Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

This week Edan Lepucki’s California, a dystopic near-future narrative about a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, debuted on the New York Times Bestsellers List at number 3, allegedly with the aid of the infamous “Colbert-Bump.” But before you take up this timely future-cast, I recommend you pick up the ever prescient and entertaining Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which in my mind defined the whole near-future dystopia in LA genre. I recently re-read Parable in Spring/Summer course I taught on “environmental futures” and forgot to write up a review until reading a review of Lepucki’s book.

Parable takes the form of the diary of Laura Olamina, the daughter of a Baptist preacher who lives with her family in a middle-class community called Robledo, outside of Los Angeles in 2024. Anthropogenic Climate Change, neoliberal economic policies (like NAFTA, Reaganomics, etc.), and rising crime/drug addiction have rendered Southern California a veritable Golgotha, or some other hellish slumlandia one can scavenge from one’s lifetime exposure to modern day Dickensian poverty imagery (think Biafra starvation picks plus Escape from New York and Road Warrior). Many residents in areas like Robledo hide behind walls, hoping to keep out the rising scourge of violence and poverty, while others take to the desolate US route 101 or I-5 corridor to travel north to Oregon and Washington, where water (and jobs) are rumored to be more plentiful.

Laura dreams of a life where she doesn’t have to live in fear of the outside violence or the suffocating closeness of hiding behind the walls. She also begins to imagine a religion of her own, called Earhseed, which helps people find a meaningful life on Earth while looking towards humanity’s destiny: to take root among the stars.

At the University of Oregon, where roughly half the students hail from California, The Parable of the Sower was a devilishly fun book to teach. Butler’s narrative of forced migration and armed lifeboats amidst a sea of social/ecological disaster remind readers (but especially my Californian students-turned-temporary-Oregonians) of the privileges of high consumption, free/rapid movement, and reliable access to social services like medical care, police protection, that some of us enjoy more than others. Butler’s novel stands as a stark reminder of the injustices present in society today, and a warning that in a world of “starved economies and tortured ecology” inequalities and social violence are often exacerbated by the relentless consumption that fuels our lives. Butler’s often grotesque narrative remains “realistic” in the sense that the web of oppression she weaves for her characters to struggle within is made of the same strands (individual and institutional racism, economic exploitation, and environmental injustice) that shoot through the fabric of American society today.

Written in 1994, it was eerily reading Parable in 2014. Laura records in her diary an outbreak of measles (see the Midwest today), abundant, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes (see decade) and massive wildfires rolling over a parched West (see Washington south to Baja). But the elevated social violence and depleted social safety nets envisioned in the novel are far and away worse than current conditions. Indeed, if there is a major misstep in this book, I think it is in Butler’s reliance on what some scholars of food aid call “poverty porn” to underscore to social decay her novel cautions against. It is hard to think of an American society so degraded that little children would gnaw on the leg of a junkie shot dead on a street and left to rot. I know the Reagan and Bush years where tough, but come on! Still, we are talking about a sci-fi book, not a documentary of things to come.

Rating: Some reads fall on the path, and are trodden upon or kicked to the wayside, some reads are cast among thorns (like True Detective) and choked out due to superior competition, and other reads fall on the good shelf, the one you’ll go to and find a great summer read. This book’s the latter.

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Evie Wyld’s fascinating, disturbing novel follows the troubled life of a young woman named Jake Whyte. The story is told in alternating chapters – present and past. The present is set on a sheep farm on rainy island off Great Britain, where Jake tries to discover who (or what) is attacking her sheep. The chapters located in the past move backward, so that the reader ends the novel in Jake’s childhood in Australia.

Because of the novel’s structure, Jake’s devastating history is told in layers, revealing more and more of the unfortunate events that brought her to the sheep farm. Teenage prostitution and violence are only some of the psychological scars that Jake bears, in addition to the physical scars that mar her back. Wyld’s Jake is unforgettable.

All the Birds, Singing, is terribly beautiful. A must read!

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Must Read

The Silkworm is the second novel in J.K. Rowling’s series following private investigator Cormoran Strike. The sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013), The Silkworm catches up with Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, less than a year after the successful resolution of the Lula Landry case. Leonora Quine hires Strike to locate her missing husband, the author Owen Quine. Strike soon discovers that Quine’s disappearance coincided with the leak of his latest manuscript – a dark, unpublishable allegory that includes thinly veiled metaphors of his professional rivals and personal enemies.

This missing person case becomes a murder investigation when Strike discovers the author’s body, arranged exactly as described in the leaked manuscript. Strike and Ellacott’s professional relationship becomes strained as they struggle to discover the murderer, who may also be the real author of Quine’s manuscript.

Fans of the Harry Potter series will find much to love in both of Rowling’s detective novels. Descriptive, playful, and inventive, The Silkworm is a page-turner that is also great fun to read! I look forward to reading more about Cormoran Strike in Rowling’s next installment, due out in 2015.

Availability: USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by:  Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Highly Recommended

I’ve been on a bit of a “plague kick” lately, having just read Mary Shelly’s The Last Man and watched 28 Days Later, and think, after reading The Rag Doll Plagues by Alejandro Morales that perhaps it’s time to take a break and read some lighter subject matter.

