Changing Times Book Group
As we face a climate-altered future together, it helps to read together. Changing Times Book Group is a reading group open to all, one title at at time. We focus on climate, social, and environmental justice themes: nonfiction, fiction and memoir. We meet every other month on fourth Saturdays. Upcoming 2025 dates: May 24, July 26, Sept. 27, and Nov. 22, usually at the St. Anthony Park Branch Library (but note alternate location for May, below). Thanks to the St. Paul Public Library system for its partnership.​
Next session Saturday, May 24, 3:00–4:30 pm
Note location! Zvago Cooperative Living,
2265 Luther Place, Saint Paul
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Current book selection: Spring 2025
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Kindred
a modern classic by Octavia Butler
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​Saturday, May 24, 3:00–4:30 pm
Zvago Cooperative Living
2265 Luther Place, Saint Paul
​
Note alternate meeting place
during SAP Library renovations
“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.”
—N. K. Jemisin
Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is abruptly transported from her home in California to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. She is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer and more arduous until it seems Dana’s life might end even before it has a chance to begin.
About the author: Science fiction writer Octavia Butler rose to prominence in the 1970s, when there were few African-American women in the field. Winner of Hugo and Nebula awards as well as a MacArthur "Genius" grant, she is the author of The Parable of the Sower and other influential novels. Many view Butler as a trailblazer for writers such as Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and N.K. Jemisin.
Past book selections
Nora Murphy joined us for a conversation prompted by her memoir, White Birch, Red Hawthorn. She led us in an exploration of our own cultural identities and sense of home: "Who are your people? And what is your connection with Minnesota Makoce?"
About the author: Murphy (at left in this photo) is a fifth-generation Irish-Minnesotan whose partnerships with Indigenous communities have led her back to her own ancestral roots. More at www.noramurphy.org.
In The Story of More, Hope Jahren leads us through the key inventions (electric power, cars, large-scale farming) that have eased our lives in the short term while racking up climate costs that are now coming due. How can we respond? In this lively personal narrative, Jahren shows us how. About the author: A Minnesota native and author of the memoir Lab Girl, Hope Jahren is a geobiologist now at the University of Oslo. Nature magazine called her "the voice that science has been waiting for."
The Great Transition is a near-future novel told in the alternating voices of a father and his teen daughter. Several decades from now, the world has been transformed by climate change, but also by human ingenuity. This is a story about families, the world we live in now, and the world we could live in. About the author: Nick Fuller Googins is a writer and elementary school teacher who lives in Maine.
James McBride wrote The Color of Water, his bestselling memoir, as a young man. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, he grew up in the projects of Brooklyn, New York. McBride retraces his own coming of age along with his mother's life story, starting in Poland as a rabbi's daughter, in this page-turning reflection on race and identity. About the author: James McBride is author of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Deacon King Kong, and other celebrated novels and nonfiction books. He is also an accomplished musician.
We're living in an era of deep transition: environmental, social, economic, and political. The Regeneration Handbook offers a path to a new type of activism based on universal patterns of transformation, expansion, wholeness, and balance. Community is key! ​About the author: Don Hall is training coordinator for the International Transition Network. Don joined us for a discussion. Learn more at evolutionarychange.org.
The Year without Sunshine is a short work of speculative fiction set in a Minneapolis neighborhood in the near future. It shows a community responding creatively to an environmental crisis that clouds the skies and disrupts supply chains. Published online in Uncanny Magazine, it won the 2023 Nebula Award for best novelette. About the author: Based in the Twin Cities, Naomi Krizter writes fiction for all ages. She joined us for this session. Visit her at naomikritzer.com.
The Climate Action Handbook is a browsable, visual guide to the climate solutions at hand when we act as individuals, households, and community members. Travel and work, consumer choices and habits, home energy, food and farming: when we change our patterns even slightly, we help shift societal norms. About the author: Heidi Roop, PhD, is director of the U of M Climate Adaptation Partnership.
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network. This book illuminates the processes of life, death and regeneration that characterize woodlands all over the world-- and the challenges urban trees are up against. About the author: Peter Wohlleben is a German forester whose books have transformed the way people view trees and forests.
The Sentence is a novel that asks what we owe to the living and the dead. A tiny Minneapolis bookstore is haunted in 2020 by the ghost of a recent customer. Tookie, now working there after years of incarceration, must solve this mystery during a year of grief, isolation, and racial reckoning in the Cities and the nation. About the author: Louise Erdrich is the Pulitzer-winning author of many books. An enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa, she runs Birchbark Books in Minneapolis.
Blending history, journalism, and memoir, Rez Life is a nonfiction view of Native American reservation life, especially in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the home ground of Ojibwe writer David Treuer. With vivid characters, the book spans past and present— and recent movements to preserve language and culture. About the author: Author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer divides his time between the Leech Lake reservation and Los Angeles.
A Half-Built Garden is science fiction that extrapolates from our climate emergency. In 2083, a young scientist stumbles upon alien arrivals who have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, aiming to convince them to leave their ecologically ravaged home and join them among the stars. But some earthlings have already begun to save their planet, forming watershed networks to heal ecosystems and communities. Should they stay or should they go? About the author: Fiction writer Ruthanna Emrys lives in the Washington DC area.
From What Is to What If is a call to action to reclaim our collective imagination. Shrinking our carbon footprint and building happier communities are two sides of the same coin, says author Rob Hopkins. Subtitled Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, the book is told through the stories of people and communities around the world who are doing it now and witnessing rapid, dramatic change. About the author: Rob Hopkins is widely regarded as the founder of the Transition movement. He lives in Totnes, England.
Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, winner of a MN Book Award for memoir/creative nonfiction, explores the parallels between the health of our bodies, communities, and ecosystems. Ranae Hanson reflects on her youth in the Minnesota northwoods where three watersheds meet; climate truths learned from her students in the Twin Cities, many from immigrant families; and the lessons in her own diabetic health crisis. About the author: After 30 years of living in Saint Anthony Park and teaching at Minneapolis College, Ranae Hanson now divides her time between Minnesota and Seattle.
The Seed Keeper, winner of a MN Book Award in the novel category, spans several generations of a Dakhota family. Rosalie Iron Wing returns to her childhood home in the Mankato area, rediscovering her heritage and the ancestors who protected their families, traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through years of hardship. About the author: Diane Wilson is the author of Spirit Car, former executive director of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, and a Mdewakanton descendent.
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, is an anthology by women climate leaders: scientists, journalists, farmers, lawyers, activists and innovators across generations, geographies, and races. About the editors: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (left) is a marine biologist and founder of Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities. Katharine K. Wilkinson is an author, strategist, and teacher.