13 Reads | Earth Day

Recommending reads for Earth Day was a challenge for me. There’s plenty of doom and gloom to go around so if you’re looking for literary analysis on our climate crisis that will result in crippling despair, you won’t find that here. (Earth Day aside, I tend to recommend non-fiction books sparingly because I think readers over index on titles that make reading about productivity. It’s no wonder people have trouble staying engaged in their reading when it feels like homework instead of a hobby.) While there’s no denying our unprecedented circumstances, I’ve found a mix of honest yet actionable non-fiction, gorgeous invitations to find beauty and wonder in our own imperfect human idiosyncrasies (past and present), and climate fiction that is just left of dystopian.

Prefer to go off book?

(See what I did there?) Ah, and now we approach the reason why I named this space ‘the off book club.’ There’s so much content out there in that faraway land beyond the books — art, music, film, I’m sure an anthology of tweets, etc. If you have an established reading practice, you might use what you read as a jumping off point to explore other mediums and types of content as a way to further immerse yourself in a topic, location, time period, etc. of interest. Or you might use what you’ve been watching and loving to find your way to the perfect book. It’s this sort of yin and yang that makes being a reader so exciting. In that spirit, here are a few other recommendations to lean into the Earth Day theme. And what do I love more than a theme? Absolutely nothing.