About Book Recommendations
Below you’ll find some suggestions of books I have read and found illuminating on my journey in the world, and which I feel I can recommend.
One of the reasons I love reading is that it is an act of engaging with the world. Writing is a way of reaching out into the void and asking “do you see what I mean?” and reading is listening to the story or the information and seeing if it resonates with our own philosophies and experiences and upbringing and education, and then saying to ourselves, “Yes, I do see what they mean, I had a similar experience . . .” or “No, they’re wrong because . . .” or “I like some of this, but I feel like they’re missing something important here . . .”, etc. These conversations allow us to develop our views on the world and to give the appropriate time and space to engage with a text reflectively.
The suggestions below are based on the conversations I found most engaging or which advanced my understanding on a given topic. They are books that have helped me to form philosophical and political viewpoints of my own.
Note: Books are linked to Thriftbooks (although getting them from your local bookstore or library is even better).
“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
-Emilia Hart
Recent Reads
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“I used to wait for the explosion, the big crash, the sudden chaos that would destroy the neighborhood. Instead, things are unraveling, disintegrating bit by bit.”
-Octavia Butler
Past favorites:
“their system of replication permeated everything. they were brilliant instead of just scary, and they found a way to convince people to buy disconnection, insatiable hunger and emptiness. the lucky ones worked their whole lives so they could buy more disconnection, hunger and emptiness. the unlucky ones were destroyed by it, and the unluckier still had parents that were destroyed by it. the more people that ate their own young, the stronger the wiindigo got.”
-Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
“These conditions reflected the failures of modern civilization—the death of genuine spiritual values and traditions, the harshness of economic greed and exploitation, the avarice for glittering material goods that, in a culture of consumerism, ultimately possessed the possessor.”
-Richard Wright
“That the volume of information, of data, of judgements, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable–it was too much.”
-Dave Eggers
More Titles:
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood *****
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen *****
- His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman *****
- 1984 by George Orwell *****
- Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell *****
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley *****
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury *****
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery *****
“Seems to me-” Lee said, feeling for the words, “seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed….”
-Philip Pullman
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