter or two of City of Trees reflected or enhanced the individual experiences that I had just read about in the novel. It came as no surprise to me that Cunningham had read (and loved) The Overstory as well and referenced it in some of her essays.

Cunningham has included line drawings of trees and some of their inhabitants throughout the chapters. Each essay is also littered with family stories and personal memories. Her reflections on grief and loss were particularly moving. However, it's her love of trees and the knowledge she has gained about them over the years that is the centre piece of this work.

As you would expect, the environmental messages in this book are active and strong. They colour Cunningham's view of the world. Since I share similar sensibilities with her, I found her essays to be beautiful, heartfelt and undeniable.

And endlessly quotable:

• A tree is never just a tree. It speaks of the history of the place where it has grown or been planted.

• There are individual giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) still living that are older than Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism.  

• Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head.

• For reasons that include increases in both temperatures and fuel loads, fires are burning hotter and becoming more dangerous....When forests do burn, old-growth forests don;t do so as intensely as younger forests.

•  James Bradley - Grief teaches us that time is plastic. A lifetime is an ocean and an instant. It does not matter whether something happened a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago: all loss is now. Grief does not stop, or disappear. It suffuses, inhabits us. The dead are both gone and never gone, living absences we bear with us.  

• Logging advocates exaggerate both the market for old-growth timber and the quality of the timber....In what universe would a reasonable person think it is okay to cut down an 800-year-old tree and reduce it a few hundred dollars' worth of woodchips? 

You can follow Sophie on Instagram with her #treeoftheday hashtag.

Book 18 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

Sydney 15℃

Dublin 20℃

The Overstory by Richard Powers

I do love to theme my holiday reads where possible. A recent week long Far North Queensland break in beautiful, sunny Port Douglas on the edge of the Daintree Rainforest, gave me a chance to finally read this year's Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Power's The Overstory. (I also packed a book of essays called City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham as a companion read - to be reviewed soon).

The Australian cover of The Overstory has been one of my favourite designs throughout 2018 and it is now one of my favourite reads of 2019. In trying to work though my feelings about this book though, it's hard to go past Benjamin Markovits' Guardian review of The Overstory, where he said,

It’s an extraordinary novel, which doesn’t mean that I always liked it. Martin Amis’s brilliant description of what it’s like to admire a book – the stages you go through, from resistance to reluctance, until you finally reach acceptance in the end – is probably more linear than what usually happens. Because reluctance and acceptance can go hand in hand...

It’s an astonishing performance. Without the steadily cumulative effect of a linear story, Powers has to conjure narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again. And mostly he succeeds. Partly because he’s incredibly good at describing trees, at turning the science into poetry...

There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. Like Moby-Dick, The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference. Time matters differently; you look at the trees outside your window more curiously. Suspiciously, even.

Yes, yes, yes! It really is extraordinary and astonishing and exhilarating, with some qualifications.

Initially I thought that following the narratives of nine individuals would be hard to track and I made a few character notes on each one, during their origin chapters, but I didn't really need to in the end. Most of the characters was so fully realised which such rich backstories, that they were all clearly delineated in my mind.

I found the story mesmerising and haunting. Trees crept into my dreams and I found myself touching trees and smelling them on my morning walks, more so than usual. Our day trip into the Daintree even gave me a chance to hug an old, old tree with gratitude.

I also learnt so much. About the catastrophic chestnut blight and the so-called nature strips left by the logging companies on the side of the road, so that from the car you cannot see that entire mountainsides of forest have been logged behind them. About how trees migrate and communicate with each other. How they protect themselves and those around them from infestations. How intricate a forest system really is. And about how quickly we're losing the old forests of the world.

My qualifications?

At times I was concerned the story might tip over into earnestness or become too worthy for it's own good, but Powers reined it in each time.

I experienced resistance a few times - especially during the activism phase of the novel. Adam, the reluctant activist character was the one who helped me through.

At times it felt a bit too easy or convenient to create a divide between those who wanted to save the old growth forests and those nasty, greedy capitalists, who didn't. We all know it's not as black and white as that and that there's a lot of nuance and complexity in between.

The really hard part, though, is coming away from this story, wanting to help, wanting to make a difference, wanting for everyone to see how important it is for all of us to maintain diversity of species, but coming up with no real solution. The activism section of the book showed how futile it is in the face of rampant materialism and capitalism. Those advocating jobs and usefulness (in the name of making more money for themselves) will never see the point of long-haired layabouts, sponging off government handouts. And any scientific study is dismissed, ridiculed or declared 'unclear' - needing more time and more study before any action can possibly be considered - as another forest is cleared.

