90 Books in 2020

Published in

Curious

38 min readJan 5, 2021

I read voraciously this year. I couldn’t stop myself. I just kept going. In a year that forced solitude, I found reading as a lifeline. Sometimes, it was to escape, but often it was to grow and understand, to be close to others in a time where that was impossible. I was insatiable for words. Other’s words, at least. I hope, in 2021, to find some of my own.

Top 10 Fiction (Novels & Short Stories)

Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar

Homeland Elegies is the kind of novel I live for, the kind I crave, the genre-bending, un-and-hyper-reality, the philosophical that doesn’t forget to sucker punch you with the poignancy of the ordinary. How does one balance the individual, the circumstance, and the collective? This is a novel about a Pakistani family and the ways that negotiate, re-negotiate, and make peace with their lives in America: a Doctor father with a love for Trump who fades into disrepair, a mother who still longs for her homeland, and a dramatist son who’s trying to decide where he falls between and the family fortunes that tie it all together. It also contains some of the best criticism of the American social fabric and psyche that I read all year. The symbolic flag of the American dream under which we sacrifice everything (our neighbor, community, etc.) except ourselves. Mainly, I find Ahktar’s assessment of Trump refreshingly necessary. While it may be out public frustration, the dying gasps of white supremacy, the machinations of caste, Ahktar argues that it’s also the fulfillment of the Regan-era shift of money as the supreme indicator of American vitality. Customers first, citizens second. Not appeasing Yahweh or Jesus but our new material god: the Economy. Ahktar writes Trump’s ascendancy [was] the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one.

The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

Everybody got God on their side in the war, trouble is, God ain’t telling nobody who he’s for. Little Onion, a boy who is misinterpreted for a girl and who continues to play this role, is “liberated” by John Brown’s gang (the abolitionist leader of the Harper’s Ferry Revolt) and rides to a semblance of freedom along the way. Onion is torn between the comforts of a good slaveholder and the rough living of the white savior-ism, and highlights the similarities in both: a real lack of knowledge or platform for the black body. One objectifies it for labor and the other objectifies it for “the cause” and the expectation that black people will give their bodies and sacrifice their lives for the cause. McBride weaves between these complications of saviorism, freedom, and bondage, as well as the benefits of complicity and assimilation versus radicalization. Though everyone in John Brown’s army is “riding for the cause,” Onion questions who and what that cause is exactly for: Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn’t count, even though most of the squabbling about them, on the outside, for at the bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of. McBride does not let this conundrum be simplified but complexes it. Who is tasked with helping and leading? Who do we celebrate? How often have well-intentioned white people still lead to the death of black bodies? McBride highlights the performative nature of white tears at John Brown’s rally: Some of the women broke into tears once the Old Man spoke. It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren’t hardly ever any Negroes present at the most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse… Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

The Bee Keeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri

I finished this novel in two long and luxurious sittings. I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to take a weekend to let yourself immerse fully into a narrative. This is something that I have been taking delight in during self-isolation. Before, it felt unrealistic to set aside large chunks of reading space but, now, it feels responsible. I want to savor this delight before the normal rhythms of life sneak back in. This novel is also, in a much larger and more tragic sense, about the loss of normal, the nostalgia that comes with a decimated past, and the search for a connection to home in strange and foreign lands. Lefteri explores the (literal) blinding desensitization of trauma and the process towards healing and re-integrating into life after loss. The symbolism of bees as hope is a poignant throughline, as Lefteri looks at how attention to the land and beauty can be a process of reintegration and resurrection. This novel asks, with compassion, what it means to remain human through small attentiveness and kindness, despite all odds and cruelties this world provides.

The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott

Half stories, half novella, but a fullness of vision and character development. Screecher birds, slap boxing, water women, and servant robots, all circling around the magical realism of Cross River, a place of Scott’s own making that bends reality and genre lines. I still hear the characters’ voices in my head. Scott examines when bodies are machines and when machines are bodies. Scott seems to abstract elements of black culture, tied up both in the past and present, to reexamine them for both himself and the reader. Placing cultural narratives from the 19th century alongside popular culture in an intertextual method that shines a new light on both. His text is dizzying and searing with content that teeters between delightful and horrific. The landscape and sense of place play its own larger role within the narrative in mythical Cross River: the Wildlands (densely wooded lands), the Ruins (remnants of old plantations), the River, and Port Yooga (the gentrified neighborhood). At times, Cross River is Paradise, the Promised Land, and other times it is Hell. The characters oscillate between these two places, often in the same breath.

