Social justice book reviews
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson took readers by storm in late 2020, so I was fashionably late reading it at the end of 2023. While something about its ubiquity made me hesitate to read it, it’s intrigued me for years.
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Author’s Note: It feels odd to be putting out a post right now that, while important, feels relatively trivial compared to what is going on in Palestine right now. There is a US-sponsored genocide occurring as I write this. Both the United States and Israel want you to think the “situation” is “too complicated” for you to condemn genocide and apartheid. It is not. Please take the time to learn about the history of Israel and its violent colonization of Palestine. I hope to have blog posts sharing what I learn in these books—some of which are free right now—up in the near future and as a continual part of my blog.
Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
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Fall is here, which means it’s almost time for Nonfiction November 2023!
Reading and blogging challenges are a huge part of book blog culture, but since I am an exclusively nonfiction book blogger, Nonfiction November is the one I wait for all year. And next week, it’s finally back!
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“This is the book that changed my life. If you only read one, make it this one.”
These words from a trusted fellow reader (and writer) were all it took for me to crack open William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
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To be an atheist means to not believe in God. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I just saved you $15.
David G. McAfee’s Hi, I’m an Atheist!: What That Means and How to Talk About It with Others caught my eye as I was wandering my favorite bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I had never heard of the book or of McAfee, so for only $15, I gave it a try. I hoped that this pocket-sized guide might fill a gap in atheist literature on how to come out to others.
It didn’t.
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The Supreme Court has been captured by shadowy right-wing mega-donors. It doesn’t sound like it could be true, but it is. In The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller put the Court itself on trial and make an airtight case that the integrity of the Court has been sold. For hundreds of billions of dollars.
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I held off on buying and reading Preparing for War until I met Bradley Onishi at my organization’s conference, the Summit for Religious Freedom, in April, because I couldn’t imagine that there could be more to say about Christian Nationalism that hadn’t already been said. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—he proved me wrong.
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Thanks to a tweet from IndieBound a couple of months ago, I discovered Jólabókaflóð (yola-boka-flot), which translates to “Yule Book Flood.” It’s the Icelandic tradition of exchanging books on Christmas Eve and reading them late into the night while enjoying hot chocolate, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
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I was a #bookstagrammer for a hot minute. I really liked seeing everyone’s books, cute book pictures, and short reviews. About a year ago, I finally gave up on that account for several reasons, but one of the reasons was that I never really felt that I fit in with the bookstagram community. Those who do fit in will tell you it’s the best online community they’ve ever experienced, but there’s something they don’t mention: the #bookstagram community is overwhelmingly dedicated to fiction.
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