The topic for week 3 of Nonfiction November is Book Pairings:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or maybe it’s just two books you feel have a link, whatever they might be. You can be as creative as you like!

Our host is Liz @ Adventures in reading, running and working from home.

This one’s a little tough for me because I don’t read much fiction. But let’s give it a go.

The Fifth Season by award-winning author N.K. Jemisin, the only fiction book I’ve read this year, pairs up very nicely with The Year Without Summer by father and son William and Nicholas Klingaman.  

The Fifth Season takes place on a seismically and volcanically active world called, with heavy irony, The Stillness. Every few hundred years or so, there’s a catastrophic “fifth season” of earthquakes and eruptions, darkened skies, crop failures and extreme hardship. The novel tells the story of an orogene – someone with the mental power to quell earthquakes and seal volcanoes – named Essen as she tries to track down her husband who has fled with their young daughter after brutally murdering their son during an especially destructive Season. This is a wonderfully written, wildly imaginative novel.

The Year Without Summer is about the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 – the largest known volcano eruption of the last 2,000 years – and the destruction that followed. Tambora released about 100 cubic kilometers of ash and 55 million tons of sulphur dioxide (SO₂) into the atmosphere. The gas formed a thin veil above the Earth that reflected sunlight back into space, lowering Earth’s average temperature by a full degree Fahrenheit (by three degrees in North America) and causing 1816 to become the year without summer.

I must say that The Fifth Season is a much better book than The Year Without Summer but both in their own ways show how we react, or might react, to catastrophic changes in our climate.

Back in June, I read Linda Mapes’s wonderful book The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests and I thought it would make a great pair with Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory. But then I remembered I’d already paired up The Overstory with Suzanne Siimard’s Finding the Mother Tree a couple of Novembers ago. What to do?

Put them all together in a tree-themed trio!

The Trees Are Speaking is a wonderful book about the old-growth salmon forests of Oregon, Washington, Vancouver Island and Maine and about the people trying save them. It explores the beautiful yet surprising connection between trees and salmon that sustains these forests and may very well help sustain us too.

A simple description of The Overstory is that it’s a novel about nine people and their relationships with trees. At one level, the book is about people, how their life stories evolve, twist, and branch and become entwined with each other. At another level, it’s about the trees themselves: chestnut, mulberry, elm, gingko, Douglas fir, and especially California redwood. These trees are also central characters in the novel. It’s about their lives, their histories, and their relationships with each other and with us. An unusual structure, yet a fabulous story.

Based on decades of research, Finding the Mother Tree is about how trees communicate with each other using below-ground fungal networks. Through these networks they help and support each other. It sounds surreal, but Simard shows how trees form interdependent communities similar in many ways to human communities, cooperating, sharing resources, nurturing their young. This book forever changed how I see forests.

All three of these books, all five actually, show how intimately connected we all are to the natural world and how important it is to preserve it.

Thanks for reading.