Podcast News, Book News, Life News

It’s hard to know what news to talk about first, but please be sure to scroll down to the end, since I may be burying the lead by waiting until then to tell you I am leaving the state where I have spent my entirely life until now.

Podcast News:

I’m still recording That Book was BONKERS, with a bunch of awesome women. So far we have covered:

  1. A Study In Scarlet by A. Conan Doyle
  2. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
  3. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

With new episodes coming out on the 15th (the IDES) of each month. We will definitely be doing something Julius Caesar-themed in March.

We are also planning on doing guest episodes, with just one or two of the hosts, between the monthly releases, so if you’re interested, please get in touch at thatbonkersbook at gmail dot com.

Book News:

The paperback of The Half-Drowned King came out on June 26, 2018 in the US. It’s going to be in some Hudson Booksellers in airports, which is very exciting for me. If you see it in the wild, I’d love to see a picture of you with it!

It will also be in Barnes and Nobles all over the country, and in many independent bookstores, like Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, WI, which looks like a huge and wonderful bookstore, and I can’t wait to visit.

Life News:

My parents moved me to Ithaca, NY when I was less than two years old. I grew up there, and then went to Cornell University for college. I did a few out of state internships, but then moved to New York City after college, and stayed there….UNTIL NOW.

Yes, that’s right. Just yesterday my husband and I closed on a lovely house in New Hampshire, and we are moving in just a few weeks. I can’t wait to get back to country living, and to try living in a whole new state. I’ll be closer to Boston than New York, but will still visit both frequently to get my city fix.

For now, though, I’m dreaming of gardening and hiking and even shoveling snow.

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Bright Futures Still Have Shadows: The Recent Novels of Kim Stanley Robinson

It’s been hard for me to figure out what to read since the 2016 election. While some people have doubled down on post-apocalyptic horror–witness the popularity of The Handmaid’s Tale TV show–I have been looking for books that keep my hopes up, without denying reality. I found what I was looking for in the more recent works of Kim Stanley Robinson. I have liked his books in the past, but New York 2140, 2312, and Aurora entranced me and lifted me up in exactly the way I wanted. These books all imagine plausible or semi-plausible futures, based on where we are right now.

New York 2140

The New York of New York 2140 is flooded by global warming, a new “Supervenice”, while outside New York many species’ futures hang in the balance–only assisted migration to the South Pole can save polar bears from extinction.

At the same time, a cooperative ethos has sprung up in New York City, and crowded apartment buildings operate as commune-coops, sharing and growing some of their own food, while their residents look after one another. The book has a slow build, following several different characters, some enthusiastic revolutionaries, and some more reluctant, as a new financial crisis looms, and just maybe, this time, the governments and the people can get it right.

2312

In 2312, humanity has spread out across the solar system, finding ways to live on worlds as disparate as Mercury and Saturn’s moons, as well as terraria built within the thousands of asteroids in between. Through genetic engineering, the solar-system dwellers have changed themselves into post-humans, while only Earth has been left behind.

2312 tells another compelling tale of non-violent revolution, but my very favorite parts were when Robinson describes the technologies that have enabled habitation of various planets and moons. Mercury’s city on rails, which stays on its dark, habitable side, while the sun heats the rails and the expansion pushes it forward, so it remains just before dawn, is an imaginative vision I will never forget.

Aurora

Aurora, set in the 25th century, has been described as less optimistic than Robinson’s other works, and it is, in a way, but it is a fitting cap for this loose trilogy that continues to imagine how humanity and its structures evolve and change into the future. The setting for most of the novel is a generation ship that is attempting to colonize a far-off earth-like planet. The settlers reach the planet as the effects of many generations within a small ecosystem are becoming more and more threatening, and then have to face a devastating choice: whether to stay or return.

Still, I found even this somewhat bleak portrait of interstellar travel optimistic for the ways it portrays different types of humanity, the way humans fight and reconcile, and finally the simple joys that we can find here on earth. If the first two books were about the exuberant possibilities of tomorrow, Aurora seems to be about the things that may not change, and the things that cannot change, but that we can and should embrace anyway.

