The Current Blaxit Book Club Selection

Here is what we’re reading right now. Grab a copy, settle in, and join the conversation.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Synopsis

Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding social chaos and anarchy caused by climate change and economic crisis.

In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy—a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions.

Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores.

But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.

Why It’s This Month’s Literary Selection

Before we even crack this baby open, I want to warn you: if ya scared, go to church…

Because Octavia's hauntingly prescient writing and world-building will leave you shook, yet intrigued.

I was first introduced to Butler's work in my African-American Women's Literature class in undergrad. We read Kindred, but it would be twelve more years before I discovered her other books.

Fast forward to 2020 when the pandemic hit, and I decided to pick up Parable of the Sower…

And, friends, I. was. NOT. ready.

Hand to God, it took me four years to finish this book (and not because of the page-length, either!). It was so confronting, so prophetic, so timely that many times I had to check the front matter to make sure it wasn't actually written in the 2020s.

It was published in 1993 and set in 2024.

I, and many others, have often wondered: how did Octavia Butler predict this stuff more than thirty years before it happened?

There have been plenty of debates attempting to answer that question, but my simple conclusion is that Black women just be knowin'.

I chose this one to open the book club because we are living through so much collapse and calamity, and things seem to be getting much more chaotic. So my hope is that we read Parable of the Sower as a set of field notes for what comes next.

As we read, we will ask what Lauren Olamina's journey means for us present-day, what it teaches us about building community, holding onto faith, and moving toward safety when -ish hits the fan.

Many of us who have thought about leaving the United States, and those who already have, might recognize ourselves in the protagonist, in her discernment, her frustration, and her fierce love for the community she is determined to protect.

Read with The Blaxit Book Club