There’s just something about Scotland lately. Maybe I spent too much time picking out the perfect Fair Isle sweater this Christmas, but I have become obsessed with the idea of rocky cliffs and cold, crashing waves—and my reading list reflects it. Come with me on an adventure through some of the fascinating books I’ve found about Scotland and find out how I got from there to new ideas of investing in community.
The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst
Maybe the sweater came first, maybe an old copy of Granta focused on the sea, but somehow I found in that magazine an excerpt from Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons that definitely cemented me on this path. The book is a history of how Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, father, and uncles designed and built Scotland’s lighthouses and it’s filled with descriptions of impossible odds and astounding inventions. I’m still marveling over how thick the walls had to be to withstand the waves and that there’s a relationship between the fluted lantern and lighthouses that can actually be traced.
“All the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name; and my father’s services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed. I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well.” – Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in The Lighthouse Stevensons
In a rare turn, I’m so excited about this book I don’t even know what to say about it, but if it sounds at all interesting from this sparse description, trust me that the book is amazing if you care at all about the sea, human behavior, optical design, engineering, or amazing feats. I also liked Bathurst’s writing enough that I tracked down every book she’s ever written, which leads me to…
The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, From the 18th Century to the Present Day by Bella Bathurst
There was a line in The Lighthouse Stevensons about an island where tenants who lived on the shipwreck side paid immensely more rent that got me excited to read The Wreckers, and I was not disappointed. While the book is not entirely about Scotland (it’s fine, the sea is my true obsession), Bathurst does center her investigations on Great Britain. She delves into everything from the wrecks themselves to the laws around plunder to the needs and norms of the populations around the wreck-prone coasts, and it’s all fascinating.
Should something that washes up onshore be considered a gift from the gods? What if you really need it because your land is so impoverished? What if you have to wrap it up like a baby and have a woman run it all over the island to hide it from the inspectors? What if you have to kill someone to get it? The stories throughout this book broadened my understanding of what it was once like to live an isolated life near the sea, and the book introduced me (briefly) to the Highland Clearances…
Clear by Carys Davies
The first fictional book in this list, Clear tells the story of a man sent to clear the last tenant off an unnamed Scottish island during a period when landlords were evicting tenants off their land so they could make more money. It was a period of great disruption that created a lot of poverty and fueled a wave of immigration to Australia and the United States. I don’t know if my ancestors were among those cleared, but I do know that the depth of humanity displayed in Clear was extraordinary, even for literary fiction. I’d previously enjoyed Davies’ stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike, yet I was still happily surprised by the quiet layers in this book.
Clear is a quick book as a minister, John, looks to improve his fortune and even build a new church by agreeing to move the last remaining tenant, Ivar, off this island. The plot thickens when John falls off a cliff and loses his memory and Ivar finds him and nurses him back to health. The two do not initially share a language but they learn to understand what they think they know about each other in a really beautiful way, all while we’re learning about the ancient language Ivar speaks and what his life was like alone on the island. I won’t spoil the resolution of the book with you, but I will say that this book definitely put me in the mind of thinking about greed and its outcomes.
The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy by Natalie Foster
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fundamental disconnect between people who see the world as zero sum and those who see it as positive sum, the ways that people who think that one’s gain must be another’s loss versus those who think there can be mutually beneficial outcomes cannot really talk to each other about change. Not a red/blue divide, but an experience or a perception based around resource scarcity and how that does and should shape our behavior. Thinking of The Wreckers, does gathering coal from a wreck hurt anyone? What about a grand piano? So I jumped at the chance to read The Guarantee for a book club.
The book club itself was amazing. In a group of just over ten people, I found myself surrounded (virtually) by women who worked at the Gates Foundation or for Consumer Reports, and people who had worked directly at high levels on many of the issues discussed in this book. Even more amazing was reading about the ways we’ve always guaranteed things in the U.S. for certain groups of people and thinking about the fact that if we broadened our focus we could provide similar support for people who really need it. The best part of the book were the examples of how we are doing this already, examples we can grow from like: experiments with basic income, the expansion of healthcare access through Obamacare, how student loan repayment pauses changed lives during the pandemic.
I was floored by how much someone’s life can change with just a few hundred extra dollars a month. I wondered why, indeed, we couldn’t provide baby bonds that gave every child a nest egg to start their adult lives with. I started to dream big about the world we are making now and about the bright future we could have if we invested in everyone in ways that gave them opportunities to be their best selves. You may say I’m a dreamer… but even the most fiscally conservative reader has to see the growth potential for our whole country if we give everyone actual opportunities.
I see the realities. I live in a neighborhood that is the poster child (literally) for NIMBYism around increased housing density. But I was also deeply inspired by what organizations like Occupy Student Debt are able to do by twisting the ridiculous aspects of the system (in this case that vast amounts of debt are sold on the open market for tiny amounts of money) to do good (here by then forgiving that debt outright. It’s easy to do what we’ve always done. It’s hard to stretch and think of new ideas. But it’s also important to note that the way we are doing things now only benefits a few, and that cannot last.
This book brought me back to what I believe the best communities are, whether isolated on a Scottish coast or not, I believe that if we nourish and support each other, if we care for what we are given and give freely of what we don’t actually need, we build love and safety. What else does anyone really need?
I hope you’ll try out any of the books above that speak to you. I couldn’t work in the Mysterious Benedict Society volume I’ve been reading with my son that also involves an unnamed Scottish isle. It will stop raining in Seattle someday and I’ll have to take off my gorgeous Scottish sweater. Until then, I’m reading about providing AIDS hospice on the Irish coast. If the book is any good, I’ll tell you all about it here.
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