Sabrina & Corina: Stories, Kali Fajardo-Anstine

To see a city you know like the back of your hand reflected in a text is a wonderful thing. It draws you in because you know the sights, smells, sounds, even streets, and buildings that are referenced. Especially Cheeseman Park, where I spent hours and hours running when I lived in the city. But I also realize that these stories are from the city that I simultaneously don’t know. Fajardo-Anstine brings to life a side of Denver and Colorado that is often overlooked or dismissed: Indian, Spanish, Hispanic. Colorado is what it is because of these influences, though rapid gentrification aims to destroy these. “The city is in flux, ladies. Lots of mixed-income levels. They say things will cool down once the area is fully gentrified, but I’m skeptical,” the police detective comments. Kali documents those who have created Colorado, who have come from the land and the San Juans, only to be pushed out of it. Jarring stories because of what I do not know. Growing up in anesthetized, sterilized suburban America where everything sparkles clean and no one ever touched me in a way they shouldn’t. It is my imperative to confront realities different than my own, especially of those who have lived in the Southwest longer than America. These stories reflect the women of the West in all their fullness and nuance, their resilience in adversity, and their hardscrabble spirits.

The Plague, Albert Camus

If you read this book during a pandemic, it will feel closer than your skin. It will also give you nightmares. One in which I vividly had the plague amidst a sea of COVID-19 patients, and doctors could not treat me because they could not understand that it was the plague.(I was also roller skating in Target looking for toilet paper with the Olson twins during this dream but that’s beside the point). Who knew there’d be such a revival for Camus during this time? I, for one, am happy, as I have long enjoyed him. Camus is much more charitable to the human condition (though a subset) of compassion and resiliency of the individual (not the crowd) than most give him credit. I was particularly struck by the incisiveness of the text into the inner emotional landscape of the public at large and the individual and just how universal human circumstances and suffering can be. To read a sentence describing the public sentiment and then see a similar tweet in present time is fascinating and unsettling. Do we ever learn? Will we ever learn? And, yet, I feel so much less alone in that everything has always come before. We think what we are feeling is new and yet there is probably, somewhere, a text that has described this exact sentiment. I don’t say this in a jaded way; it is like a sigh of relief. The plot follows Dr. Rieux through the onset, lockdown, and re-opening of a French town due to the plague. The book is less about the plot than it is the inner response of each character to disaster, catastrophe, human suffering, and hope. Finally, Camus asks: once we recover, will we remember? Will we be changed and how?

There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency.
The plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders

It is the hyperreal and the sharp literalism that makes these stories seem otherworldly and magical, even as they are the logical conclusion of our current reality. Saunders has mastered the concept of the holy fool — pathetic, depressing, but still full of hopefulness and efforts to make a supremely broken world, situation, raccoon killing business, or a Civil War theme park redemptive in whatever way possible. The stories err on the side of the grotesque and vulgar but there is still an endearing and self-sacrificial quality in each and every one of them: people covering up their multitude of sins by sacrificing their bodies, minds, and souls for what they have wronged. The holy profane, the sacred vulgarity of this life that we all experience. The final piece: Bounty. A post-apocalyptic Medieval Westworld (but with real humans with slight deformities called the Flawed) style novella with a twist of mutagenic dystopian vibes, in which the protagonist seeks to save his sister but eventually is called to a higher purpose. Saunders asks: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen? And… why is the world so harsh to those who are losing? Saunders creates a revelation of how harsh life could be, how little it cared for someone’s failure, and how close he was to the precipice. Everyone just wants to be happy, to succeed, to be loved, to secure a small slice of the pie. This is the main premise of all the stories in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline — broken people, at the bottom of society’s barrel, just wanting to scrape by with some peace and happiness.

Missionaries, Phil Klay

Technically, Klay is a wonderful writer — the layers of richness, particularly within his character’s subconscious is masterful. So much of the novel is intricate, terse dialogue paired with long stream of conscious ruminations from his characters and their memories and internal motivations. Klay illuminates how complex and complicated war is and how naive people outside of its purview can be. I’ve also always been fascinated by Colombia and its complex path towards peace and how the United States both help and hurt across all organizations in South America (especially with Reagan’s hypocrisy in facilitating the destruction of much of Latin America). Success is ultimately a matter of perspective, and also, at times, morality. There are things that people want to do, things people are compelled to do, and things that people have to do. No one is a pure player and partnerships are critical, often with groups with wildly disparate goals and processes.

Imitations, Zadie Smith

Smith’s prose style is a conversational intellectualism that brings the reader along in her thought process as if they were having the thoughts themselves. One might fear that writings surrounding COVID might be cliche or overbearing but Smith finds the right way to talk about the whole through the particulars: tulips that she wished were peonies, submission to what is in the face of a global humbling. The American resistance to the reality of death instead focused on the discrete problems of death. But in COVID, death has come to everyone unflinchingly, sometimes delayed by the highest bidder but not always. There’s a feeling that everyone just needs something to do, something to fill the time they have spent a million ways of avoiding, I feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it. Contempt as a virus, contempt for the throwaway of police violence, of racism, linking herd immunity to the concept of policing as a virus itself. People carrying the virus that are unaware until they are calling the cops on a birdwatcher. “Has America metabolized contempt?” Has it lived with the virus of racism for so long that it no longer fears it, no longer feels the need to make a different America?