The only option Power leaves us with, in the end, is,

The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

The Overstory is a good story. It's poetic, urgent, timely, rich in detail, epic in nature and wears it's heart on it's sleeve. It is meaningful and satisfying.

I'm not sure we can say that this leaves us with a particularly optimist view of the human race, although, we can feel pretty sure that the trees will survive, somehow, somewhere, no matter what.

My copy of The Overstory in the Daintree Rainforest

Favourite Quote:

My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

Favourite Character: The entire Hoel family who start this novel off with such a powerful generational story.

Favourite of Forget: Unforgettable

Facts:

• Shortlisted 2018 Man Booker Prize
• Winner 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• Winner 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
• Longlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award

1/20 Books of Winter
The Overstory was read during my week in Far North Queensland - where the average daytime temperature was a glorious 27℃. The same week in Dublin had a chillier average of 17℃.
#justsaying

The End We Start From From by Megan Hunter

There is a lot of space in Megan Hunter's The End We Start From. Known as a poet until now, her debut novel is written almost like a poem, but not quite. It's not prose as we know it either. It's fragmentary, somewhere in between.

Stark, sparse paragraphs, poetic words, no names, just letters of the alphabet. Everything is pared back to the bare minimum to create a startling story about the end of times. The End We Start From got under my skin.

Hunter's choice of epigraph was a poem by T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets,

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. 

She then shows us the end of our known world (via an environmentally disastrous flood that covers London) through the eyes of a young woman about to give birth to her first child. The story reads almost like her journal entries. Brief snatches of time captured through the lens of baby love.

Many reviewers talked about the not-so-new idea of comparing first-time mothering with the end of the world. Curiously it wasn't this particular idea that captured my attention. I was intrigued by how this baby (and the other newborns) will be growing up in this new world which will be the only world that they know and understand. They won't have to accommodate or change or adapt to this new world order; it is their world. They won't spend their lives thinking about and regretting the wonderful old ways and wishing it could be like that again. They won't be climate change deniers or head-in-the-sander's; they will know, they will be living with it as a fact. They will belong to this new world. This is our hope and the way forward.

The story is contained not only within the carefully chosen words but also in the gaps and all that is unspoken. Hunter mentioned several times that she was trying to find a way to move between poetry and prose to find a form that suited her. It worked for me just fine.

London. Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children.

The cupboards reveal themselves more by the day: their wooden backs, the greying corners we never used to see.

Days are thin now, stretched so much that time pours through the. 

Z has learnt to smile. He has cracked with it. The smiles built up inside him, R and me smiling madly into his face until it couldn’t hold any more. It cracked, and out came his smile, urgent, almost demented.

Hunter also interspersed these fragments with flood mythologies. They reminded us that since the beginning of recorded time, humans have been grappling with the chaos that mother nature throws our way. We make up stories to help us make sense of the unknown. It made me wonder what stories would then be made up for future generations about this disaster.

My only quibble was the ending. However so many authors these days fail to capture a satisfying end note that I'm becoming used to that feeling of let down after a great read. So much thought seems to go into the epigraph but the search for an equally apt epilogue is not always given the same care.

Benedict Cumberbatch's company has apparently bought the movie rights to the book.

A shout-out to the brilliant cover design by Naomi Clark and illustration by Kazuko Nomoto. I picked this book up for the first time purely thanks to the lovely, lovely cover.

1/20 #20booksofsummer (winter)
16℃ in Sydney
20℃ in Northern Ireland

Circle by Jeannie Baker

Circle is one of those amazing, gorgeous picture books that I love and adore...right up until the very last page.

But that last page does my head in every single time I read it. Before I go into the final page, let me tell you all the reasons why I love and adore the rest of the book.

Firstly, I had the very great privilege of attending the book launch and exhibition opening for Circle at the Australian Maritime Museum in Sydney last year. Being able to see Baker's collages up close and personal is a real treat that I would move heaven and earth to be a part of (I also attended the opening of her exhibition for Mirror six years ago).

The collages were hung between child and adult height for everyone to enjoy. They're not huge pieces, which makes the precision details in each one even more impressive. The colours, the textures, the perspectives are an aesthetic delight.

Secondly, Circle is the story of the bar-tailed godwit, a migratory bird that I knew nothing about until the launch/opening night. This incredible little bird takes a six day flight from Australia/New Zealand via the Yellow Sea to Alaska each year.

