The Reading and Watching Lists for The Future Is Behind Us

Recommended x Rachel Wolfson Smith

READING LIST

Orwell’s Roses x Rebecca Solnit
A fascinating and well researched meandering that started with political writer George Orwell’s rose garden and bends through the mysteries, traditions, trends, and appropriations of roses throughout history. I like how she educates us on how their beauty motivated humanity’s desire to mold them and the global landscape.

Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies x Cara Aitchison, Nicola E. Macleod and Stephen J. Shaw
Written as a textbook for landscape architects it was my primer on the fascinating way landscapes have changed over time through human whims, industrial needs, and changing standards of beauty. The gender divisions within the landscape were of particular interest.

The Botany of Desire x Michael Pollan
This book links four fundamental human desires - sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control - with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato. Through the stories of these plants we see how humans have molded nature to satisfy their yearnings.

The World Without Us x Alan Weisman
A succinct and direct imagining of how the world would implode, and then be completely fine if humans ceased to exist overnight.

Sapiens x Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens minimizes all of humanity into patterns and shows us that we're better and worse than we like to think we are. This book’s darkness is in its realism.

The Drowned World x J.G. Ballard
In truth Ballard’s writing is hard to get past, but the imaginings of people living in the aftermath of an ecosystem that we'd thoroughly destroyed was incredible and so vivid. It somehow brings the future in line with the scale of the plants and reptiles of prehistoric times, but with a subtle James Bond flare.

Blue Prints x Anna Atkins
Atkins was a botanical illustrator who adopted cyanotypes into her practice when the chemical mixture was first discovered because she felt it more honestly depicted the plants than any drawing could. She created the first photography book; a collection of her cyanotypes.

Dutch Flower Painting 1600 - 1720 x Paul Taylor
Dutch flower paintings are inherently narrative and speaks to trade and trends of the times. While its heyday was over a century prior to the Victorians, its influence was felt. In lieu of the book, just look up paintings by Rachel Ryusch.

Lincoln in the Bardo x George Saunders
In a book like no other, we encounter a narrative made of a hundred different viewpoints and opinions and find our own truth within them. A scene toward the end was influential in the imagining of hands within the vines of the drawing Caregivers. You have to read the hardcopy of this one as the audio version is confusing.

Emma and Persuasion x Jane Austen
She wrote in the Georgian period, just prior to Victoria's reign, but reading Austen became part of my research. The recent movie renditions are great too, and both are by female
directors: Emma x Autumn de Wilde, 2020, and Persuasion x Carrie Cracknell, 2022.

Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Love and Those Who Stay, The Story of a Lost Child x Elena Ferrante
The four novels cover an entire lifespan of two girls who are smart, poor, and Neapolitan. It's the perfect frenemy story and explores how many coming-of-ages women have throughout their lives.

The Architecture of Happiness x Alain de Botton
This book was a delight, and touched on the happiness that beautiful design can elicit in our souls while reminding us that it isn't actually a cure at all. Braided within are wit, humor, and the psychology behind why we seek beauty and order in our living spaces in the first place.

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Volume I x Ernest Hemingway
An experience of human nature reflected in gender roles and primal safaris. No one puts sentences together like Hemingway, and his style was a major influence of Joan Didion.

Blood Meridian x Cormac McCarthy
The darkest and most symbolic book about humanity. It’s super bloody, but has stayed with me like few books have.

The Memory Police x Yoko Ogawa
I'm a big fan of the way Japanese novels tend to blend the internal worlds of their characters together with the nature and environments that surround them. This one has Orwellian hints of 1984 mind-control, but the way it's done is so special and visual and pulls at the reader's broader memories and senses. I love this book.

The Secret History x Donna Tartt
Probably my favorite of the books where a female author narrates a male protagonist. The novel brings us back to youth, college, obsessions with subjects, and of being part of a group and an outsider to it at the same time. A beautiful Greek tragedy, set on a perfect New England college campus, its characters are all out of touch with reality. It's great in hard copy but it's fun to listen to Tartt narrate the audiobook. If you like The Secret History try the podcast 'Once Upon a Time at Bennington College' which studies the book’s origins.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running x Haruki Murukami
A guide to the creative process of famed novelist Haruki Murukami, which talks less about writing than the life that surrounds the author. It was inspired by Raymond Carver's What I Talk About When I Talk About Love, which traces the same circuitous route around relationships.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean x Joan Didion
She's the master of weaving the micro into the macro, and in her last collection of short stories I especially loved 'Why I Write' which states what's obvious to creators - that if we'd known the answers to any of our questions we wouldn't have had to make our art to figure them out.

NEXT BOOK

Utopia x Heidi Slopinka
I loved her Dictionary of Animal Languages and can't wait to read her newest novel.

WATCHING LIST

Her x Spike Jonze
A man takes his Operating System to experience idyllic scenery with him when he wants to take their relationship to the next level.

Blade Runner 2049 x Denis Villeneuve
Symbols of Eve and the new life she begets are illustrated with a construction of Eden, and the last tree and flower in a robotic future.

Ex Machina x Alex Garland
As much as the humans try to claim dominance, a robot enters our world, passing through a fern filled Eden en route to an ominous future.

Soylent Green x Richard Fleischer
In a dystopian wasteland people's last moments on Earth are spent surrounded by visions of unadulterated flora and fauna, and classical music.

Annihilation x Alex Garland
A creative and dark imagining where nature has reached its limit and takes back its authority. It’s based on a book trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, but IMO Annihilation is the best of the three.

Marie Antoinette x Sofia Coppola
A young queen in an era of excess feels like the rockstars and socialites of modern day. Set in the century prior to the Victorian era, it still embodied the decorative obsessions of the wistful and unfulfilled.

In The Mood For Love x Wong Kar-wai
In the aftermath of being cheated on, our protagonists slowly develop feelings for each other. Instead of verbalizing her emotions, our heroine is wrapped in dresses that express them for her. Sometimes blending into rooms, other times with people, I especially love the scenes where her floral dress camouflages her loneliness within the plants on the wallpaper and outside her open window.

Emma x Autumn de Wilde
The women in this film look like little cakes, and there is no inch of them untouched by decoration. The reappropriating of nature into their peacocking is clearly connected, but especially so in certain scenes - for instance when Emma’s curly tendrils look like they’ve been plucked from the flowers of the Chestnut tree behind her.

VICTORIAN VIDEO SHORTS

Actual video footage from the Victorian era.

https://www.intofilm.org/news-and-views/articles/victorian-archive