THE DARK MOUNTAIN PROJECT
Two authors Charlotte Du Cann and Nick Hunt both part of The Dark Mountain Project recommend seven books.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She also teaches collaborative non-fiction, and radical kinship with the other-than-human world. Her new book After Ithaca is out in May and is available from the Dark Mountain shop.
Nick Hunt is an author whose books include Walking the Woods and the Water, Where the Wild Winds Are, The Parakeeting of London: An Adventure In Gonzo Ornithology and Outlandish. His new collection Loss Soup and Other Stories is published in May and is also available from Dark Mountain.
Nick Hunt recommends:
The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh
‘Something between a history book and a fable about consumerism, The Nutmeg’s Curse tells the story of how rapacious greed for spices led the Dutch East India Company to seize control of Indonesia’s Banda Islands – then the world’s only source of nutmeg – in the 17th century. Ghosh prises apart this overlooked history to draw a series of troubling links between the spice trade, imperialism, capitalism, climate change and war. He is a brilliant storyteller, and this striking and disturbing book helps us understand how the modern world came to be.’ – Nick
The Overstory by Richard Powers
‘This novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, begins with the mass death of trees: the North American chestnut blight, which killed up to 4 billion trees at the start of the 20th century. While this book is very much about people – weaving together the interconnected stories of nine human protagonists – trees are the real subjects (not the objects) of the narrative, and Powers takes the reader deep into their inner lives, following the mycelial threads that link the human to the arboreal. This book genuinely changed how I saw the world: for weeks after finishing it, I could hardly walk down a street without stopping to stare at a tree, awestruck and dumbfounded, astonished that I could ever have taken their extraordinary presence for granted.’ – Nick
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
‘An ecological detective story set in a small Polish village, this strange, twisted, darkly brilliant novel –revolving around a nature-loving old woman obsessed with the poems of William Blake – infuriated the right-wing hunting lobby in Poland, which is as good a reason as any to buy a copy. One of the most original, exciting and surprising books I’ve read for years.’ – Nick
Loss Soup & Other Stories by Nick Hunt
A journalist is invited to the fabled Dinner of Loss to drink a viscous soup made of lost and extinct things. In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a nihilistic sea captain becalms himself on a plastic sea, while in an English fishing village a senile Blackbeard reminisces about his bloodthirsty glory days. The failed conquistador Cabeza de Vaca sheds his personality on the swampy coasts of the New World, and in a cabin in the woods a couple are haunted by the ghosts of Homo erectus, Neanderthals and other extinct hominids. Elsewhere, a legendary beast is dragged from a Welsh mountain lake…
The fourteen stories in Nick Hunt’s debut collection of short fiction travel from sixteenth-century Mexico to a post-collapse near future, from a visionary supermarket to life on other planets. All of them revolve around different forms of loss. By turns blackly funny, disquieting and fantastical, Loss Soup and Other Stories is a journey through the Anthropocene, climate chaos and the Sixth Extinction to the strange new worlds that might lie beyond.
