by Sara Aranda, updated April 2021

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• The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King

The back cover states: “‘Stories are wondrous things,’ award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. ‘And they are dangerous.’ Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America’s relationship with its Native peoples.”

This book has been one of the most powerful and revelatory for me in recent years. Nearly every page has a mic-drop moment — storytelling is incredibly powerful and we all need to take in the humbling truths that King presents. From challenging our obsession with appearances to placing responsibility upon us now that we have heard the stories he’s told, I cannot recommend this book enough.

• Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time by Ben Ehrenreich

“The crisis humanity faces is total. In sharply featured, compelling prose…Ben Ehrenreich’s stunning Desert Notebooks combs through history, literature, myth, physics, and ecology to understand how we got here, and how we might find our way out, into forms of time that are made not of our thralldom to capital and petroleum but of our relationships to each other, to our fellow creatures, to plants and rocks and landscapes, and to the stars overhead.” – Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands

Another recent illumination filled with “yes, finally!” With my own personal kinship to the Mojave desert and familiarity to Las Vegas, Nevada, I love the weaving of stories into the discussions of climate change, culture, politics. Again, powerful messages that need to be heard, heeded, and felt, but done so with a lyricism that I believe is more potent and alive than traditional doomsayer books tend to achieve.