The Rag Doll Plagues is broken into three narratives that each resonate in both narrative voice and plot. The first story takes place in colonial Mexico, where a mysterious plague called “La Mona” turns thousands into what the chief colonial physician alternatively describes as “bags of pus,” “blood sausages,” or “the living dead.” Unfailingly lethal, La Mona is described as a “just” disease because it takes the lives of the poor, the rich, the indigenous as well as the Europeans (who overall tended to import diseases to the “New World” at and after Contact). The second narrative takes place in Orange County, CA in the 1980s during the initial AIDS outbreak. Narrating this tale of disease and the social forces which both structure its spread and containment is another doctor, Gregory, trying to suture the wounds of gangland violence and AIDS-doomed hemophiliac wounds of his wife, Sandra. The third tale takes place in a relatively dystopic twenty-second century Los Angeles-Mexico City industrial corridor of the “Triple Alliance” (think NAFTA or something like it fully merged Canada, the US, Mexico, and a spike of Chinese ex-patriots inhabiting all three nations). Gregory, the grandson of our last Gregory, is a doctor who finds that Mexican residents of Mexico City have somehow evolved or mutated to resist the “hyperbolically polluted” Mexico City and that simple blood transfusions using Mexican blood can cure the new myriad diseases caused by the pervasive industrial waste that has marked the twenty-first and second centuries as a time of “ecological disaster.” The race to commodify Mexican blood, which Gregory wryly notes is by no means a new pursuit, is on!

So… yes, this is a wild book full of blood, gore, and also love, humor, and social-political commentary. At the heart of each narrative is the story of widespread environmental injustice, as racist and profit-driven political systems construct terrible infrastructure which either directly brings about the plague in question or exacerbates its virulence. The scientific acumen of the doctor-narrators is challenged and exposed as but a limited tool against the monsters which perhaps can only be tamed with socially and environmentally equitable political structures. It is a gruesome and disconcerting novel that takes on the transhistorical sweep of a horrific dream you know, at some level, you already wake and sleep through today.

Rating: “The kind of infectious you want to spread around” — quote from the Christopher Guest film, A Mighty Wind.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Achebe’s fifth novel, Anthills of the Savannah takes place in a fictitious, recently decolonized West African nation named Kangan. Kangan geographically resembles Nigeria, in that its south is typified in the novel by lush tropical jungles while its northern province is blasted by the same Harmattan that blows over Sokoto, Kano, and Maidiguri. Kangan’s political life is also modeled on Nigeria’s successive military coup d’etats in the 1970s and 80s (and as it turns out, post 1987), and the novel follows the tragic fates of four Kangan civil servants: Chris, Ikem, Beatrice, and “His Excellency,” Sam, during a horrific drought and the civil unrest which accompanies the forces of nature.

Each of these characters, minus Sam, takes a turn at narrating this story of political malfeasance and intrigue, and each narrative leapfrogs or backtracks on the others in time and space, making Anthills at times a difficult plot to traverse. What is clear from the beginning is that Sam, the almost unwitting president, has begun to cling to power and take personal umbrage against even trivial shows of political dissent, and this signals the predictable, bloody, course so many dictatorships seem to take. He begins to suspect his erstwhile college friends, Chris and Ikem, as “threats to the state” and investigate their movements. As is typical of Achebe’s other work, each of his narrators come across as well-developed, believable characters. Chris, Beatrice, and Ikem each speak as if Achebe were recording three people, not penning three characters. This is what always impresses me about Achebe’s writing; you don’t have a protagonist and the supporting cast, but rather a whole crew of “real” people.

Ikem, like Achebe early in his career, works for the nation’s media, and is an author of some renown. Through Ikem, Achebe recasts some of his earlier essay, “The Novelist as Teacher” and launches some searing critiques of the modern African nation-state, neocolonial interference with African politics and economies by America, and the shortcomings of civil society (such as university students and unions) to break free of the cycles of violence and poverty that nations such as Nigeria have faced in spite of breaking free of their colonial yokes. Although written in 1987, much of Achebe’s overarching critique remains relevant as we become an increasingly globalized world.

Not to make a mountain of Anthills, but this is a really good book. (that is the only pun I could come up with over ten minutes of concerted effort, so that’s as good as it’s getting for now).

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Recommended

In this third installment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams delivers yet another interesting novel about familiar characters Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Slartibartfast, Trillian, and Zaphod Beeblebrox and their adventures in space. After having wrapped up many plot lines in the last novel, Adams introduces a new conflict as unhappy inhabitants of the planet Krikkit plan to destroy the entire universe and only a few people have the power to stop them. However, it felt as if the more unwilling certain characters were to save the universe the more unwilling I was to continue reading the book.

I will say that in parts this novel was certainly entertaining and clever, but altogether not much different from the past two Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books; I would even go so far as to say it was lacking a certain spark for adventure the other two books possessed. It is true that there is a new, more serious conflict for the characters to combat in this novel, but as a whole it did not further develop the series in any way, nor did the characters themselves seem to develop much throughout their adventure. I would still recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed the last two novels in the series because of this novel’s very close resemblance to them, though one should not expect very much.

