Jessica Abbe

This weekend: Tour de France! Actually...Eastern Sierra Book Festival! Get out there and read.

Why read?

The East Bay, where I live, was the locale for a fictional pandemic wiping out nearly every human being. Earth Abides was published in 1949.

(If you haven’t read George R. Stewart’s classic—um, spoiler alert? Nah, expired I think.)

Earth Abides was one of the hardest books ever for me to read. I started it when I was a teenager in the 1970s, and didn’t finish it until we were actually experiencing a worldwide pandemic in 2020. I still think of it often.

Isherwood survives because of an extended backpacking trip in the Sierras. He returns to freakishly-silent Berkeley hills.

The few survivors try to use technologies that are suddenly of the past—scavenging canned foods from empty stores, and siphoning gasoline for vehicles that will eventually come to a permanent stop—as they relearn the skills of earlier humans. Days are filled with foraging, hunting, fishing, making fire, rebuilding shelter, planting; also practicing medicine and midwifery, raising children, and seeking out other survivors.

Decades into the post-apocalypse tale, an older Ish stands before the UC Berkeley Library. Books, no longer valued as repositories of knowledge, have become fuel for cooking fires. He chooses to lock up the doors rather than leave them open to a generation that did not learn to read.

Sigh. I believe in reading. And of all beloved libraries, UC’s Doe Library is the portal to enlightenment I have always loved best. BIG sigh.

But mostly—I feel gratitude. The gift of the storyteller changes how we think.

It’s hard to trust and believe these days. More than ever, I love the art of reading: to open a book with genuine curiosity, and see what that author sees! It’s a powerful antidote to the spewing of money-green pool slime by indefensible dogmatic monsters of malice.

I am so grateful to authors who labor to put eye-opening stories into the world. And yay, libraries!

Never too late to pick up a book.

Free shipping from Bookshop.org this week! “Anti-Prime Days” through June 26. Your purchases benefit independent bookstores, not billionaires. 📚 https://bookshop.org/a/119491/9798886799361

Book salon Writers and readers together! 📖 A swell Sunday afternoon last week hosted by Elizabeth McLeod, sharing book stories with the amazing Cindy Cohn, author and lawyer, who fights the good fight for all of us.

📺 Cindy was interviewed by John Stewart on The Daily Show, check it out!

➡ You can learn about Cindy's organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), here: https://www.eff.org/

I’m looking forward to the Eastern Sierra Book Festival on July 18! 📖 Sales of my novel will benefit the Mammoth Museum at the Hayden Cabin. Come by, say hi! Enjoyed a memorable resupply in Mammoth Lakes during a month-long trek from Kings Canyon to Tuolumne Meadows in 1981.

➡ Check out the details here: https://easternsierrabookfestival.com/2026-2/

"A love letter to the 1970s." That's how my book cover artist, Chris Walker, described Some Greater Awakening. Also describes our collaboration. Fun to exhibit at the Bay Area Book Festival this past weekend! 📖

➡ Check out my book here: https://www.jessicaabbe.com/book

Great to see my state senator, Jesse Arreguin, at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley this past weekend!

➡ You can check out Some Greater Awakening here: https://www.jessicaabbe.com/book

Some Greater Awakening is an elegy to the beautiful, fought-over mountains of the West, and their long-suffering yet indomitable people. 📖

I’ll be at the Bay Area Book Festival as an exhibitor this Sunday, May 31st. Come by our table for your copy of Some Greater Awakening! Attendance is FREE. 🎉

➡ Check out the full details here: https://www.baybookfest.org/

Some Greater Awakening is a novel following a free-spirited writer who gets drawn into the fray over logging and the ruin of ancient forests and Indigenous sacred sites. 📖 Learn more here: https://www.jessicaabbe.com/book

I’ll be at the FREE Bay Area Book Festival as an exhibitor on May 31st. Come by our table for your copy of Some Greater Awakening! 🎉

➡ Check out the full details here: https://www.baybookfest.org/