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Have you ever hugged a book after you finished it? Held it there for a few moments and breathed while in an effort absorb everything deep into your bones. Heart pierced by the psychic trauma and strength of the black woman forced to make untenable choices for survival, which I will never understand but can feel in proximity thanks to Morrison’s words. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter. Or: How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. I hear Wright and Baldwin and Coates, and all the mothers who rule with an iron fist because the alternative could be (unjustly) iron bars, or the Schoolteacher, as Sethe references, or death. Your love is too thick, Paul D tells Sethe. Too rough for him to listen to. Too thick, he said. My love was too thick. What he know about it? I was reminded of Nikki Giovanni and Jame Baldwin’s discussion about the relationship between the black man and black woman, which Morrison brilliantly deconstructs. But maybe a man was nothing but a man… They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and as soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house. This book explores the choices one has to make in a system that devours all concepts of reality and morality. Morrison looks at what haunts us, how and why we atone, and what it looks like to find forward motion from trauma. Morrison holds our gaze and refuses to let us look away: that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive.

Top 10 Non-Fiction: General

Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, Isabel Wilkerson

I bought this book on a warm August afternoon in Crested Butte while I waited for my camping partner to finish his work. The first few pages left my mouth agape, enough to cause my friend to look up at me quizzically, and I re-read them several times. America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation… We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. I believe that this book will be a critical foundation for racial conciliation in America. Wilkerson steps outside of America to show that our racial issues are rooted in caste and compares these structures to Nazi Germany and India’s caste systems. Until we understand that what we operate within is a caste system, we will never be able to actualize the change we seek. While race is the skin covering, caste is the bones. Caste is the subconscious architecture that makes rigid boundaries between certain groups seem inherent, ordained, natural, while being wholly arbitrary. Race is our shorthand simply for what caste someone belongs in, an ever-shifting codifying system that is almost laughable in its historical transmutations (even the Nazis thought America’s one-drop rule to be too much). Race is fluid so as to constantly fit the current needs of the dominant caste. This is why cancel culture feels lacking to some, Wilkerson argues. It’s that we think we can simply cast out the outliers when it’s the whole caste structure that needs attention.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the wrong grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things… For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group… In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random black or brown person who is also shopping to ask for a sweater in a different size… It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It is the automatic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they have historically been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized.

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him. Religion as the sanctification of power. The entire sum of all our achievements as the ability and capacity to destroy ourselves. Baldwin holds the whole truth, the brutal truth, before one’s eyes not as a method of destruction but of deconstruction, to be followed by reconstruction — the redemption of the unjust initial Reconstruction of the South. It is galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. Dreaming of power through the symbols of power — a principle to release people from personal responsibility. To accept one’s past isn’t drowning in it but learning how to utilize it — an invented past always crumbles like the way one wakes from a dream. Baldwin wants to know if we can transcend color, nations, and altars. The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of others always has been and always will be the recipe for murder. Baldwin is concerned about the dignity and health of the black soul, opposing any attempt to do to others what has been done to them. The American Republic has never been mature enough to truly set people free and will not be until its policies are based upon love and not compulsion. People are not anxious to be equal but entranced with superiority because freedom is heard to bear. And yet we are capable of bearing a great burden, once we know its reality. White Americans do not believe in death, in the darkness, and thus fear the darkness of skin. But what of love? Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Race has no genetic or scientific bases; there is no way to separate ethnicities in the five Celera genomes. Skin color as a surrogate for race is social, not scientific. Racism as a social practice, both an action and a rationale for action — withholding of the presumption of equal humanity, as Glenn Loury says. Racecraft: mental terrain, pervasive belief — imagined, acted upon, reimagined outside of the physical sphere. Race, like witchcraft, is not material but believed and reaffirmed through belief — a product of thought and language without material causation. When an individual becomes a race and a normal situation becomes race relations — that’s racecraft. Racecraft, like witchcraft, is an invisible ontology that is only perpetrated by those who believe in it. Racism and class inequality in the United States have always been part of the same phenomenon. When will we sidestep from the binaries of racism to really address the issue of class inequality, both white and black, the authors ask? Inequality never stands merely as fact, as the way things are or the way things are done: it requires moral reinforcement in collective beliefs. But our language to speak out this is crude, stunted, tied, and full of landmines. Racecraft requires constant re-imagining and thus takes up our mental capacity to imagine something better, more equal. Racism is a social and political practice that is its own action and rationale simultaneously. It is quantitative evil — harming all that fall under it. But what can release us from this trap is often still the most taboo to speak of: class inequality. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernable historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons. Those holding liberty to be inalienable, and holding Afro-Americans as slaves, were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth.” The authors explore sumptuary codes, Jim Crow, metaphorical blood vs. physical blood, tolerance, white yeomanry, and the 3/5ths compromise. It’s all so rich and revelatory and leaves me with a sense of hope: it doesn’t have to be this way. We can envision something better.

Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, Jonathan Metzl

This book has given me significant clarity on the culture I grew up in (conservative, evangelical whiteness) and gave voice to many feelings I have had in the last few years. Mainly: that the racism of white Americans hurts them in ways they can’t see and that many politicians capitalize on these blind spots to the detriment of working-class white Americans. I felt profoundly saddened by this book, which humanizes its subjects in a way that most platforms on the left fail to do, and their unseen victimhood within a system that they believe supports them. White or black, to varying degrees and levels, crony capitalism chews us up and spits us all out. Do we exist merely as a part of the system or as valued, protected members of equal democracy? Sadly, this question is rhetorical, and we’ve become complacent in its answer. Metzl argues that whiteness is also a significant health risk. White Americans make tradeoffs for this health and livelihoods in subservience to larger ideals and prejudices. These political acts of self-sabotage hurt poor working-class white Americans and undercut the well being of everyone else. Whiteness is an ideology, a political position, a public health stance, and an altar to sacrifice one’s life to. “Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system that might put him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities.” Metzl looks at guns in Missouri, health care in Tennessee, and education in Kansas. Bans on gun research keep us from understanding just how devastating they are. Suicide by gun is the most impulsive and the most lethal. White men parade with pride the thing that is killing them the most frequently. Loosening gun policies in Missouri went hand in hand with the loss of over 10,500 years of productive white male life in the state over the subsequent 7 years. With all its might, TN resisted Obamacare and revealed its racial twinge, as people would rather suffer at the hands of capitalism than expand community health: to live free and die sooner. The health debate and data in Tennessee suggests that being accountable to only ourselves and not our community creates a staggering loss of human life. If Tennessee had expanded Medicaid from 2011–2015: 4,599 black lives might have been saved and 12, 013 white lives. Finally, tax cuts in Kansas, where failed Keynesian austerity and trickle-down economics decimated a vibrant school system. But taking away resources in the boom leads people to lack a sense of security and creates societal antagonism (i.e. resentment of state-sponsored benefits). This tactic destroyed Kansas infrastructure and schools, leading one Republican to realize: if you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, please do, but some don’t have bootstraps to pull themselves up by. Gaps in education lead to significant gaps in health outcomes. Adults without a highschool diploma are expected to die nine years earlier than their counterparts. Ultimately, this is about the mortal tradeoffs white Americans make in order to defend an imagined sense of whiteness. We have to consider what white Americans give up when they invest in defending their position in the hierarchy instead of the betterment of all. We abandon years of life and skills that could lead to a more integrated, healthy world. But what about policy? Metzl argues that we fail by trying to do too much at once and now explaining the everyday benefits of legislation in ways that recognize historically based tensions. Finally, Metzl asks: what might American politics look like if white humility was seen not as a sellout or a capitulation but as an honest effort to address seemingly intractable social issues? And I often ask myself: do I want to win white conservatives over? Or do I always want an antagonist by which to measure my moral rightness?

Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood & Youth, Richard Wright

Why could I not eat when I was hungry? Why did I always have to wait until others were through? I could not understand why some people had enough food and others did not. The fulfillment of desire as a luxury and process of privilege and the exploitation of black children. Wright powerfully explores the ways that he was not afforded a childhood and the hunger that was his closest companion. Wright documents the absurdity of race while simultaneously learning its terrifying maneuverings. I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. Wright seeks explanations in the face of a culture and society that only allows people to perform their roles. What community can he belong to? Shut out from the academic world, unable to submit to the religious fervor, and too subversive for the Communists, Wright’s individuality breathes a sigh throughout the book — where can the individual go in a racialized world? It is precisely Wright’s claim to his individuality as a human that infuriates all those around him — his family because he won’t fall in line, white people offended by his consciousness, the church that calls him devil, and the Communists that call him bourgeois. When I contemplated the area of No Man’s land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I too share these faults of characters! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

A Promised Land, President Barack Obama

This truly is a presidential memoir in the typical fashion — outlining the behind the scenes policy processes and justifications of the administration and Obama’s decisions as president. Which, personally, I loved. I love the minute details of how policy works at all levels of government, the negotiation process, and the problem solving that affects the day to day lives of regular Americans. And with Obama being the wonderful writer that he is, you can palpably feel the responsibility, intensity, anguish, and joy that he felt through the job. Obama truly loved doing the work, and you can see that in the ways that he outlines the discussions around the financial crisis, healthcare, Bin Laden, etc. I was fascinated reading about the complexity of the financial crisis and all the small behind the scenes tweaking and creative response that saved the world from a depression and (depressingly in light of COVID) Obama’s lightning-fast actions to stop H1N1 in the U.S. This book makes me mourn even more the Trump days (or perhaps I should be grateful that he did not get much done), that so much good that could be done in America was lost over these last four years. You might disagree with Obama’s policy choices but if you read this book with an open heart and mind, you cannot dispute that he tried his damndest and genuinely cared.