Charlotte Du Cann recommends:
The Marriage of Cadmius and Harmony by Roberto Calasso
‘To decolonise a culture, you have to deal with the Underworld. It’s easy to forget our ‘civilised’ educated democracies are underpinned by the ancient Greek gods lust for domination and amusement. Books that reveal how we are unconsciously trapped in the mechanics of power are mostly deep imaginative prose works that can bring this dark ‘material’ out into the light. Roberto Calasso’s astonishing remix of the classical myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, runs from the rape of Europa by Zeus to the Olympian carnage of heroes at the siege of Troy, and returns the gods to their enthralling amoral role in the drama of human affairs.’ – Charlotte
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
‘Equally immersive and devastating is W. G. Sebald’s masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. The narrator walks a metaphysical path along coastal edge of Suffolk, past its abandoned great houses and fishing fleets, placing his melancholic gaze on the underbelly of Empire. A journey that weaves in the lives of poets and philosophers, Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, the Empress Tzu, the silkworm industry of Norwich, the bombing of German cities in WWII, the invisible cruelty of hierarchies that keeps us caught in the repeating wheel of History.’ – Charlotte
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance by John Berger
‘Even though I have been looking at a world rocked by oil dependency and climate change for over a decade, the books I return to are about ways of being human that endure, that show a glimpse of the future embedded in time/physical. Hold Everything Dear – Dispatches on Survival and Resistance is a slim book about a journey to Palestine written with the spare poetry and intellectual fire of old age. John Berger goes to the front line and sees for himself how the Palestinian people are living. He looks at the hyperreality of the media, the business of war, at poverty and privilege. He stands by a group of donkeys and by a young boy watering aubergines under olive trees and locates himself in an ancient land. He sits at his writing desk at night and addresses the dead revolutionary artists he once knew. The future is fraternal, he says. He is 79 years old and he is still a Marxist and reading these pages you know why. When the storm advances, hold everything dear, he is telling us. The people that matter, the trees that matter, the life that matters.’ – Charlotte
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Culture Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta
‘As consequences of civilisation squeeze modernity in a death grip, connecting with the ancestral world, breaking out of our box of time, is perhaps the most radical act any of us can do.
In his startling manual Sand Talk – How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Tyson Yunkaporta describes five ways of seeing from an Aboriginal perspective – kinship mind, storytelling mind, dreaming mind, ancestor mind and pattern mind. All five help perceive the land and ourselves within it, kin with creatures, rivers, rocks and sky. This knowledge is embedded in ritual, storytelling and practice that hold communities and cultures together, so human beings can be ‘custodial’ for places and living beings. We have a thousand-year clean up ahead of us, Yunkaporta tells us, and generously hands us the imaginative tools to begin the work.’ – Charlotte
After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time by Charlotte Du Cann
What happens when the heroes disappear, when the battle for the city is over, when you return to the island and find a box in your hands? There was an instruction once that told us why the box should never be opened. But you don’t believe those stories anymore. You always open the box.
After Ithaca is a non-fiction work – part memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis. It is set in the Peruvian rainforest, in the backrooms of Suffolk towns, in Japan, in France, Australia, in the desert borderlands, in borrowed houses and Occupy tents, in kitchens and burial chambers, underneath a lemon tree on an abandoned terrace…
The book revolves around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, set by Venus, the goddess of love and justice: four territories that map this search for meaning and coherence in a time of fall. Each chapter starts with a memory of place as a clue to the investigation: the recovery of a relationship with wild nature, with being human, a kind of archaeology for the pieces of self that lie missing beneath a broken storyline, like the shards of a pot.
It is a personal story and also a social story, about the relinquishment of a certain world, that looks at writing as an existential practice: showing how myth can be a technique for finding our lost voice, our medicine of how to put a crooked thing straight.
How to pull ourselves out of the wreckage, and start again.
Poem of the Month
The Month of May | Wendy Cope
‘O! the month of May, the merry month of May…‘
-Thomas Dekker (d. 1632)
The month of May, the merry month of May,
So long awaited, and so quickly past.
The winter’s over, and it’s time to play.
I saw a hundred shades of green today
And everything that Man made was outclassed.
The month of May, the merry month of May.
Now hello pink and white and farewell grey.
My spirits are no longer overcast.
The winter’s over, and it’s time to play.
Sing ‘Fa la la la la,’ I dare to say,
(Tried being modern but it didn’t last)
‘The month of May, the merry month of May.’
I don’t know how much longer I can stay.
The summers come, the summers go so fast,
And soon there will be no more time to play.
So carpe diem, gather buds, make hay.
The world is glorious. Compare, contrast
December with the merry month of May.
Now is the time, now is the time to play.
Looking for something you can’t find here? Contact our Librarian if you’re looking for something specific, or an educational book list to support teaching about climate change:
mattroselibrary@gmail.com.