Friends,
It’s August 2026, what is time? We have just a few weeks of summer left and I normally head to the beach! This year it will be a pool summer and I am excited to spend time in the sunshine with some good books.
I savor this time: I stare at water, I eat ALL the seafood in sight, I nap, and I read, read, read, and read.
Every year I share some of what’s in my pile with y’all, here’s what I’ve been reading and can recommend:
The Care Manifesto
I absolutely believe that “care” should be at the center of everything we create-including our government and our economy. We can have a truly caring world if we take the time to reimagine care. I am reading this book AGAIN because one thing that is clear to me is we are in this moment of time because of our lack of care for one another and the world around us.
The Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care–childcare, healthcare, elder care–to care for the natural world. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship and it calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make more welcoming cities. It sets out an agenda for the environment putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.
Citizen
This is a meditation on race by the amazing Claudia Rankin. This book is bold, she uses essays, images and poetry to document mounting racial aggressions through 21st century daily life and across the media. Some of what she shares are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court. Citizen is a testament to the individual and collective effects of racism. If you’ve never read anything by our former Poet Laureate I can’t recommend this enough.
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
This book was published in 2022 and is incredibly important for this moment in time. It was, and continues to be, a much needed critique of the left and this will be my second time reading it. As the authors put it they are exploring how “one-sided pro-Israel policies reflect the truth-bending grip of authoritarianism on both Israel and the United States.” Except for Palestine “argues that progressives and liberals who oppose regressive policies on immigration, racial justice, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, and other issues must extend these core principles to the oppression of Palestinians” (as we know, they often don’t). The books explore so much, including how and why folks conflate advocacy for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.
What have you been reading this summer?
I would love to hear the ideas you’ve been mulling over, the questions you are grappling with, and the books you are finding joy and hope in. Hit reply and let me know!
We get free together!