Thirdly, this is a story about our environment and our climate and what we have been doing to it and how it affects the smallest members of our planet. It's a story about our global ecosystem and how everything is connected. Circle is the ultimate tale of belonging.

And now the ending.

The very first illustration in the book shows us a boy in bed with a wheelchair beside him. We have no explanation for this. The assumption I made was that the boy had a permanent disability. There was nothing in the image to suggest to me that he was only injured for a period of time (i.e. wearing a cast for a broken leg, get well cards on the bedside table etc). Instead he is reading a book about birds and day dreaming about flying.

Baker refers to an injury in the teacher's notes provided on the night. If this had been obvious to me, I could have accepted this very same boy at the end of the book on crutches, rushing to save the godwit on the beach, dropping his crutches and suddenly walking/running. If I'd known he was recovering from a protracted injury, I could have applauded his hard work and apparent recovery.

The teacher's note conclude with 'thus, the bird's year long migration is given a human perspective'.

However it looked to me, like a child with a permanent disability who suddenly walked. It didn't make sense. I certainly didn't experience the human journey within the bird's journey that the notes indicated. It felt like it was something added on as an afterthought.

Part of judging whether a picture book for children has been successful or not is if the illustrations and the stories work alongside each other. According to the CBCA judging criteria for early childhood books, there needs to be a 'unity of purpose' where the issues in the text and the pictures revolve and resolve together.

Perhaps this is why Circle has been longlisted for the Picture Book of the Year award (which focuses on the illustrations) and the Eve Pownall Book of the Year (which focus on the information/non-fiction elements within the story) and not the Early Childhood Book Award.

+ Winner of the 2017 Australian Indie Book Children's Award.

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

Speculative fiction is not usually my cup of tea, but I had heard interesting things about this debut author and his book of short stories.

This is part of the rave book blurb from goodreads -

AN EXTRAORDINARILY RESONANT AND PROPHETIC COLLECTION OF SPECULATIVE SHORT FICTION FOR OUR TECH-SAVVY ERA BY DEBUT AUTHOR ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN.

Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.

Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.

Could the book possibly live up to its hype?

Yes.
Yes it can.

I don't normally read this genre, so perhaps there are lots of books like this out there. Therefore this may be nothing new or remarkable. But for a speculative fiction novice, I found these stories extraordinary, startling and original.

The longer stories in the second half of the book worked best with the title story creating a very eerie and sombre mood as the joys and woes of having a data family in the 'New World' are explored. In fact, it was all of the stories that featured family life in the near future that had the most resonance for me. The impact on the children and their various possible reactions were the human element in this book full of new technologies and social media gone viral.

I enjoyed the little references that crossed over between some of the stories that provided a sense of a coherent, consistent world view.

If you're not sure if this book is for you, try out Saying Goodbye to Yang, Children of the New World, Migration, The Pyramid of the Ass, Openness or Ice Age. They're the ones that have continued to haunt me.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

I started reading This Changes Everything way back when in November 2015 in preparation for Cop21 in Paris. Not that I planned to go or even had any high hopes for the outcomes, but I wanted to have more knowledge about the main issues and catch up on the latest thinking about climate change.

I knew this would be a slow read and a slow burn.

There were a lot of facts and information to absorb. A lot of rhetoric and statistics to wade through and weed out.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out how and why people could say that climate change is not happening or is not real. That somehow it is a belief rather than a fact that you can choose to accept or not.

The scientists sometimes get the details and specific projections wrong, but the overwhelming data on climate change is undeniable.

Reading the first few chapters in Klein's book sheds some insight into this phenomenon.

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look then turn it into a joke....Which is another way of looking away.

Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, i was to discover while researching this book, is yet another way of looking away....

Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. Meditate and shop at farmers' markets and stop driving....And at first it may appear as if we are looking, becasue many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still have one eye tightly shut.

Or maybe we do look - really look - but then, inevitably we seem to forget. Remember and then forget again....We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.

Klein reminds us that governments and countries are historically capable of great change and huge shifts in ideology from the abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the overturning of Apartheid and sex discrimination (still a work in progress, I feel).
We are also capable of finding incredible wealth reserves to tackle major events like terrorism and super storms and other weather related disasters. At times like this, all the old excuses get thrown out with the grey-waste dishwater.

The real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

One would have to say though, that the current plethora of end-of-the-world dystopian YA books in the market right now, indicates that this part of the message is not getting through. According to the dystopian authors, our collective futures are not looking very rosy or bright at all.

