Last week, I asked for your recommendations of your top books of the year, and you delivered in more ways than one. Sifting through your recommendations, I was struck by the shift in mood over the past year. The acceleration in climate change and its rising toll is so despicably synchronized with the surge in hatred and violence, the far-right frenzy and roll backs of climate ambition in much of the world. 

The morning news is more than enough non-fiction most days and its obscene characters would have been toned down by any decent fiction editor. 

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books,” the Argentine-Canadian writer Alberto Manguel once said: “To find words for what we know.”

You certainly seem to be reading a lot of words but only a few book recommendations, and no movies were runaway leaders based on a tally of votes. The list was eclectic and very wide-ranging. But two non-fiction books and one novel were obvious favourites and I’ll include some of your other intriguing suggestions.

It was a photo finish between Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben and Kate Marvel’s Human Nature.

In Here Comes the Sun, the archdruid of the climate movement tells the breaking story of the astonishing rise of solar power around the world. Solar, along with wind, batteries and their cousins in the electrotech revolution (heat pumps, EVs, induction stoves, etc.) are being deployed more quickly than any energy transition in history, writes McKibben. And they might just give us “A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization,” as the book’s subtitle suggests.

Around the same moment that global temperatures started spiking in 2023, humanity started installing more than a gigawatt of solar panels every day. McKibben writes that we may be “on the verge of realizing that the sun, which already provides us light and warmth and photosynthesis, is also willing to provide us the power we need to run our lives. We are on the verge of turning to the heavens for energy instead of to hell. It won’t happen automatically, and I don’t know if we will do it, at least in the short window physics is giving us to deal with climate change.”

Garry from Victoria writes that: “There is so much great information in this book to refute the myths about renewable energy.  And it provides some ground for hope.” 

On the same topic, the journal Science just announced that its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year isn’t some newfangled breakthrough at all, but more of a breakout: “The seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy.” And you might remember that we leaned on McKibben’s book for a dose of hope and gratitude in the newsletter before Thanksgiving this year: 

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