Rachel Baack
Summary: In under 250 pages, author Robert P. Jones illuminates the close relationship between white Christianity and white supremacy in the United States, both historically and presently. He describes the ways in which white Christians have not only tolerated but actively participated in racist speech and action throughout American history, the ways in which white Christian theology developed and still exists in ways that allow and even encourage white supremacy, and the present reality that white Christian identity in American is independently correlated with an increase in racist attitudes (and vice versa). He goes on to call his readers to do the necessary work of reckoning with the past and present of white Christian racism and of pursuing racial justice, providing some examples of churches and communities that have begun that work.
While white American Christians are the imagined audience for the book, I think it would be certainly accessible and likely interesting to a much broader audience, including anyone who has ever observed and wondered at the paradoxical connection between white Christianity and racism in the United States.
Summary: In this retelling of Cinderella, recent fashion graduate Cindy finds herself in a design slump. She sees a perfect opportunity to promote her work and maybe get her groove back when a slot opens up on Before Midnight, a Bachelor-esque dating show that her stepmother (not evil, just a bit of a workaholic) happens to produce. The problem, however, is that Cindy may be a little more into the show’s “suitor” than she’d expected she’d be.
My favorite thing about this retelling is that Cindy gets to have a positive, supportive relationship with her stepfamily. The ending didn’t totally live up to my expectations, but it was still pretty cute.
This Pulitzer-prize winning collection is both straightforward (hence the title) and melancholic in its tone, addressing topics that run the gamut from addiction to death and loss to the depths and horrors of love and back again. The sonnets are untitled, but my favorites from this collection are on pages 7, 35, 38, 57, 66, and 105.
This Pulitzer Prize winning collection by Marie Howe is achingly beautiful. Especially compelling to me were her expression of love for and grief over the loss of her brother, as well as her exploration of faith. My favorite poems in the collection were “The Singularity,” “Gretel from a Sudden Clearing,” “The Attic,” “The Grave,” “One of the Last Days,” “The Star Market,” the third untitled poem from “Poems from the Life of Mary,” “Magdelene—The Seven Devils,” “The Affliction,” and “Magdalene on Gethsemane.”
This collection is incredible. It expresses honestly the deep grief and anger that accompany tragedy and injustice while acknowledging the persistence of hope and love. My favorite poems in this collection are “Variations on a Last Chance,” “To Be Self-Evident,” “On Translation,” “Letter to June Jordan in September,” “Tantoura Redux,” “Gloria,” and “Zaghareed.”
In this exploration of the human mind, David McRaney uncovers some of the truths about the ways we behave, think, and regularly fool ourselves. This book is a great introduction to some fascinating psychological phenomena for those who have not had extensive exposure to the field.
The tone of the book was interesting in that (at least as I perceived it) it seemed to be intentionally informative and communicative of a hope that the contents of the book would ultimately be helpful to readers’ lives, but there also seemed to be an underlying enjoyment of the discomfort readers would likely feel upon learning some of the difficult truths being presented.
This graphic novel depicts nine under-told stories from Black history—those of Henry “Box” Brown, Harry “Bucky” Lew, Richard Potter, Theophilus Thomson, the residents of Malaga Island, the students and teachers of the Noyes Academy, Marshall “Major” Taylor, Spottswood Rice, and Bass Reeves—in a way that honors the legacies of those stories’ subjects and will connect with a modern-day audience of all ages.
Summary: After losing her fiancé, Freddie, in a car accident, Lydia Bird is devastated, unable to face life without him. As it turns out, she doesn’t quite have to. Seeking some respite from her grief, she begins taking sleeping pills to help her rest, and she discovers that, every time she takes a pill, she is somehow able to enter an alternate life in her sleep, one in which Freddie didn’t die. Thrilled at first to be united with her fiancé, Lydia soon realizes that she may not be able to sustain a life split between two realities.
