Solar
by Ian McEwan
A dissolute Nobel laureate accidentally becomes the face of clean energy.
For you if
you want the climate crisis delivered through the most ridiculous and recognizable human being imaginable
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Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist coasting on work he did decades ago — lazy, gluttonous, on his fifth marriage, serially unfaithful. By a sequence of accidents involving a dead colleague and a stolen idea, he becomes the unlikely figurehead of a solar energy project that could actually solve climate change. McEwan uses Beard's spectacular moral failure to make the sharpest possible argument about the gap between knowing and doing — here is a man who understands the science completely and cannot apply any of it to his own life. The funniest climate novel ever written and the most honest about the species-level irony of our situation: we have the intelligence to understand our catastrophe and apparently not the character to stop it.
Where This Book Lives
- Themes
- climate changehypocrisy
Part of a Reading Journey
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
A Room with a View(1985)
dir. James Ivory
Choosing passion over propriety.
A young Edwardian Englishwoman, kissed once in the Florentine hills by an unsuitable free spirit, returns home to a proper engagement — and finds she can't stop wrestling with what she actually wants. Adapted from E.M. Forster's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in its gentle insistence that following desire is itself a political act against Edwardian repression. Pedagogical in showing how class convention polices romantic choice as much as any law does.
The Importance of Being Earnest(2002)
dir. Oliver Parker
Two men, two lies, one name: Ernest.
Two Victorian bachelors each invent a fictional alter ego named "Ernest" to escape their obligations, until both fictions collide with the women they're courting — who each insist on marrying a man named Ernest. Adapted from Oscar Wilde's play.
Why it’s here: Punk in weaponizing wit against Victorian propriety — every double life and invented relative is Wilde mocking a society obsessed with appearing respectable rather than being honest. Pedagogical in showing how absurd social rules reveal themselves once you refuse to take them seriously.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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The whole Arctic, right now. Everyone wants what the melting ice reveals.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
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It's worse than they're telling you. Here's the full picture.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