Klein tells us who the deniers are and why denying benefits them and their world view. They "believe that they and theirs will be protected from the ravages in question" for now. That they will be able to buy their way out of any difficulties that arise.

She brings to light many of the myths surrounding this topic and shows where they come from and who they benefit.

I got bogged down by the chapters on US politics and the corporate world. It was hard not to feel numb and hopeless at this point of the narrative. How could these traditional, self-serving entities ever grab hold of the "bold long-term planning" required by Klein.

The section on the history of Nauru was heart breaking. Australia's tragic use of this island to house the refugees coming across our seas is but the last in a long line of greed, denial and self-interest. 

The few died-in-the-wool capitalists who actually read this book, will probably attack the ideas in this book as being dangerous, irresponsible, socialist or communist.

Not being an economist, I cannot say much about her discussion on the global markets and how big money looks after it's own, except that it felt right. It reflected what I see happening in the news and in some of our local issues (from a coal mine trying to open in my old home town to getting playing spaces for kids in the suburb I live in now).

There was a lot in Klein's book to make us feel pessimistic about our ability to effect any meaningful change.

Our faith in techno wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster....it remains our culture's most powerful form of magical thinking.

However, the main problem that I had with This Changes Everything, is that in so many ways it changes nothing.

It was a huge brick of book that only the dedicated will ever read word for word. People like myself, who already accept that climate change is real are looking for something practical to do about it. Sure I can attend another grass roots demonstration and divest our family portfolio of non-renewable energy stocks (both of which we've already done to the best of our ability), but what else?

We can protest and change some of our behaviours but unless the big end of town joins in too, then really, the whole thing feels pointless and hopeless.

In the end, the best I idea that I came away with is actually an old one - Pascal's Wager - except in this case, it's in our best interests to believe in climate change because if we're wrong, then the worse thing that can happen is that we have a better world to live in with less pollution. But if we deny climate change and we're wrong, then we're all completely stuffed.

For a more day-to-day practical book about what you can do try The Handbook by Jane Rawson and James Whitmore.

The Handbook: Surviving & Living With Climate Change by Jane Rawson &James Whitmore

Way back when, I picked up a book that changed my life.

I think the year was 1989 or 1990 and the book was The Green Consumer Guide by John Elkington & Julia Hailes.
In collaboration with the Australian Conservation Foundation and CHOICE magazine, the UK pair had tweeked their best-selling book for an Australian audience.

At the time I was deeply concerned about the hole developing in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. I was keen to reduce my CFC use, to do my bit and make a difference.

This book gave me lots of good tips and suggestions.
The amount of highlighting in the book is testament to all the sections I thought were important to remember.
I was starting out on my adult life and I wanted to make good choices not just for me but for future me and any future family I might have. And because I was young and idealistic, I also wanted to make good choices for the future of our planet.

I bought white goods, furniture and appliances over the years, based on the principles espoused by the authors. I took out a CHOICE membership so I could keep up to date & I always made purchases based on their eco-friendly ratings.

I started recycling everything I could and I created a garden compost. I grew some of my own vegetables and herbs. I watered in the cool of the evening and mulched religiously. I avoided using plastic bags as much as possible. I bought recycled paper products. I made my own envelops (remember when we used to write letters to each other?)
I used green cleaning methods and tried companion planting to keep the bugs at bay. I put a lead weight into my toilet cistern and converted to cruelty free cosmetics. I walked to work most days and gave out Wilderness Society calendars at Christmas time.

So imagine my disappointment over the years to discover that things were getting worse for our planet. Perhaps not as quickly as first predicted or as dire, which maybe meant that all our little efforts were helping after all. If only our governments and big business weren't so determined to ignore, deny and continue on with their make-more-money-at-all-costs attitudes.

And now, suddenly, it's 30 years later, and we have scientists talking about critical tipping points and points of no return. For us and for our planet.

To help us prepare for the new environmental challenges ahead of us, Rawson & Whitmore have written a modern how-to guide for survival - The Handbook.

If you're new to the whole self-sufficiency approach or want to do something practical but don't know what that is, this book will do for you what The Green Consumer Guide did for me.

It's full of useful information about how to flood and fire proof your home, emergency survival tips, self-sufficiency ideas and lifestyle choices that can make a difference. It's very specific and practical. But most importantly, it discusses the psychological impact of climate change and how we can prepare our minds for the changing times ahead.

If, like me, you've been reading and doing stuff like this for years, many of the ideas here will not be new to you. But it's a great refresher course with up-to-date statistics and scientific thinking.

It's also great to be reminded that we can do something, we can be pro-active. It's not just endless, seemingly fruitless talks at world conferences or famous folk jumping on bandwagons. There are things we can do. We don't have to wait. They might be small things, but if enough of us do these small things every day, then perhaps we can slow the bigger changes down.

Finally, one of the interesting passages near the back of The Handbook discusses how hot our planet is getting and how hot it will get in the future.

2014 was the world's hottest year since humans started keeping records. 14 of the 15 have happened in this century.

In Australia, 2014 was our third hottest year; 2013 was our hottest. Seven of Australia's ten hottest years have occurred in the past 13 years, with only 2011 cooler than the 1961-1990 average.

I found this fascinating.
Like many of you, I have said things like "oh this summer is not as hot as the ones I remember when I was a kid" or "it's not that bad, we've had hotter summers and survived."

I was wrong.

The summer's weren't as hot back then. The stats clearly say so.

Our memories are wrong.

In the 16 years of this new century, 14 of those years have been the hottest on record.

This is our new normal.

Time to get real; time to get practical.

The Reef: A Passionate History by Iain McCalman

The Reef: A Passionate History does exactly as its cover promises - it delivers 12 'extraordinary tales' about Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

The only thing it missed to my mind, was a thirteenth chapter where McCalman included some of the local Indigenous tribes stories about the reef. There must be Dreamtime stories, rock paintings and oral traditions that could have been unearthed for such a chapter.

The majority of Indigenous stories in this book about life on the reef only existed through the lens of the white explorers and settlers - they only appeared as helpers or hindrances to the white exploration and discovery process.

Sadly perhaps, this is all that is available to the modern researcher. Whatever the reason, the Aboriginal perspective was missed.

The reefs story begins with Captain Cook's 'discovery' and end in modern times with Charlie Vernon, Chief Marine Scientist who has predicted an imminent 'reef apocalypse'. The book is full of fascinating snippets about the history, geography, biology, geology, politics, sociology, psychology, ecology and environmental aspects of the reef.

However, the truly disturbing chapter is the last one that highlights Vernon's findings on coral bleaching. He observed his first patch of coral bleaching in the early 80's, quickly followed by the first global mass bleaching event on 1981-82. The next major mass bleaching occurred in 1997-98 and an even worse one occurred in 2001-02. As it turns out,

reef-growing corals, which seemed peculiarly susceptible to increases in heat and light, were alerting scientists to climatic changes....

These damaged corals are capable of regeneration if water temperature returns to normal and water quality remains good, but the frequency and intensity of bleaching outbreaks is now such that the percentage of reef loss from coral deaths will increase dramatically....

[Reefs] are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present. Imprinted in fossil typography are the stories of the mass-extinction events of the geological past, including their likely causes. These archives tell us that four out of the five previous mass extinctions of coral reefs on our planet were linked to the carbon cycle. They were caused by changes to the ocean's chemistry brought about by absorption of carbon dioxide and methane, through a process of 'acidification'.

Today's culprits are the same gases - carbon dioxide and methane - though their increased presence is not due to massive meteor strikes of volcanic eruptions that caused earlier catastrophes....

Already the oceans...have reached a third of their capacity to soak them up and balance them chemically. Stealthily, the oceans of the world have begun the process that scientists call 'commitment', which in this case refers to the 'unstoppable inevitability' of acidification that presages destruction long before it is clearly visible.

Sorry for the long quote, but I knew I couldn't trust myself to paraphrase all of that as precisely as McCalman did.

It has had a profound impact on me.

By 2050, the coral reefs could be melting into the waters like a 'giant antacid tablet' heralding an unstoppable 'succession of ecosystem disasters'. The point of no return is close at hand and the only real hope we have is that some of the key micro-organisms like plankton, algae and polyps evolve fast enough to become resilient to this new threat to their environment (and ours) or that the pattern of mass extinction doesn't follow that of the previous five.

It is a tragedy to think that this beautiful area of the world could disappear forever (or at least for enough lifetimes to make it seem like forever). And it is impossible to imagine what other changes this loss will incur.

We visited the area around the Low Isles 18 months ago, not long after a cyclone had battered the coral. Our youngest had control of the hired underwater camera; he took some beautiful photos despite the obvious damage all around us.

This post is part of #AusReadingMonth and #NonFicNov