I recommend these books to anyone who likes science fiction and is feeling bleak about the future. Robinson’s wonder at technology and love of humans, their foibles and their ingenuity, shines through in every sentence. It is hard to read these books without feeling both uplifted and determined at the end of the experience.

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Tucson Festival of Books

The first thing I learned at Tucson Festival of Books is that I’ve been spelling “Tucson” wrong all my life. Why would you put the “C” first? What is with that?

Tucson Festival of Books is a huge, free book festival held on the University of Arizona campus. This year it drew 130,000 people and had about 1600 volunteers helping run it. There is a big science component, and also lots of events geared toward kids.

I saw authors like R. L. Stine wandering around, and I got to fangirl Janet Fitch, one of my favorite writers.

I was the author guest at an author dinner, where we had the world’s cutest desert:

I was on three panels, two about historical fiction, and one about being a debut author, and led a workshop ambitiously titled, “How to Turn an Idea into a Novel: Linking Theme, Plot, and Character”. Most of my events were full and turning people away.

I love being on panels, and these were very well-run, with interesting questions from the moderator. I think panels are more interesting for the audience than a single author doing a talk and a reading, and expose audience to more than one author at a time.

It’s also truly wonderful to meet other working authors. Many of my classmates are now published, and my teachers in my MFA program were all published authors, but I feel like I can never meet enough. It’s good to see other writers at different stages of their careers, having different struggles. The flight home was filled with authors and we were still talking about the festival and writing, even though we were tired and nearly talked out.

One of the great things about being on panels is hearing about other writers’ processes. Some of the historical fiction writers I met don’t do much research until after the first draft is done–which makes sense since they were writing about recent history and mostly need to spot check. Some writers outline, some don’t. Some, like me, do some outlining, some furious writing, and some more outlining. But most writers, especially writers of fiction, share an interest in other people, their stories, and a certain kind of thoughtfulness about the world and how it works.

My workshop was very well-attended, turning away nearly as many as people who made it in–and I wished it could have been twice as long. So many people who want to write novels! Some writers complain about meeting people who talk about their own writing ambitions, and I understand that since many new writers don’t yet appreciate how much work it is to finish a novel, but I also think that writers can come from anywhere.

I do also like to remind people that:

  • The Half-Drowned King had 14 drafts before it went to copy editing. The Sea Queen had 8. Writing a novel-length manuscript is only the very first step.
  • Don’t worry about finding an agent or a publisher until you have a manuscript that is as good as you can possibly make it.

It takes a combination of love of story, commitment, and talent, and different writers have different levels of each. Some people publish their first novel in their seventies. I’m happier to meet people of all ages with stories they want to tell than people who have suppressed those dreams. And writing is something people can take up at any age.

I’m still riding a high from this festival, and I hope to return next year. If you are in the area of Tucson (spelled it right this time!) or want to visit the southwest, you could do a lot worse than to time it around March and this wonderful event.

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How to get kids to read, maybe

Back when I was soliciting ideas for blog posts, Bill Morrissey asked me about how to get young people to read. I don’t have kids, so take all this with a grain of salt, but like many of you, I was a kid once, and I haven’t entirely forgotten what it was like.

I was a late reader. Some of my fellow students showed up to kindergarten already able to read, but I did not. And when I was seven I went through a pretty severe rebellion where I refused to do my homework. I showed up, not having it done, and cried when it became evident to the whole class that I had not done it, but I hadn’t, and the next day the whole thing repeated itself.

My 2nd grade class was full of kids reading at a 3rd or 4th grade level, and I was not, so my teacher put me in a group with the fast six-year-olds, until I caught up. I’m not sure why reading was a struggle for me. My parents read to me a lot. My house was filled with books. I loved stories. I was very verbal from a young age. It probably was some sort of rebellion, a way to assert myself. I’m not sure what changed except maybe me being allowed to progress at my own speed, and by the time I was eight years old, I was reading everything in sight. By the time I was eleven, I was reading adult books (SOME OF WHICH I SHOULDN’T HAVE, MOM). Now I average reading about 80 books a year.