Billionaire Wilderness: the Ultra-Wealthy and the Re-Making of the American West, Justin Farrell

The beauty of Farrell’s work is that he takes a group that I am more than apt to roll my eyes at (as I often encounter similar sentiments in Breckenridge) and humanizes them so that we might better understand. This, in fact, is Farrell’s whole point. If we do not understand the ultra-wealthy, their motivations, their values, and how they perceive themselves, then we will never be able to address issues that involve the ultra-wealthy. They are a few and far between research group, as we usually rely on caricatures and generalizations. He does not give them a pass, to be sure. But to accurately study a group, a social scientist must operate without bias, and Farrell encourages readers to do the same. I am particularly interested in the ways that Farrell explains the tokenization of the rural working poor in Western communities. Where I live, the ski bum and the immigrant worker are more preeminent than the rancher but the sentiment remains. The hard work and struggle of the working poor are memorialized as the ultra-wealthy try to “pass” as a rugged Westerner, a mythos that has not existed for a very long time. There are many wonderful facets to Farrell’s book like how the ultra-wealthy seek to find a more “authentic” life and how a pastoralized view of the American West leads to the prioritization of the ecological over the human and is often not without strings attached. But something that was of particular interest to me was the sumptuary codes that the ultra-wealthy in Jackson enact with religious vigor. The costume of the Westerner is constantly idolized and all expressions of extravagance and luxury are culturally shamed because it breaks the illusion of alliance with the mythical “common folk.” The problem is that by rendering the lower classes of the American West and Jackson as a mythical ideal, it prevents the ultra-wealthy from seeing the struggle and suffering that so desperately needs alleviation.

The Splendid and the Vile

While I find historical books very interesting, I don’t find myself reading books from the 40’s very often, except maybe the few this year of race issues in the 40’s (Baldwin, Wright, etc.) While I enjoy the occasional WW2 movie, I’m certainly not a war buff. I ended up reading nearly 100 pages a day. There was something refreshing about immersing myself and dropping into a world that is different from mine and a topic that I know so little about. I never thought I’d enjoy reading about the strategy of the Royal Airforce but Larson makes it all relatable. Larson shows how people continued to live in London during the Blitzkrieg. I especially enjoyed Churchill’s idiosyncrasies and silk robes. There was a perspective recalibration that came from this book: namely that London was consistently bombed for two years and still carried on living their lives, falling in love, and going to work.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez

A necessary read for anyone who grew up in the evangelical church. I can trace how these ideas and upbringing manifested in myself, in my community, and in the perception of Christianity writ large. Essentially I see it as the manipulation of a religion for the means of power. Evangelicals mix together patriarchy, masculinity, authority, nationalism, and militarism to create the current right landscape that we see today not for the sake of the gospel but for the sake of power. Whiteness, masculinity, and militarism are so entrenched in evangelicalism that it’s hard to see anything else. The John Wayne mythology’s trajectory to Trump. This lays out how evangelical support for Trump was not an aberration but a fulfillment. I think that any evangelical woman that reads this book will feel rage, but then a sense of relief that they were, in fact, being gaslit their entire lives, and they were right.

Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde

I have always heard Lorde’s words but to read them in context brings new light and power to them. Particularly the “your silence will not protect you” quotation. I had always assumed, out of context, that it was directed towards the people who thought that silence would save them from the tensions of entering into the work of racial justice. Which is still true. But the broader essay provides much more depth. Lorde is confronting her own inevitable death and choosing the pain and suffering that may come with speech over the possibility of dying without ever having spoken. Your silence will not protect you from pain and suffering because you are going to die. So, speak. Speak now. Her work is a beautiful mixture of theory, conviction, and beauty. I understand that graciousness is such a flashpoint in the current conversation and not something to bring up but I find in Lorde an elegant, poignant, and gracious anger. Lorde is my teacher on the path towards embracing useful anger.

What understanding does is makes knowledge available for use.

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Top 10 Non-Fiction: Spiritual or Social Science

Universal Christ, Richard Rohr

I have several teachers at this point in my spiritual life, but I would say that the preeminent one is Father Richard Rohr, the great saint of the perennial tradition. I have read this book twice now. I imagine that I will read it many more times, coming back to specific chapters during moments of need and contemplation. Father Richard led me into contemplative practice as a guide, along with several other teachers (like Ram Dass, Barbara Holmes, Mirabai Starr, James Finley, Barbara Brown Taylor, John O’Donohue, John Philip Newell, and Thich Nhat Hanh), and I now endeavor to be a student of contemplation and action. You may find yourself now thinking, “Wow, Haley has really gone off the spiritual deep end, hasn’t she?” I laugh now when I think about the person who recently told me that I was “far too smart to be this spiritual.” I thank that person for the great lesson in humility that they provided me. But believe me when I say that this has been hard-fought wisdom. I will never force upon any others what I have seen, discovered, and learned, but I will never relinquish it again. I now structure my life around Rohr’s journey of order, dis-order, and re-order. This has been the process of many things in my life. To start with the black and white notion of Christianity and conservatism, to then have those authorities totally deconstructed and to humbly float in the nothingness for a few years, and now to be able to reincorporate, reconfigure, and redeem. Rohr has been the impetus for this.

