the big stickied thread is getting cluttered with lots of new people and the “how was your week” thread isn’t a great fit for introductions, so it seems about time to make this a dedicated thread of its own so peoples’ posts aren’t getting lost.

tell us a little bit about yourself, folks. don’t gotta be too specific or revealing, just whatever you want to put out there. this’ll be a good way of getting to know all the people you’re now on here with

  • OOFshootEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    I would be extremely interested in notification books, I’m currently working on Pests by Bethany BrookShire, what are you into? What’s the best one you’ve read this year?

    • alyaza [they/she]OPMEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      generally i am an equal opportunity reader. the past few months have been a climate change nonfiction binge so there are a lot of books i can talk about in that field. i’ll probably make that a separate reply since it’s so long. outside of that the most recent one i finished was Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. his entire bibliography is a pretty good read, particularly Into Thin Air about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster and Into the Wild, abut the late and eclectic wilderness guy Christopher Johnson McCandless.

      The Woman Who Wasn’t There is a curious one about a fake 9/11 survivor which is accompanied by a movie of the same name. both are pretty good; i saw the movie before the book. for lighter reading, Coyote America is a fun one–that’s about the eponymous coyote and its history as a species. reaching a little further back i was also a fan of A History of America in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps because i love it when books analyze history through an unconventional lens like that

      • alyaza [they/she]OPMEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        and here’s all the climate change books. my suggested permutations:

        • if you’re a pyromaniac, the path of Fire in Paradise, Paradise, Megafire, Firestorm, and The Pyrocene should satisfy that itch.
        • the doomer trifecta is probably Fire and Flood, Losing Earth, and Nomad Century so if you want to know how badly we fucked this one up they go into that quite intimately
        • wonks will probably enjoy Nomad Century, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, and California Burning as they deal with policy and policy prescriptions in decent droves
        • people looking for something less emotionally devastating should read the optimistic chapters of The Best of Times, The Worst of Times (it is structured to alternate pessimism/optimism chapters) and Choked (which has a generally positive outlook)
        • Extreme Cities is a Verso book, and so is probably the most socialist-oriented of these
        • if you want to be emotionally devastated on a personal level: read the two Paradise books (ideally back-to-back) or one of them and The End of Ice

        ordered by year

        • Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future by Ashley Dawson (2016)
        • The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell (2017)
        • Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik (2017)
        • Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame by Michael Kodas (2017)
        • Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner (2019)
        • The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail (2020)
        • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science by Paul Behrens (2020)
        • Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich (2021)
        • The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next by Stephen J. Pyne (2021)
        • Fire and Flood: A People’s History of Climate Change, From 1979 to the Present by Eugene Linden (2022)
        • Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince (2022)
        • The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle (2023)

        California specific appendix

        • Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano (2020)
        • Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by Lizzie Johnson (2021)
        • California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric–and What It Means for America’s Power Grid by Katherine Blunt (2022)