WLS Evening Book Club News

By Dan Keane

The Wairarapa Library Service’s Evening Book Club gathered in July to discuss Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman, a climate dystopia set in a future Los Angeles where fires ravage the hills and synthetic WAT-R flows from every tap. A fascinating set-up, to be sure—but after eight months of cheerful thumbs-ups from our readers, we discovered together the distinct pleasure of the universal pan.

It’s our tradition to start every meeting with each reader giving their very informal grade for the book, and usually we spend the evening outling the difference between a warm 70 and a glowing 90. Kleeman, bless her heart, struggled to earn anything over 50, and the collective thrill as the scores came in was palpable even over Zoom: there’s nothing quite like the glee of sharpening your knives alongside fellow indignant readers.

To be sure, there was grudging praise for Kleeman’s rich description and passionate engagement with our gloomy environmental dilemmas. But we had so many questions: did anybody actually like the sad-sack hero? Was the man in the grey suit the Angel of Death, and did we care? We proposed our own fixes: Alison the wife, the one who tore up her own lawn in a fit of ecological despair—more of her, she was great! We celebrated one surreal local highlight: late in the book, a villain declares her plan to escape to “seventy-five acres of pristine farmland an hour outside Wellington.” Maybe she dreamt of joining Evening Book Club, too?

In the end, we decided that Kleeman’s admirable ambitions were struggling to contain too many ideas—a forgivable failing when trying to tackle such a big, difficult story as the warming Earth. For more on the topic, we suggested Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement for a very readable, elegant argument about what climate fiction can do.

NEXT UP: For 3rd August we’re returning to the very real-life adventures of Ruth Shaw’s The Bookseller at the End of the World. For 7th September we’ll read Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, a bestselling debut narrated in part by an octopus. We meet on Zoom, with readers joining from across the Wairarapa, and all are welcome. To sign up for a library copy and the Zoom link, visit wlseveningbookclub.substack.com or email dan@wls.org.nz. Come join the conversation!