Wisdom, Modern Life, Alan Watts

I want to plaster this all on my walls. Detachment is participatory in all things and all stages: an honoring that change and decay give life its unique vitality. The spirit and body are good when living in harmony in the present. What would our lives look like if we truly understood that the universe is about ecstatic play? Can’t you see everything that’s here? It’s so good. God once said it was so. So why are you trying to escape it? Be here, not there. Be with this, right now, not that, in some distant future. It’s always a strange paradox: to keep, you have to lose. To be willing to be abandoned so that you may be ushered into the pulse of life itself. What is it like to be enlightened? Dr. D.T. Suzuki was asked. It is like ordinary, everyday experience, except about two inches off of the ground. The biggest leap of faith I ever took was letting God go and then letting it come back. Why so serious? Let’s play! Join in the dance! Isn’t this life magic? Death is the counterbalance to life and what makes it all so wonderfully fragile and beautiful. They are both the in-breath and the out-breath that sustain everything. Why worry? Everything you’re afraid of is already here and gone; it’s only your expectation of it that brings you misery.

Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, Ram Dass

You can know knowledge but can you be wise? All this talk of ideas, empty of wisdom and compassion. Knowledge without wisdom is only despair. If your being isn’t developed, you can’t absorb it anyways. I am looking to move intellect into intuition. I want to link together these minor satoris: blinding experiences of full awareness, where the seed is planted and awakening begins. When you’re no longer attached to being one separate part of the universe, you get to enter into all of it, the kingdom of God one might say. Sub Ek, it’s all one, Sub ek. Everything is coming and going and we can mantra-size it all to get closer to our God. We continually remind ourselves of what is so that we can enter deeper into it. “I can’t be phony holy anymore. I’ve just got to be where I’m at.” If one phrase could represent my life mantra, then this is it. We work with our desires so we can have some distance from them and get context but they will always be with us (like the poor, Jesus said, or the thorn in the side). Then comes the guru, a deep word that modern linguistics has bastardized. The point is to become the guru, to draw them into yourself, to become like this being of love, light, and presence. “It is a process of surrendering. I’m willing to let go into whatever he thinks is best for me. I surrender to his version of my storyline in place of my own… It’s turning me into him.” Ram Dass speaks of Maharajji and suddenly I understand what Jesus has been to me this entire time. We invite the guru into our hearts and offer ourselves to it. We love and we open and we love our way into becoming. We witness our emotions and turn them into our practice; we don’t judge, we notice. One who sees the way in the morning can gladly die in the evening. We honor everything and everyone because it has the indwelling spirit of the Christ. In this moment, what is drawing me into the spirit? With the in-breath, you draw the spirit into you, with every out-breath, you feel it filling you up. Don’t knock it until you try it.

Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor

Who’s afraid of the dark? Well, all of us, really. Taylor explores the light/dark binary as its good/evil cultural assumption and finds so much lacking. We seek to abolish physical, psychological, emotional, cultural, and spiritual darkness at all costs. But when we disavow the dark, we disavow so much personal and cultural potentiality. The incandescent light bulb at every attempt of humanity to escape the necessary realizations of the darkness. I think of the times I have been able to find utter darkness and all of them have been while in the wilderness, once we have all shut off our headlamps and said goodnight. And yet, it does not feel scary or lonely, as the stars and moon blink above if it is a clear night. As Taylor expounds in one section, I am not afraid of the dark itself but rather what humans set about to do in the dark. In the darkness, our brains unspool into possibility, sometimes fearful and terrifying but those feelings are there to teach us just as much as the light. How does one embrace holy darkness? (Something that my evangelical upbringing really endeavored to hide and thus become so much less appealing as I grew older). I hope to let the darkness be a teacher to me now — to not immediately seek distraction when I wake in the night or first thing in the morning. I have always felt more comfortable by candlelight and dim string lights, anyways, always seeking warmly lit spaces instead of the bright fluorescent light. Walking in the dark takes practice and attention. We may say that in the beginning, there was life, but first was the darkness, the home and dwelling place of G-d before the light was brought into being. I want to live more in this moonlit darkness. To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up. To want a life with only half of these things in it is to want half a life, shutting the other half away where it will not interfere with one’s bright fantasies of the way things ought to be. Darkness is important to our health, and the health of the ecosystem around us. How much more will we pay to keep the lights running instead of learning to find a home in our own darkness? For now, I will become acquainted with my own and try to visit the moon more often.

