Off the Page

In difficult times, sometimes hope is maligned as something frivolous, a symptom of one's inability to engage with reality and look trouble in the face. But of course, the certainty of hopeless is its own kind of limitation. As Rebecca Solnit writes, "To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

The following books are infused with hope—that what we do and who we are really matters, that second chances are possible, and so too is a better world.

*****

This is Not the End of Me, by Dakshana Bascaramurty

About the book: Layton Reid was a globe-trotting, risk-taking, sunshine-addicted bachelor—then came a melanoma diagnosis. Cancer startled him out of his arrested development--he returned home to Halifax to work as a wedding photographer—and remission launched him into a new, passionate life as a husband and father-to-be. When the melanoma returned, now at Stage IV, Layton and his family put all their stock into a punishing alternative therapy, hoping for a cure. This Is Not the End of Me recounts Layton's three-year journey as he tried desperately to stay alive for his young son, Finn, and then found purpose in preparing Finn for a world without him.

Wit …

This week on The Chat, I’m thrilled to speak to author Trevor Cole, whose complex and heart-tugging novel Hope Makes Love explores issues of love, trauma, and the lengths we will go to make amends for our past.

Hope Makes Love tells the story of Zep Baker, a former major league baseball player who believes all he needs to put his life back on track is to revive his marriage by convincing his wife to return to Tampa with their daughter. In order to do so, he enlists the expertise of Hope, a neuroscience researcher. Hope, meanwhile, is struggling with a traumatic past and relationship issues of her own. The novel follows both characters as they travel into new and uncertain emotional terrain.

Trevor Cole has won international acclaim for his fiction and journalism. His first two novels—Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life and The Fearsome Particles—were each shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC Literary Award. His third novel, Practical Jean, published in Canada, the US and …

But there are bats

who catch fish

and slime molds that sing

and ancient Greenland sharks

who don’t even reach sexual maturity

until they are 150 years old.

This is what I want to say

to those who believe

the Earth is already doomed:

Just look

at the capacity

of this

gloriously complex planet

I wrote this book for you—and for the people you love who believe the world is screwed.

I suspect you know who I mean—the ones brave enough to acknowledge the existential angst of living and working through a planetary emergency. We see it in students who appear to have everything going for them yet are so desensitized by environmental despair, they are simply done with feeling; or the ones so saturated with doom-and-gloom messages, they honestly believe no future exists. We hear it in adults grieving for the world their children will live in. We watch it echo around the world through the voices of the million and a half students joining Greta Thunberg in school strikes against climate change.

Whenever I speak about environmental solutions and positive global conservation trends, I encounter people so hungry for hope, they line up to talk to me. They follow up with long, thoughtful emails telling me they honestly believe the state of the planet is past the point of no return. They …

Hope Nicholson's newest project is The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen, an engaging and gorgeous catalogue of comic book heroines though the ages. Hope, author of The Secret Lives of Geek Girls and founder of Bedside Press, specializing in archival comics collections, is pretty spectacular herself, and we relished the opportunity to ask her a little more about this fascinating book. 

*****

49th Shelf: It seems like superwomen are having a moment, what with the success of Supergirl and the Jessica Jones series, the awesomeness of reboots like Ms. Marvel, and excitement about the forthcoming Wonder Woman film. But your book posits that there exists an incredible history of powerful female heroes that it lesser known. So what do you think is particular about what’s happening right now?

Hope Nicholson: I think there are a lot of great things happening right now for female characters! Definitely we've never had as intense a cross-platform saturation as exists today in this really overwhelming presence of comic-book-related TV shows and movies, and we are seeing more female characters pop up as leading characters in these programs. Another great thing that is happening is an awareness that we need a lot of female characters from many different walks of life, to con …