Summary: Invited by Dr. Montague, a philosopher wishing to investigate the nature of the supernatural, Eleanor arrives at Hill House, known by the residents of the nearest town to be the site of supernatural disturbances of an undefined nature. Eleanor, herself chosen as a guest of Hill House because of a supernatural event that happened in her childhood home, is joined, in addition to Dr. Montague, by Luke, who is to be next to inherit the house, and Theodora, who seems to have some degree of extrasensory perception. In spite of the ominous air about the house and early indicators that something is in fact amiss, the four guests make one another’s acquaintance and begin their stay in a spirit of something akin to camaraderie that provides a degree of comfort. It is not long, however, before things begin to change in ways the foursome never could have expected.
John Warner, a writing professor and—obviously—a writer himself, makes a case for writing and reading as inherently human activities that we not only should not but simply cannot outsource to generative AI. He argues that any “reading” or “writing” activity that an LLM can do is not the real or meaningful work of reading or writing. Warner encourages his readers not to fear AI but to rethink what it really means to write and what relationship we should cultivate (or not) with generative AI as a result of that consideration.
Summary: When a famous artist dies and unexpectedly leaves his most famous work to Louisa, who has just lost her best friend and is on the verge of aging out of the foster care system, she and the artist’s lifelong friend, Ted, are thrown together against both of their wills to figure out the logistics. As the unlikely pair get to know each other, Ted reveals the story of the artist’s life to Louisa, and Louisa, in turn, begins to share pieces of herself with him.
This book was full of heartbreak laced with small, blindingly bright moments of joy, and its plot was interesting and unique.
Summary: Crawford Cope, the star pitcher of his small Arkansas town’s baseball team, has just been sentenced to 300-hours of community service for beating his dad, an even bigger MLB star and hometown hero, with a baseball bat. Crawford, convinced that his lack of anger management skills are to blame for the whole situation, determines to keep his head down, pay off his debt to society, and learn to keep his emotions under control, if not for his own sake then for the sake of keeping his family, which includes his eight-year-old brother, together. His plan is interrupted, however, when he meets Hannah Flores. Also the recipient of a community service sentence, Hannah is Crawford’s opposite: she is a talkative, edgy, social outcast who loves punk music and, after forming an unlikely connection with Crawford, recognizes that Crawford is carrying the burden of family secrets that he shouldn’t—and possibly can’t—carry alone.
In this collection of short fiction, the stories of Black women and girls—all of whom are impacted in some way, whether large or small, positive or (more commonly) negative, by the church—are told with both heartbreaking clarity and heartwarming humanity.
“Dear Sister,” “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” and “When Eddie Levert Comes” were my personal favorites.
Summary: 35 years after her aunt Viv inexplicably vanished from the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York, 20-year-old Carly arrives in the small town to investigate. As she looks into the circumstances surrounding Viv’s disappearance, she learns that the situation is much more complex, terrifying, and even supernatural than she had every imagined.
The novel alternates between Carly’s perspective in 2017 and Viv’s in 1982.
Summary: Tress is a seemingly ordinary girl living on an island in the midst of the Emerald Sea, an ocean made not of water but of fluidized green spores that burst to life as deadly vines when coming into contact with water. This naturally makes sailing this and Tress’s planet’s other seas, similarly comprised of spores of varied hues and with different but equally life threatening reactions to water, quite treacherous. In spite of this danger, after Charlie, a young nobleman with whom Tress has fallen in love, is shipped off to the Midnight Sea that is home to the infamous Sorceress, Tress resolves to sail the seas on a rescue mission. The resulting journey is one full of adventure, peril, and—to Tress’s surprise—friendship and personal growth.
This story is as exciting as it is heartwarming, and Brandon Sanderson lays down some banger figurative language and one-liners throughout the novel.
Summary: Tolly Driver is a normal teenager—a near nobody, really, to everyone except his best friend Amber—living in Lamesa, Texas in 1989. It isn’t until a string of violent murders takes place the summer before his senior year that Tolly becomes someone that Lamesa can’t help but note, and not in a way that Tolly ever would have asked for. As Tolly is transformed, Amber investigates and illuminates to him the ways he’s being pulled into the slasher genre against his will.