Walking in Wonder

I had always been told to read O’Donohue but had yet to read him until now. This is the first of many O’Donohue books I will read, and I am honored by those who thought I might find a kindred spirit within. O’Donohue’s syntactical style and processes of thought mirror mine, though I could learn from his steady refinement. Philosopher turned poet bent — a mystic with an understanding of Hegel. The emissary of the sacred bridge between internal and externality. To be reminded of Meister Eckhart: If the only prayer you say is thank you, that would be enough. I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it… Your body is actually a miniature landscape that has gotten up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape. I cherish O’Donohue’s gifted understanding of myself as a tiny landscape — of interior mysticism and exterior materiality. A reminder that we need not fear absence, only vacancy, and yet alienation is anything that robs us of self-presence and makes us absent from our own lives. That the main project is the reclamation of what we are called to do here, our purpose work, and yet all of us will carry tabernacles of absence with us all our lives. I am reminded of Augustine: we are all a question unto ourselves. I am reminded of Rilke: we are all solitudes bordering one another. Or O’Donohue’s reference to Merleau Ponty: we are not objects but lived in meanings. What meanings is your life creating? Finally, O’Donohue’s image of death will stay with me. Like a baby who exits the womb from darkness into bright light must imagine they’re dying, so we will depart the womb of the earth into this next exciting mystery of life.

Permission to Feel, Mark Brackett

As a person who has a hard time connecting to her deepest emotions or instead gorging on feelings and has a real fear of expressing my true feelings to other people, I think the strategies presented in this book are life-changing. People assume that emotional intelligence is something fuzzy or squishy but it’s about thinking creatively about ourselves and others. Emotional Intelligence isn’t a constellation of traits that we perceive as good (kindness, warmth, optimism, resilience, grit, empathy) but a set of skills we acquire and practice to understand our own and others' feelings. Integral emotions — directly related to the event at hand, incidental emotions — relating to other events but infiltrating our thinking without our awareness. RULER: recognize, understand, label, express, and regulate — how to accurately identify and decode what we and others are feeling and then how to manage those emotions. The 5 key emotional skills: “I am able to accurately recognize my own and others’ emotions. I am aware of the causes and consequences of my own and others’ feelings. I have a refined emotional vocabulary. I am skilled at expressing the full range of emotions. I am skilled at managing my own emotions and helping others manage theirs.”

Communion: The Female Search for Love, bell hooks

I grew up believing that if I stepped outside the approved boundaries, I would not be loved. Sometimes I still struggle to know that this isn’t true. Our tendency as a culture has been to talk about desire, not about love. hooks argues that feminism did not change female obsession with love or offer new ways to think about it, but rather suggested that we should just give up and not care about it. The irony, of course, is that most of us were not loving too much; we were not loving at all. Power Feminism emulates patriarchy while hooks asks what it means to be a fully empowered loving womxn. We see that what matters is a deeper understanding of love as a transformational force demanding accountability and responsibility for nurturing spiritual growth. Love is freedom, constructive and redemptive visions, not power plays. ” In the end, it was much easier for men to make way for women in the workforce than it was to give them more emotionally. I demanded that my partner give me more emotionally but did not see that he simply did not have more to give. Feminist women stopped talking about love because we found that love was harder to get than power. Men and patriarchal females were more willing to give us jobs, power, or money than they were to give us love. This book is a top-down, structural reformation of what it means to be a feminist that loves well.

Knowing how to give love, we also recognize the love we want to receive. And this is a form of power… Wise women who love know that no matter the strength of the patriarchy, women must assume accountability for the changing of our lives, in ways that empower, for choosing to love, and for learning through love ways to overcome the barriers that exist to keep us from being fully self-realized… No one can bestow happiness or lasting joy upon us if we have not found the way to joy within ourselves. Self-knowledge is the way to find out what the secret of joy is in our individual lives… The joy we share must come from within, must be rooted in our own soulfulness.

All about Love: New Visions, bell hooks

A reexamination of love for everyone in our culture. We do not understand love. We think that we can abuse it and still have it; we think that we simply stumble into it. But love is something we choose and nurture. Love and domination cannot co-exist. Love and manipulation cannot co-exist. Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. A choice, an act of will, an intention, and an action. Love is a mixture of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open and honest communication. When we invest feelings in a person, that is cathect, not love. Cathexis is the way in which a loved one becomes important to us, but it’s not the same as love. I have thought there were men who loved me who treated me poorly. I have dated men who wanted to be loved but were not that interested in being loving. Do we analyze what car to buy more than what partner to have? Do we accept behavior in romantic relationships that we wouldn’t tolerate in a friendship? If you’re willing to be vulnerable and re-work your understandings of love, this book is necessary.

