books to read at the end of the world #1
first entry in this series about books I'm reading that you should pack into that emergency preparedness kit.
We’ve been in the end times for years - I don’t think I need to get into that. What I do want to get into is how can we continue to find meaning, color, and life at the end of the world? We have to continue living, to continue fighting, and I wanted to start collecting and sharing media that makes me feel like it’s worth it. So, without further ado, here’s my first list of books that are giving me so much life in the face of the void!
1. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
This is the first time I’m reading bell hooks in her entirety rather than in the beautiful excerpts you find, and I must say: WHOAH! She’s phenomenal. She writes with this incisive brilliance that makes you realize that there is no world, no universe in which her words don’t alter our reality. She was a visionary, a scholar, and a beautiful voice that grounded her work in love. She knew what was coming on the horizon. I’ve not finished the book yet, but it’s so special that it’s the first book on my list.
In this work, she questions the dominant narratives of feminism, its lack of clear definition, and the often violent ways it centers white, privileged feminist perspectives. She plays with ideas that are ubiquitous now, but so revolutionary at the time (re: intersectionality) but she still has this freshness to her ideas that I don’t feel like we’re rehashing the same points. Below I’ve attached a quote that became a common theme in the other books I’ve written about below:
First of all, that was a read. I don’t know what I’d do if someone called my work insensitive, narcissistic, and self-indulgent… Beyond that, I feel like the core of her argument is here. The feminist canon is exclusionary and doesn’t capture the experiences of people who exist outside the margins. And when we attempt to break free of these narratives, we hit brick walls. bell hooks says it best:
If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the common discourse.
I don’t need to justify why bell hooks is on my apocalypse reading list - her work is both a source of hope and a guide to the future. These thoughts about intersectionality, marginalization, and feminism infiltrate the other reviews and I feel like they’re the better for it.
2. Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez
Crosshairs is good. Crosshairs is also one of the darkest things I’ve read lately but I can’t stop flipping through the pages. The story follows Kay, a Filipino-Jamaican femme queer man as Canada goes through this violent dystopian shift called ‘The Renovation’ that isn’t too far from our current reality. It’s a heavy yet hopeful read, and one of the most artful depictions of movement work I’ve come across. There is so much power in her storytelling that you feel delivered at the end of this tale.
This Canada of the very near future has been ravaged by massive floods and is run by this government-sanctioned military regime called The Boots. Everyone who is Other, who exists at the margins, is at terrible risk as they round up queer, disabled, Black, Brown, and Indigenous folk to send them to ‘work-houses’ (read as concentration camps). This story is about genocide - ongoing, historical, and in the future. This story is about an inevitable world, one that we’ve already arrived at.
This novel spans genres, reading like literary fiction, carrying the ambitious world-building of dystopian sci-fi, enveloped in an epistolary format, as a love letter for the ages. I don’t want to insult the author by giving such a basic comparison, but it did remind me a lot of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. You know how she says everything she’s written in this world is already true? Well, definitely, but there’s always been this sense that (1) she’s only writing about/for white women and (2) these things that she pulls from are already violently happening to people like us. That’s my biggest criticism of Atwood’s novel - she starts her world-building from the center rather than the true margins of society while pulling these conditions from the experiences of those at the margins. It really reminded me of bell hooks’ criticism of Betty Friedan (see above).
Crosshairs is not The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s really a reminder that dystopia, climate disaster, and government-sanctioned violence isn’t a distant reality for most of us. The shores of disaster are lapping at our ankles, and it’s time to find what you fight for.
3. Binti by Nnedi Okarofor
I picked this up a few weeks ago when I was looking for Nnedi Okorafor’s most recent work, Noor, but all the copies at my public library were unavailable. I picked this up for the cover and could not put it down. It’s very short, but Okarofor has a way of writing that packs each sentence with more narrative power than you’d imagine. It’s filled with lore and the characters spark with life, so I’ll try to do it justice.
I read this book in a sitting - Binti is a young Black woman who’s been accepted to the best college in the cosmos, and she’s about to run away from home to make it onto her ship. Her family are master harmonizers from the Himba tribe and they create complex, beautiful objects like astrolabes. Water is scarce in the desert she hails from, so all of the Himba coat their skin and hair in this sweet-smelling mud. This Earth is very different from ours, but there are these currents of similarity that you may be able to easily recognize.
Her story begins like a very typical, if not highly futuristic story of a young brilliant Black woman attending a PWI. She’s both enamored and unnerved by her Khoush (non-Black) classmates, who are as brilliant as she is, but remain incredibly uneducated about the lives that the Himba lead. Everything is good, until the Meduse attack the ship and murder every single human on it. Except her.
This is when the story picks up. She survives, again and again, until she gains the begrudging respect (and eventual trust) of the tribe of Meduse. Okorafor describes them as jellyfish with tentacles that kill, but as time goes on, you learn more about their culture and the reasons why they’re on this ship. I don’t want to spoil more, but Binti is a hero. Binti is a fighter, a scholar, and a fearless believer in peace.
Binti is for those of us who want to imagine the future, who need to imagine existing beyond western/colonial visions, and most importantly, everyone who wants a good sci-fi story. I don’t think there’s anyone like Nnedi Okorafor out there right now, and there will never be anyone like Binti.
Squad by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle
This one got extra points for being set in the Bay Area. The prettiest, smartest, most popular group of girls you know are hiding a dark secret - that their squad, their pack isn’t a normal one of Mean Girls; their pack is a pack of shapeshifting cannibalistic werewolves who target terrible teenage boys. At least, they did, until they all start breaking the rules.
I feel like someone smarter than me could say a lot about what cultural shifts reflect the decisions and emotions these girls experience. I could make a phenomenal criticism about white/girlboss feminisms, and think about how the one-dimensionality of it empowers them to be horrible. There’s something to be said about homophobia, anti-Blackness, fatphobia, and how we learn and reproduce these behaviors. But I cannot summarize it all here. This was beautifully done - well-written, phenomenal art, powerful plot twists, the whole she-bang.
Squad was filled with the magical lore I love to read about; set against the lives of teenage girls who needed to eat men to stay beautiful. It made me think a lot about how our lives carry the same pace even as the world is ending or we’re facing catastropic, life-altering moments. We just get up and keep going to school/work, we keep living our lives. The horrific, the mind-breaking, the outlandish becomes our new normal. Squad was about that, but it was also about what priveliged people would (or would not) do to maintain these lives. Lots to think about here… go read it!
And that’s the first list! Impossibly long but very heartfelt. Till next time!
Munira