From Dr Seuss to All Quiet on the Western Front: 19 books to help you find hope, sense and resistance in difficult times

[cbabe]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/dec/21/from-dr-seuss-to-all-quiet-on-the-western-front-19-books-to-help-you-find-hope-sense-and-resistance-in-difficult-times

From Dr Seuss to All Quiet on the Western Front: 19 books to help you find hope, sense and resistance in difficult times

Writers, activists and politicians on the books they turn to for wisdom and perspective – and to restore their faith in human nature

Paul Daley
Sat 20 Dec 2025 14.00 EST

…

Bob Brown: ‘I frequently give this book to friends’
The environmental activist and writer Bob Brown says: “Worst-case scenario is that if we keep knocking down [environmental] tipping points like we did this year then by 2050 there’ll be a 25% collapse in the economy and 2 billion people dead.”

The Lorax by Dr Seuss
That is why his first recommendation is The Lorax, a picture book by the children’s author Dr Seuss, whose central character declares: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.”

“It ends with the word ‘unless’. Unless we do something we’re leaving our kids a very troublesome mess. I frequently give this book to friends,” the former Greens leader says.

“It’s a surface look at the situation the world thinks it’s in where everyone says it’s about the economy. But it’s not. It’s about the environment with the economy subservient to that.”

Brown also offers 12 Rules for Strife, a comic book call to action and social unity by Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman, as well as historian Mark McKenna’s recently released The Shortest History of Australia.

… more … Also nonfiction and films…

(What is your go to book?)

[hermetic]

1. Read the article

and author Kate Fullagar recommends this essay from 2019, What is Called Thinking in the Anthropocene?
by Liane Carlson. You can read it online here: https://therevealer.org/what-is-called-thinking-in-the-anthropocene/
which I will do now.

I was going to copy and paste what she had to say about the article, but The Guardian threw me out for not having a subscription.

[cbabe]

2. Here ya go:

She also suggests a 2019 essay by Liane Carlson, What is Called Thinking in the Anthropocene? She re-reads it often.

“It’s really beautiful, and sad, but somehow uplifting … Carlson makes such a great case for why studying thought matters at all – it’s never really to find solutions, as university defenders feel compelled to say now, but instead to realise our fellowship with all other humans – past and present – in our inevitable failures among the successes.”

… more …