You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters, Kate Murphy

Everyone is interesting. You’re just not listening well and asking the right questions. This book fundamentally changed how I try to engage in conversations. Often, I would find myself afraid of having a conversation with someone I didn’t know really well, fearful that we would run out of things to talk about. What I realize is that I was preparing a monologue and not seeking to support an engaging dialogue. Truly listening means letting a conversation flow and open up naturally, creating unfolding intimacy and the joy of the possibility of where it could meander to. Murphy, a journalist with the New York Times, explores what it means to listen, what it does to our brains, and why it’s so necessary for society. Listening is about developing curiosity for the world, yourself, and others. When someone says something to you, it’s as if they’re tossing you the ball. A good listener picks up on tonal and nonverbal cues, asks a clarifying question or two, and can respond more sensitively and specifically. Ways to create good listening? Self-awareness exercises, reducing distractions during conversations, asking questions that support the conversation and the person and not ones that shift the focus to you, journaling.

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Dr. Sarah Lewis

I was driven to buy this book from Brene Brown’s podcast with Dr. Lewis that inspired me. I will definitely revisit this book when I am struggling in my career or creativity. The focus, isn’t on perfection but on mastery. Mastery is about endurance and it isn’t about success but, instead, a curved-line, constant pursuit. And we have to learn to accept that failure is just part of the process, and those who are okay with failing are the ones who become innovators. Edison — I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. The focus is on the labor of mastery and the gains of experience that setbacks provide. Lord grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. — Michelangelo. The deliberate incompleteness in our craft is what always keeps us pushing forward. Near wins propel us towards ongoing quests where success stops us in our tracks. Going from failure to failure trying to keep up the enthusiasm. We just work towards bridging the gap between the vision and the work and try to be faithful to our visions, knowing that the journey within them is the point. Besides, innovative ideas and work often look like failures at first. Surrender and pivot out of failure: receiving the energy, accepting it, and diverting it right back out. Failure is not punishment and success is not reward, they are what they are and it’s how you respond.

Full List: Chronologically

The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking ahead in a Reckless Age, Bina Venkataraman
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Thomas Chatterton Williams
A Particular Kind of Black Man, Tope Folarin
Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life, Alan Watts
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, Jose Antonio Vargas
The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories, Rion Amilcar Scott
A Woman’s Place Is At the Top: a Biography of Annie Smith Peck, Queen of the Climbers, Hannah Kimberly
Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, Ram Dass
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Annie Dillard
Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Sabrina & Corina: Stories, Kali Fajardo-Anstine
We Speak for Ourselves: a Word from Forgotten Black America, Dwight Watkins
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American life, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields
The Beadworkers: Stories, Beth Piatote
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, Jonathan Metzl
Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood & Youth, Richard Wright
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
Beloved, Toni Morrison
A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle
Billionaire Wilderness: the Ultra-Wealthy and the Re-Making of the American West, Justin Farrell
The Woman Code, Alisa Vitti
The Plague, Albert Camus
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
The Book of Delights, Ross Gay
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, George Saunders
The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot
The Bee Keeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri
Circe, Madeline Miller
Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr
The Sacred Enneagram, Christopher Heuertz
How to Be an Anti-Racist, by Ibrahim Kendi
Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, Barbara Holmes
Walking in Wonder, John O’Donohue
Permission to Feel, Mark Brackett
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, John O’Donohue
The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter
Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
Trace, Lauret Savoy
Hum if You Don’t Know the Words, Bianca Marais
Bad Feminist, Roxanne Gay
White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo
Communion: the Female Search for Love, bell hooks
The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, Albert Murray
Big Friendship, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis
Home Going, Yaa Gyasi
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, Micheal Twitty
Democracy Matters: Willing the Fight Against Imperialism, Cornel West
White Rage, Carol Anderson
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Woman that a Movement Forgot, Mikki Kendall
Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons from Our Own, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Grist for the Mill, Ram Dass
Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot
The Dance Most of All: Poems, Jack Gilbert (One quick favorite line: if we are always good does God lose track of us?)
The House of Belonging: Poems, David Whyte
Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, David Whyte
The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson
All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, Isabel Wilkerson
She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, Sarah Smarsh
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, David Whyte
Missionaries, Phil Kay
Homeland Elegies, Ayad Ahktar
A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Jimmy Carter
Wild Mercy, Mirabai Starr
Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Jon Meacham
Imitations, Zadie Smith
The Lowest White Boy, Greg Bottoms
Ongiongness: the End of a Diary, Sarah Manguso
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart
Memorial, Bryan Washington
You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters, Kate Murphy
The Curtain, Milan Kundera
Bluets, Maggie Nelson, (I read this book every year)
Notes from a Native Land, Aime Cesaire
Book of Hours: Poems, Rilke
What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund
Driven to Abstraction, Rosmarie Waldrop
The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, Dr. Sarah Lewis
The Promised Land, President Barack Obama