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI and COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Brianna Glase
Rating: Recommended with Reservations

How curious–Though this book was published in 1996, the plot and characters weren’t dated or annoying. I love Scottline’s wit and often caustic characters; Running from the Law doesn’t disappoint in either category. Though I don’t often quote USA Today, they called it “a good, twisty plot” and that sums it up. One twist after another kept this reader’s interest and the main character was strong without being stupid. The good guy always wins with Scottoline, but the reader gets to enjoy a bumpy ride to the end.

Availability:  COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Jane Kostenko
Rating: Highly Recommended

If you were alive at the turn of the century, you quietly paid witness to an inconspicuous but momentous moment in human history: sometime in the early aughties the majority of all human beings living on earth resided in urban areas. This shift, from rural to urban, argues Mike Davis, denotes significant impacts on the world’s economy, ecology, and social relations.

At the heart of Davis’ survey of the “prevalence of slums” across the planet, from Karachi to Kampala, Los Angeles to Luanda, or Buenos Aires to Beijing, is an argument against what he characterizes as dated narratives of global urbanization. Instead of seeing newly bustling megacities (think Seoul, Shanghai, Mexico City, or Kinshasa) as logical “next steps” of developing nations marching to the same drum as that which the United States and Western Europe danced to in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growth of cities today is driven more by neoliberal land-grabs via World Bank and IMF imposed structural adjustment programs than by rural people freely seeking “modern life” and jobs in the metropole. In each chapter, Davis takes a survey approach to a different topic concerning the recent explosion of urbanization: Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), population growth, etc. What this approach does well is sketch major patterns over time and space. But the lack of helpful context around each example takes away from the potency of each example.

Overall, I would recommend this as an interesting look at urban spaces the world over.

Rating: Don’t be a SAP, go read this book.

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D. Hall
Rating: Recommended

As Bokonon, narrator Jonah, and their puppet master himself, Kurt Vonnegut, I will warn the reader: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” In the precise terminology of Bokonon, founder of a false religion, these are “foma.”

I first read Cat’s Cradle at the beach during the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, instantly making me a disciple of Vonnegut’s wry, humane, somewhat-repetitive oeuvre. Cat’s Cradle is hilarious, apocalyptic, trenchant, and irreverent. If there is only one Vonnegut novel you read, undoubtedly this should be the one (ok, well you’d better also read Slaughterhouse Five). Yesterday’s re-read was my fourth or fifth time through this book in ten years, and I was pleased to find that it still makes me laugh, and think, and shudder. It’s simply one of my favorite books and picking it up again was a perfect way to start a summer vacation.

Cat’s Cradle is narrated by John, who prefers that you call him “Jonah.” Jonah is a freelance writer piecing together, in abortive fits and starts, a book about the creation of the atom bomb and what its creators did on August 6, 1945 when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He focuses his research on the eccentric, “pure-research” scientist, Felix Hoenikker, credited as “the father” of the bomb (not in real life, but in the book). Hoenikker, unencumbered by any ethical considerations, playfully creates trinkets and weapons in a “pure research” lab that then patents and sells the weapons to the US military. Jonah learns that before his death, Hoenikker may have worked on a weapon far more potent than a hydrogen bomb. Felix is survived by three oddball children.

Far away from the New York research facility, the Republic of the Island of San Lorenzo lies in the balmy Caribbean. The island has been much colonized and oppressed under successive regimes of the Spanish, the Catholic Church, Big American Sugar, and petty dictators. Everyone on San Lorenzo follows a fake religion, called Bokonism, which admits that it is completely made-up. The message of Bokonism, the fate of Jonah, and indeed the world, lie unexpectedly on this unassuming island. Read the book, and you’ll make it to that island, after a few laughs and seeming-detours through Cold War America.

Published in 1963, Cat’s Cradle is a strong indictment of the suicidal madness of Cold War geopolitics and the only-slightly-less insane foreign policy of the US and its Third World puppet-states during the long standoff with the Soviet Union. It is also a powerful meditation on social and environmental interconnectedness and complexity. Here too is a critique of “Science” (capital S) as rationalism capable of completely describing (capital T) Truth.

This books make you laugh your way to the end of the world.

Rating: “See the cat? See the cradle?” Yes. I give this book an (Ice) 9 out of 10. You’ll get that shameful pun after you read it.

Availability: SMCM Library, USMAI
Review Submitted by:  Shane D. Hall
Rating: Highly Recommended

Reading a book that was published over a decade ago, but that takes place nearly 3 decades ago, can really stretch one’s patience. Pay phones? Records searches? I can’t imagine what Kinsey Millhone would do in the world of cell phones and the Internet. But the author has said she wants to move through time in a linear fashion, so will never catch up with real time, and I respect that. So, pretend that you’re just reading a cold case murder mystery and appreciate how painful information gathering was pre-Internet. All of the alphabet books make for good reading; just be aware that technology will be frozen in the dim past (but motives and evil remain current…)

Availability:  COSMOS
Review Submitted by: Jane Kostenko
Rating: Recommended