I’m actually not sure young people, by which I mean people under 18, aren’t reading. They’re reading texts and blog posts and tweets and fan-fiction, and definitely books and comics as well. If my generation was known for talking on the phone for hours, this generation is known for being on their smart-phones, and a lot of what they’re doing is reading.

However, I think we’re talking about reading full-length books, and particularly fiction books. Why do we want young people to read fiction? Though it’s important to learn to be a careful reader and a clear writer in this era of written communications, fiction teaches us more than that: it teaches us to see things from others’ perspectives, to value metaphor and symbolism, to look for themes, to analyze characters and meaning, and hopefully understand others and ourselves better.

So how should we get young people to read books? A better question might be to ask how we get young people to engage with narrative—and to remember that they already are, only that narrative might be on social media instead of in fiction.

(I taught a session of a high school creative writing class last year, and the teacher told me that it was amazing how many students had trouble telling stories that weren’t 99% autobiographical. I wonder if that is a consequence of this social media age where people are constantly creating their own public narrative. I’ve always found my own life to be pretty dull and would rather make up stories about people who are far more interesting than me.)

A good start to encourage any kind of new behavior is to meet someone where they are. I suspect a reason why many people end up hating literature after high school is that they are reading books that are too challenging for them, and even if not, their enjoyment of it may be crushed by having to prepare it for a test, rather than explore it. A way to meet young readers where they are is to find out what they are already reading and suggest similar things. The explosion of YA literature in the last fifteen years has made it easy to find books that young people can relate to in any genre.

And there’s nothing wrong with comic books or manga. It’s still reading, and there’s still a narrative to engage with. There is romance, and pulpy sci fi, and super heroes in the world of comic books, and among all of those, transcendent literature. There is also nothing wrong with fan-fiction. In fact, reading and writing fan-fiction can be one of the deepest ways to engage with a text. No one thinks more deeply about Harry Potter than the people writing novel-length fan-fiction for the pure joy of it.

It’s probably not a bad idea to limit screen time, TV, iPads, and smart-phones. I suspect one of the reasons I was such a big reader from age eight on is that we didn’t have a TV when I was growing up and my parents both worked more than full time. I spent a lot of time on my own, entertaining myself. I often had to wait for a long time for my parents to get off work and pick me up, and I always had a book with me.

And my parents reading to me and being big readers themselves helped. As did the transgressive elements of the things I read as a pre-teen and beyond. There are worse places to discover sex than in the pages of The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel. 

Not every young person is going to want to read, and they are also going to find ways to read and tell stories that are different than anything we could have imagined. But we can put the media and tools in their hands to get them started on their reading path.

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The Real Tragedy of the Commons

I just finished reading Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll. I saw it mentioned in some article as a rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy, a massive bestseller that argues that Appalachian poverty is caused almost entirely by the bad decisions of its residents, and the way to cure it it is to be exceptional and have exceptional luck. A logically impossible conclusion (we can’t all be exceptional), but the American appetite for that sort of story, that elevates (or condemns) the individual, and erases the impact of history, government, and corporations, is bottomless.

Ramp Hollow is unlike any history book I’ve ever read before. It tells the story of Appalachia, as a region that was populated by Native Americans, then white “mountaineers” who lived as subsistence farmer-hunter-gatherers. It tells how foreign land-owners, and the concept of “enclosure”, which turns common land, like grazing forest, into private property, killed the ability of Appalachian residents to continue to live as they had before. It makes the strong argument, by comparing the land takeover in Appalachia to land takeovers elsewhere, that that common, undeveloped land, usually forest or marsh, is an ecological cushion, and necessity for more developed land, and when it is gone, the way of life falls apart. And also that consuming that land is one of the first ways that capitalism encroaches on a local peasant economy.

Far from the commons being always exploited by individuals who have access to it, Ramp Hollow argues that the real tragedy of the commons is how often it is taken away from those who need it. We can see that today with library funding on the chopping block.) In communities focused on a local way of life, the community itself often polices the use of the commons to keep it available for everyone. We see the traditional tragedy of the commons more in the air and ocean which are dumping grounds for corporations that do far more harm that individuals can do.