Summary: It’s December 1985 in Ireland, and Bill Furlong, a hardworking, kindhearted father of five girls, makes a distressing discovery while delivering coal to the local convent. This revelation points to deeper, longstanding issues surrounding the convent’s activities and the town’s willingness to turn a blind eye to them.
This book is a short but poignant one, addressing a historical abuse perpetrated in Ireland between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and offering readers a vision of hope and integrity in the face of injustices committed by the powerful.
Summary: Piero Martin explains in as close to layman’s terms as one can get the history, applications, and current definitions of the seven units included in the International System of Units (SI) of measurement. He also includes related anecdotes and observations from history and science.
This is a very readable and interesting book that not only helps make incredibly complex concepts accessible to the general public but also explores the way these concepts connect to deeper aspects of our humanity. To put another way Martin’s approach to communicating with his audience (and to quote the friend who recommended the book to me), “This is an author who you can tell really likes other humans.”
Summary: Cyrus Shams is a 28-year-old poet, the son of a mother whose plane was shot out of the sky when he was still an infant and a father whose subsequent emigration from Iran to the United States landed him in an exhausting job at a chicken plant. After recovering from a years-long substance addiction, the young poet becomes fascinated by the concept of martyrs and dying a meaningful death. When Cyrus learns about an artist with terminal cancer who is spending her final days in the Brooklyn Museum talking to patrons, he decides, after some encouragement from his friends Sad James and Zee, the latter of whom accompanies him on the journey, that he has to go see her. Although unsure of his expectations as he approaches conversations with the artist, what Cyrus learns will nonetheless surprise him and, inevitably, readers of his story.
Something I loved about this book was that the author frequently wrote in acknowledgement of confusion or lack of understanding from his characters when other characters made profound, metaphor-laden statements, thus inviting readers to feel comfortable with confusion on their own part. This author, it seems, understands that figurative language, especially when being used to describe highly unique and personal experiences, may be difficult to understand, and that’s not necessarily due to a deficiency of the listener’s or reader’s intelligence.
Summary: In this work, social scientist Mark Robert Rank explains what he calls the structural vulnerability approach to understanding poverty in the United States. According to this approach, American poverty can be understood by looking at both individual characteristics that make it more likely that any given person will experience poverty (characteristics such as education, race, gender, parents’ socioeconomic status, etc.) and broader structural realities (especially a lack of jobs that would keep families above the poverty line) that make it so that some people will inevitably fall into poverty. Rank then offers a set of solutions that would allow the US to tackle poverty on both the individual and structural levels.
As someone with no background in economics or social policy, I found this book easy to understand and the evidence that Rank offered to support his claims well laid out.
Summary: In 1961, six-year-old Bear Van Laar disappeared on his family’s property. Now, fourteen years later, the second Van Laar child, thirteen-year-old Barbara, has gone missing from her cabin at Camp Emerson, the summer camp owned by her family and hosted on the property adjacent to their estate. As the search for Barbara unfolds, law enforcement, locals, and camp staff and attendees alike begin to ask the inevitable question: Could these two disappearances be connected? And if so, could it be the Van Laars themselves that have something to hide?
Summary: This is a highly readable book tracing the history of Indigenous nations in North America from antiquity to the present, highlighting their sovereignty and purposeful decision-making. DuVall dispels myths about Native weakness and ignorance in the face of European colonization and centers Indigenous power and self-determination.
Summary: In five stories the author refers to as “work[s] of fiction based on real events,” readers are introduced to several world-renowned scientists, most of whom lived and worked during the time of the World Wars. What the author imagines for his readers are the inner thoughts, and at times, dialogue and select events in these individuals’ lives, all of which reveal the dangers—whether physical, social, emotional, or existential—associated with scientific discovery and absorption in it.
Summary: Without explanation, Karen, a seemingly normal and well-adjusted housewife, goes speeding through town and crashes her car into a telephone pole, which lands her in the hospital with a concussion and a case of amnesia. Her husband, Tom, reacts with understandably deep concern. This behavior, after all, is completely unexpected. Soon, however, it becomes clear that something is amiss, as the body of a murdered man is found in the same part of town as Karen’s car crash, and secrets—Karens’, Tom’s, and others’—start to come to light.