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).
“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
Recent Reads:
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1. Do not obey in advance.
-Timothy Snyder
2. Defend institutions.
3. Beware the one-party state.
4. Take responsibility for the face of the world.
5. Remember professional ethics.
6. Be wary of paramilitaries.
7. Be reflective if you must be armed.
8. Stand out.
9. Be kind to our language.
10. Believe in truth.
11. Investigate.
12. Make eye contact and small talk.
13. Practice corporeal politics.
14. Establish a private life.
15. Contribute to good causes.
16. Learn from peers in other countries.
17. Listen for dangerous words.
18. Be calm when the unthinkable occurs.
19. Be a patriot.
20. Be as courageous as you can.
Past favorites:
“Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.”
-bell hooks
Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America
Kate Harding and Samantha Mukhopadhyay
“The necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal. The urgency of distinguishing between those who belong to the human race and those who are decidedly non-human is so powerful the spotlight turns away and shines not on the object of degradation but on its creator.”
-Toni Morrison
“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business is a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
-Neil Postman
More Titles:
- Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique by Roderick A. Ferguson *****
- Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler ****
- God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson *****
- Making Malcom: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X by Michael Eric Dyson *****
- Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua D. Greene *****
- I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb *****
- Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow by Susan Campbell Bartoletti *****
- On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma ****
- The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Christopher Hibbert ****
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf *****
- The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by by Jeffrey J Williams (Editor, Carnegie Mellon University), John McGowan (Editor, University of North Carolina), Laurie A Finke (Editor, Kenyon College), T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Editor, Vanderbilt University), Vincent B Leitch (General editor, University of Oklahoma), William E Cain (Editor, Wellesley College) *****
“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.”
-Ta-Nehisi Coates
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