Ten Climate Books to Add to Your Holiday Reading List

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(Bloomberg) — Whether you want to relax on a beach or kill time during a snowstorm (or just need an excuse to avoid over-talkers), it’s never a bad idea to have a few books around for the holidays. 

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From page-turning sci-fi and real-life accounts from the wildfire frontlines to a thought-provoking look at the history of electric vehicles, the Bloomberg Green team has you covered. Here are 10 books worth packing this December for your holiday reading or snagging as a last-minute gift. It’s by no means exhaustive so if you have a favorite climate-themed read or list, please share it with us on Instagram or Bluesky!)

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The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Mountain in the Sea is more than climate fiction (cli-fi), it’s anthropocene-fi. OK so that’s a clunky term unlikely to catch on. But it aptly describes Nayler’s novel, which is set in a future where humans have reshaped the Earth not just through heating the planet but also through overfishing and technological development. The new world and the systems that wrought it are the backdrop for a fascinating exploration of what it means to be conscious and our relationship with nature. I couldn’t put it down, and I’ll also never look at octopi the same way again. (And I already held them in pretty high regard!) – Brian Kahn 

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

In this 2012 novel by a Pulitzer Prize winner, Dellarobia Turnbow, a frustrated, poverty-stricken farmer’s wife, is enchanted by the unprecedented arrival of millions of monarch butterflies in the trees near her Appalachian home. Displaced from their winter habitat in Mexico, the insects’ presence is first seen as a miracle but gradually comes to be understood as a harbinger of climate change. Dellarobia’s awakening to the enormity of planetary illness mirrors her personal evolution — and both are juxtaposed with humor and hope against the prosaic details of her daily struggles.  – Danielle Bochove

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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver

If nonfiction is more your thing, Kingsolver also offers that with this 2007 book. The book outlines her attempt to feed her family for one year entirely from home-grown, local food. A garden is nurtured, chicks raised, cheese made — then winter arrives. The family must survive on preserves, root vegetables and modest portions of humanely raised and slaughtered meat. Part personal account, part how-to manual, the book illuminates the miracle of food and what is required to bring it to the table sustainably. – Danielle Bochove 

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

This slim and thoughtful novel, which won the UK’s Booker Prize this year, imagines a day in the life of six crew members on the International Space Station as they orbit the Earth while a climate change-charged typhoon rages below. They reflect on their lives, the decisions that sent them into space and the consequences of humanity’s constant push for more. Despite taking place on a spacecraft traveling at 17,500 mph, it manages to be a moving, dreamy meditation on the beauty and fragility of both humans and the planet we call home. – Olivia Rudgard

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A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future by J. Mijin Cha

Half a century ago the US transition from a manufacturing economy decimated entire communities, especially in the Rust Belt. While the economic changes were likely inevitable, Cha argues persuasively that the suffering that came with it was not. Rather, it was policies — or the lack thereof — that failed to help people adjust to a different kind of economy. Now, the country is undergoing another transition, this time away from fossil fuels. Cha makes the case that the US is on track to repeat the same mistakes. But, by weaving together stories from communities at the center of the energy transition with social science research, she also shows how communities and political leaders can chart a new, just path. – Kendra Pierre-Louis

Car Wars: The Rise, the Fall, and the Resurgence of the Electric Car by John J. Fialka 

As someone who hates driving, I never imagined myself reading, let alone enjoying, a book about cars. But Fialka had me hooked. Instead of declaring electric vehicles as 21st-century transportation, Fialka looks into the rearview mirror at the global EV industry over the last century. His writing takes readers back to the early 1900s when hundreds of electric cabs zipped along the streets of Manhattan; and the almost simultaneous rise of Henry Ford’s gasoline-powered invention as it grabbed the attention of 8,000 onlookers at a race track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Nerdy, yes. But also gripping. – Coco Liu

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Fire Weather by John Vaillant

Wildfires may seem otherworldly as they huff and puff smoke and churn out their own weather. But through the story of 2016’s catastrophic Fort McMurray wildfire, the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, Vaillant expertly details how humans and fire are inextricably linked. He writes with empathy and humanity about the people faced with impossible decisions in the path of a roughly 1.5-million-acre fire. But he takes no prisoners in detailing the hubris that led to the ravaging of the Canadian oil city — not least that of the fossil fuel industry that both made Fort McMurray rich beyond imagination and led to its ruin. – Olivia Rudgard

The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E. K. Johnston

A paradox of climate change is that even as it wreaks havoc it’s eerily invisible: We can only see its impacts. The Story of Owen upends that context by delightfully braiding fantasy with modern life. It’s set in a small Canadian town where dragons are real and capable of destroying entire cities — and they feed off carbon emissions. But instead of reining in CO2, society has chosen to enlist teenagers as dragon slayers. Set from the perspective of Siobhan, a teenage music prodigy who befriends Owen, a classmate who comes from a long line of dragon slayers, this young adult novel explores big ideas around friendship, society and who we are willing to sacrifice to maintain the status quo. It’s also a not-so-thinly-veiled allegory about leaving future generations to solve climate change. – Kendra Pierre-Louis

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Charleston: Race, Water and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford

Every place needs a book like Charleston, a city history focused on centuries of contradiction — flooding and development, wealth and slavery, privilege and poverty. Crawford maps those complexities onto a future of higher temperatures and rising seas. Coastal cities may all share familiar and limited options, but their unique histories and composition leave them with very local headaches. (Witness the different strategies and issues — and financial resources — at play from Miami to Lagos.) Charleston is history resurfaced and recast with great urgency as the question, what will they do next? – Eric Roston

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

The narrator of this slim and inventive novel is a queer mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign in Griffith Park, above the city they call “ellay.” Desperately hungry and thirsty as drought ravages one of Los Angeles’ few remaining wild landscapes, the mountain lion spends their days eavesdropping and commenting on the conversations of hikers that are oblivious to the narrator’s presence (and the climate crisis). When the cougar is driven into the city by wildfire, the novel takes an even more fantastical and haunting turn.  – Todd Woody

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