August 31, 2025 · 5:48 pm

Wild Dark Shore: Eco-parenting-elegy

I’m trying to remember the name of the book I reviewed here that was about the near future, climate catastrophe, parenting, and some biblical themes. I really liked it. The bible part is what did it: A Children’s Bible.

Why am I trying to remember that one? Because Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore reminded me of it – similar theme of how to parent amid the climate collapse, of how to not only explain to our children the destruction and loss, but to prepare them for the present and future of suffering and inequality and grief.

Wild Dark Shore manages to keep you reading what might otherwise be too overwhelming an indictment of our inaction and paralysis of the scale of the problem by placing the themes amid a gentle mystery and a (albeit somewhat implausible) romance.

The mystery: a woman washes up on the shores of Shearwater island – a remote island where there is one family who are there to protect Earth’s last seed banks until the seeds can be moved to a safer location (the sea levels are rising, permafrost melting and the seed bank is no longer safe) (if such a location even exists). As she recovers and we learn why she is there, she begins to uncover suspicious things and witness strange behaviours from the family. What, the reader wonders along with her, happened here.

From there plenty of implausible plot points follow – and I enjoyed and liked the book too much to take much issue with them – but there is a host of things that just… didn’t seem likely (at all), but I allowed because the writing was beautiful and, perhaps, because I wanted them to be possible (the romance not the least of them).

But what the book does best (at least, I think) is make palpable the choices that climate catastrophe have forced on those parts of the world already most impacted and will – are – forcing on the privileged like me through the pressing decisions around the seeds, but also – and most evocatively – in the choices about what to do with/for/by our children. What sacrifices ought we have made already or should we be making to the future (and no, this isn’t an argument for effective altruism, more a practical question of what can one generation reasonably do to better the outcomes for the next).

The climactic scene – while perhaps too on the nose and overly layered with Symbol – brings this question to a head and the reader is left mourning not just the particular loss for the family, but through this synecdoche our greater loss as a planet.

Anyway. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but it will make you feel something about our planet and our connection to it – and that is no small feat.

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August 21, 2025 · 12:37 pm

Let Us Descend

I can’t place what I didn’t love about Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend but it was something about an uncertainty of what would be/was the trajectory of Annis’s story. Which makes sense, I know, in a book of slavery and the experience of uncertainty and alienation for those enslaved. And maybe love of a book focused on the slave experience is the wrong aspiration – something closer to appreciation and awe for the brilliant writing, the evocative and rich descriptions, the pacing and poetry.

The novel focuses on Annis and her journey of enslavement from a time with her mother to a slave market to a sugar plantation and beyond. The physical journey is marked by spirits and hauntings that make manifest (or as manifest as a ghost can be) the intergenerational trauma of slavery and violence – and the ways resilience come from the stories we have been told and tell ourselves. I suppose my uncertainty about what the novel was going to be about (like it felt like I kept waiting for the plot to begin? or the core conflict to be made clear?) misunderstands that the story is one of survival – and that the meaningful trajectory of experiencing endless uncertainty of place, people and threatened and real violence – and when and how we can claim autonomy and community amid the most abject dehumanized moments – is itself the life of Annis and the plot we are meant to follow.

So in this instance I think the problem was me as a reader – expecting or wanting something different from the story – while the book itself is an expertly crafted, compact gem.

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August 21, 2025 · 1:09 am

Three Days in June: Smooth and swift

You could read Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June in one sitting. A quick little slip into the world of Gail – socially awkward, a little aloof, a little out of touch even with herself – as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding. Over the three days she is (at first forced) reintroduced to her ex-husband, Max, comes up against the kind of relationship she has with her mother and the kind she wants with her daughter, and also forced to question her career choices to date and to come. It’s a compact and (I think) successful way to show how change – big change – can happen in a few days when the build toward it has been a long time brewing and there’s a big enough event(s) to make the change possible.

Lovely, too, to return to Anne Tyler, who I haven’t read in years and years, but who I used to read Every Single Book she wrote.

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August 19, 2025 · 12:40 pm

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.

I may be a bad feminist, but I found Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next far too focused on proving that women can be/have been computer scientists and can be/have been important to understandings of artificial intelligence. Like sure, yes, this is all true. And also so what. Okay, I know that in the case of the essays, the so what is that as we construct new forms of intelligence – or as new kinds of intelligence and beings emerge in the transhumanist future – we ought to learn from the past and create this future in more equitable ways. But it just read to me as… obvious?

Though clearly it is not obvious when it is the tech bros creating and profiting from new forms of AI and new AI products – and as Winterson argues the risk in all of this is that these men – like the industralists before them – will seek to maximize profit at the expense of the labour or women (and children). Though with AI less so the labour and more so the data or the ways in which these systems are designed, optimized (and implicitly, aligned – or not). I’d not call this one deeply researched, but with that it’s also not overly technical – and so if you wanted an accessible (and perhaps a bit surface) exploration of current (well now not so current because of the publication date of 2021 makes this ancient) technology then sure.

So while most of the book I yawned my way though, I did find the last essay (I should mention its a series of – sometime repetitive – essays about AI/technology and the past and future) on a future where a transhumanist self is defined not by intelligence but by love to be compelling. Oh I know it’s the Unitarian in me, and I know its a desire for there to be something that connects us, but that call to love as the ultimate end is well, deeply appealing. Even if Winterson doesn’t attempt to define what love is (or where, how, when it operates – or operates differently from a god BUT WHATEVER).

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