Ramp Hollow tells the story of how outside forces like government and corporations, were hostile to the peasant farming way of life, not only because they wanted the land, but because these mountaineers were not cogs in a greater capitalist machine. They used some money and did some trade, but most of their economy was local and barter-based. But when logging companies and extraction companies came in, not only did their work take away the commons, but they also purposefully tried to cut off workers from their family connections and other sources of sustenance to make them more dependent on the corporations.

I’ve never read a book of history that shows so many parallels to other similar events, that draws in art, literature, anthropology, political theory, and the evolution of all those fields as the region and the country changed over time. I’ve also never read a book of history that ends with proposed legislation to help return the idea of land held in common to the residents of Appalachia. It is a cry for a kind of democratic socialism that focuses on the local, on the needs of the people who live closest to the land, and wants to give them the ability to manage their own economy, that does not think the solution to every problem is more education and moving to cities with job. I think it’s a fascinating read for understanding how the US and the world became what it is today.

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2017: A Year of Reading

In 2017, I read 55 new books, and did probably 10-15 re-reads. (I don’t tend to keep track of re-reads, but I love re-reading books. Some books, comfort reads, I have read probably more than 50 times.) There was a time I read 80-100 books per year. There was probably a time when I read even more. I also read The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, which is not coming out until 2018–perks of being an author!

But I’m actually pleasantly surprised I read that many books this year. Because of politics, it was a hard year for me to get lost in fiction, though I always enjoyed it when I did.

Some stand-out books I read this year:

Arcadia by Iain Pears, which I wrote about here

The Round House by Louise Erdrich – the first book of hers I’ve read, but not the last. It is at once a literary coming-of-age story, a mystery, and revenge tale.

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar – the first book I read by an NYU classmate, but not the last!

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari – a fascinating, and sometimes infuriating book about the history of humanity

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith – a wildly inventive novel about the end of the world brought about by giant bugs, but more importantly, a coming-of-age story about a dick obsessed bisexual teenage boy in the midwest

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw – another coming of age story, by the author of one of my favorite middle-grade books (Master Cornhill). I read this as a teen, but I don’t think I finished it then.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson – Pulitzer prize-winning and for good reason, this book is harrowing and impossible to put down

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemesin – the first book of The Broken Earth Trilogy. It was amazing and emotionally challenging, and I need to read the rest of the series before I write much more about it.

Alice by Christina Henry – a grim, spare, and inventive retelling of Alice in Wonderland, about magic, insanity, sex trafficking, and privilege. It’s amazing how much Henry manages to do in this short volume.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – I always knew I would read this someday, and I was saving it for the right time, which turned out to be Christmas 2017. A wonderful book to get lost in.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan – makes the argument that the history of civilization is much better told centered on the Silk Road than Western Europe, and then proceeds to do just that.

City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett – the conclusion to Bennett’s Divine Cities series, which I’ve written about here. Among the many wonderful things this book does is interrogate and undermine the idea of a singular hero, fueled by his pain.

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Arcadias

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, but I’ve been having some hardware trouble. My computer is a Surface Pro 2, which I bought in early 2012, and has served me well and faithfully for all that time. However, the keyboard/cover, is a bit more touchy, and now it won’t let me type the letter “i” “o” or use the backspace button. o_O

So I have a new one on the way, but in the meantime I’m typing on a rather challenging wireless keyboard, and don’t really have a working mouse. This time, let’s blame my typos on that.

A month or so ago I read Arcadia by Iain Pears with my book group. It’s the first book of his I’ve read, though he’s most famous for The Instance of the Fingerpost. Like many of his books, Arcadia has a rather complicated structure, switching between several POVs and four(ish) different timelines.

It begins with the following events:

  • An Oxford professor tinkers with his fantasy novel setting, but never really gets his plot off the ground
  • A psychomathematician in a dystopian future plots her escape
  • A young boy in a pastoral world has a strange encounter

Eventually all of these characters and plotlines intersect and recombine, exploring time travel, history, the effects of events on the future, the truth behind the beautiful Arcadias, for of course et in Arcadia ego. Along the way, it pays homage to J. R. R. Tolkein, Aldous Huxley, Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and John Le Carre, among many others I’m sure I’m missing.

One of the things I really loved about Arcadia was how it played with the notion of history, causation, and time travel. It posits time as a string, you can move a piece of string around, but it is always connected to the rest of the string. If you change past, the future will change, and if you change the future, the past will have to change to accommodate the cause and effect that connects future and past.

I’m sure someone could poke holes in that, but it is a pleasing way of handling time travel in a narrative. In many narratives, like the TV show The Flash, time travel is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Traveling in time to fix things has challenges, and causes unforeseen problems, but those problems often do not feel organic to the plot; they feel levers the writers can pull whenever they want.

But because Arcadia insists on cause-and-effect chains connecting future and past–in both directions!–the narrative feels much more satisfying. It also makes the book a special pleasure for a novelist to read. As I work on The Golden Wolf, and have a handful of events for which I need to come up with interrelated causes, I feel just like one of the characters in Arcadia, creating an effect in the future and then watching causes line up to create that effect.

The characters are also rather charming, especially the three main women, a plucky lass in 1960s Oxford named (of course) Rosalind, our psychomathemetician from the future, and a noblewoman in the pastoral fantasia. For a book that explores some dark possibilities, the experience of reading it is rather humorous and lighthearted. It sends up some aspects of pastoral fantasy (and Tolkein’s fantasy), though in an affectionate way, asking why a psuedo-medieval fantastical world would endure for millennia when in the real world, technology tends to progress. The answers make sense but are not always pleasant to contemplate. I recommend this book for any thoughtful reader of fantasy or dystopian SF.

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The Mists of Avalon is Real! (Sorta)

I was a child who never stopped pestering my parents for books to read, and after running through everything in the house remotely targeted toward kids or teens by the time I was eleven, I asked my dad for a book, and he handed me The Mists of Avalon. I imagine, he figured 800 pages of Arthurian legend would keep me busy for a little while.

And it did, because I became obsessed. There are books with tighter plots, more sympathetic characters, characters who spend less time moaning about their cruel fate. There are books written by authors who haven’t had fairly horrific child abuse allegations made against them, but there is probably no better book to give to an imaginative pre-teen growing up in the middle of the woods. If I could have stepped through a patch of mist into Avalon, and become a priestess of the Goddess, I would have done it in a second.

Now that I write historical fiction, and have done a good deal of research about Early Medieval Europe (i.e. The Dark Ages), I can appreciate the difficult task Bradley had creating a world full of Arthurian romance, while also trying to be true to the times. She doesn’t dwell on the mud and stench of turf fortifications, but neither does she shy away from the dark and difficulty of travel, the superstitions, or the bondage of women to tasks of making fabric.

It is also made difficult by the face that so much of the Arthurian legend was written long after the time it purports to describe. Nothing about King Arthur appears in the historical record until the 9th century Historia Brittonum, but some of the characters identified as his contemporaries have better historical attestation. One of those is Urien of Rheged, (married to Morgaine in TMoA), who is praised in the Welsh Manuscript The Book of Taliesin. However, until recently the location of the kingdom of Rheged was unknown.

All of which is preamble to this news: the kingdom of Rheged has been found.

“…new archaeological evidence from the excavation of Trusty’s Hill Fort at Gatehouse of Fleet in Dumfries and Galloway now challenges this assumption.

‘What drew us to Trusty’s Hill were Pictish symbols carved on to bedrock here, which are unique in this region and far to the south of where Pictish carvings are normally found,’ said Ronan Toolis of GUARD Archaeology, who led the excavation which involved the participation of over 60 volunteers. ‘The Galloway Picts Project was launched in 2012 to recover evidence for the archaeological context of these carvings but far from validating the existence of ‘Galloway Picts’, the archaeological context revealed by our excavation instead suggests the carvings relate to a royal stronghold and place of inauguration for the local Britons of Galloway around AD 600. Examined in the context of contemporary sites across Scotland and northern England, the archaeological evidence suggests that Galloway may have been the heart of the lost Dark Age kingdom of Rheged, a kingdom that was in the late sixth century pre-eminent amongst the kingdoms of the north.’

