An Environmental Reading List
On 25 November 2023, I appeared on a panel, ‘When Nature Calls’, at the Singapore Writers Festival with Esther Vincent, Wu Ming-Yi and Shelley Bryant. I recommended a whole host of eco-fiction books and I have listed them below for your thoughtfulness and reading pleasure.
Decentring the Human
The Animals in that Country, Laura Jean McKay
‘The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change’ by Kij Johnson
‘The misformed howl, the hint of killing animals gathered to work efficiently together—it awakens a monkey-place somewhere in her amygdala or even deeper, stained into her genes. Adrenaline hits hot as panic. Her heart beats so hard that it feels as though she’s torn it. Her monkey-self opens her eyes to watch the dogs through pupils constricted enough to dim the twilight; it clasps her arms tight over her soft belly to protect the intestines and liver that are the first parts eaten; it tucks her head between her shoulders to protect her neck and throat. She pants through bared teeth, fighting a keening noise.’
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Fox 8, George Saunders
Elmer, Gerry Alanguilan
‘Wild Geese’, Mary Oliver
‘A Fallen Bat’, William Olsen
‘The Mower’, Philip Larkin
Ghost Species, James Bradley
The Wolf Border, Sarah Hall
‘She would like to believe there will be a place, again, where the streetlights end and wilderness begins. The wolf border. And if this is where it has to begin in England, she thinks, this rich, disqualifying plot, with its private sponsorship and antiquated hierarchy, so be it. The ends justify the means.’
Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor
Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff Vandermeer
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler
Classic Environmental Fiction
The Drowned World, JG Ballard
New Atlantis, Ursula Le Guin
‘Coming back from my Wilderness Week, I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable, at least those that hadn’t yet worked loose from their bolts, so everybody waited inside the bus; besides, it was raining. We began talking, the way people do when there’s a breakdown and a wait. He held up his pamphlet and tapped it — he was a dry-looking man with a schoolteacherish way of using his hands — and said, “This is interesting. I’ve been reading that a new continent is rising from the depths of the sea.”’
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Flight Behaviour, Barbara Kingsolver
Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
Contemporary Eco Fiction/Dystopian Cli-Fi
Weather, Jenny Offil
Elizabeth Costello, JM Coetzee
‘No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?’
The Lives of Animals, JM Coetzee
The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak
Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel
Severance, Ling Ma
Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
‘In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.’
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Environmental Non fiction
This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein
Raffles' Banded Langur: The Elusive Monkey Of Singapore And Malaysia, Dr Andie Ang & Sabrina Jabbar
The Green Rail Corridor: A Biodiversity and Ecological Overview, Hua Chew Ho, Alan Owyong
Too Many Thoughts Walking the Rail Corridor, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow
‘… the concept plan caters to the idea of an urban population that needs to be entertained and coddled, rather than the philosophy of providing basic necessities like street lights, regular grass-cutting and perhaps a few paved sections, and signs for the nearest shelter (in the event of emergencies or inclement weather) – and leaving people to find their own fun.
Oh Singapore.’
Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, Ed. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson