Parable of the Sower - by Octavia Butler

MotherJones.com

The Best Books We Read in 2021

New titles and older classics that fired us up.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler (1993). It might sound odd that a book about the climate apocalypse and humanity’s descent into assault, addiction, and virulent capitalism comforted me most this year. But it did. Like many others who rediscovered Butler’s words over the last years of political chaos, I was in awe of the wild accuracy of her writing. (Butler herself speaks on this: “I didn’t make up the problems…All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”) The book is a collection of fictional journal entries from a young woman named Lauren who is in the process of making sense of a quickly deteriorating world. Born with “hyper-empathy,” a condition that causes her to feel the physical and emotional highs and lows of others as if she were them, Lauren finds herself on a pilgrimage from southern California to the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, Lauren develops a type of theology-ideology-hybrid that unfolds as she learns to navigate a world ravaged by our fellow humans. It purports that humanity’s place is among the stars.?

Something I’ve struggled with a lot this year is an ever-creeping sense that the collective “we” are growing meaner and more hostile toward each other. Maybe that’s an American feeling. Maybe it’s personal. The reality that Butler creates for Lauren is terrifying for a lot of reasons that we can conceptualize all too well right now: rampant wealth inequality, disconnected politicians, overwhelming pollution, people turning to substances to escape capitalism’s tentacles, etc. And yet, there’s a throughline here Butler delicately weaves: community. Learning how to trust each other and live together is their saving grace. It might just be ours, too. —Sam Van Pykeren