The excavation revealed in the decades around AD 600, the summit of the hill was fortified with a timber-laced stone rampart. Around the same time supplementary defences and enclosures were added to its lower-lying slopes transforming Trusty’s Hill into a nucleated fort, a type of fort in Scotland that has been recognised by archaeologists as high status settlements of the early medieval period.”

And if this is true, a part of me can still hope that, in a world divided from our own by a misty lake, the priestesses of Avalon still weave their magic and keep the old religion alive.

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Resistance Reading: Hope in the Dark

Before the election I read lots of political news. I knew it wasn’t just “to keep myself informed” but because it was interesting in a horrible way, and because the outrage and sense of being right that I get when I read angry, articulate people who agree with me, is enjoyable, if maddening.

It still is. Not attractive, right? Not being my best self.

But after the election I resolved to read political news only with the purpose of figuring out what I could do. And I’ve been more politically active in the last month before than in the rest of my life combined. Something that has kept me motivated is reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark. She writes about the importance of taking action, of organizing for justice and progress. She writes about how small actions influence others and have consequences that we may not see for many years, if ever. She writes about a small group of anti-nuclear protesters standing in the rain outside the Capitol, and how a statesman saw them, and thought that if women with so little support, in terrible weather, felt this strongly about the issue, it was maybe worth more thought on his part.

She tells many stories like that. Some have come to ill, like Venezuela’s change in leadership. Some have been invisible; as she notes, a species saved from extinction is a preservation of the status quo–nothing looks different.

She also illuminated the difference for me between hope and optimism. Optimism may be false and even dangerous right now–things may not work out for the best, in fact they probably won’t for many people. Hope is a different thing; it is a spark that lights the darkness. When Pandora opened the box, and found hope inside as well, it did not negate all the evil that had been let out. Rebecca Solnit’s version of hope means “another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

She argues for activism as a lifelong pursuit. Battles may be won and lost, but the war is never truly won, and ground gained is not kept except with action. The mistakes we–I–have made as an inactive person with progressive ideas, are mistakes of inaction, of believing that because women have reproductive rights now in the US, that cannot be taken away, it does not need to be defended, and even expanded. Or if it does, that work should be done by someone else, career activists, people other than me.

One could get discouraged by the never-ending nature of the fight for more equality, better outcomes for everyone, social justice, but I think that can be a source of hope as well. I see so many well-intentioned progressive writers saying, “Don’t focus on that, focus on this, because that won’t work.” Well, that might not work, but we can learn from it, and if you don’t try, it definitely won’t work. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. People are capable of focusing on more than one thing at once, of trying one thing, taking a stand–which is not invisible–and then standing for the next thing.

As the early example of the small protest in the rain shows, standing up is important in and of itself. It gives questions to some, and courage to others. It says: “this matters”. In a country where oil companies that cause oil spills that contaminate the water are not called criminals, but those protesting that contamination and trying to prevent at are, it is important to point out that is wrong, as loudly as possible.

In Hope In The Dark, Rebecca Solnit looks at long-term changes in societal norms, and how those came about. Gayness used to be barely whispered about in polite society, within the memory of many living people. But gay people and their allies said you must pay attention to this, this is important, and over a generation, it went from a dirty secret to widely accepted, almost inconceivable–at least in certain circles–that gayness has anything wrong with it, though there is still far to go there too. These issues always move from fringe “crazies” agitating about an issue, through to the mainstream, and that movement is made of individual choices, conversations, protests, letters, droplets of water that carve a new path in rock.

Finally, Solnit points out that in times of crisis, people do not, actually, behave as The Walking Dead, and so much pop culture, would have us believe, with people taking advantage of lawlessness to harm one another. Instead, workers in the World Trade Center carried a paralyzed accountant down 70 flights of stairs, even fearing that the building could collapse under them at any moment. Boat owners from all around the Gulf went to New Orleans to rescue people stranded on their roofs, in defiance of the coast guard. As Solnit reminds us, no one said: if I can’t save everyone, there’s no point. They knew there was a point in saving one person. If this election showed us that we are worse than we think, perhaps it can also remind us that we are better than we think, that crisis can bring out the best in us if we let it.

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