I picked up The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World to read during Lent along with the folks at Cafeteria Christian. I love Desmond Tutu, though, and I'm not good at sticking to a reading schedule, so I finished it way ahead of time. I was frustrated by this book at first because it felt like it was barely scratching the surface. I wanted more details, more explanation, and I just wasn't getting it. I'm so glad I stuck with it, though! Each chapter revealed another layer, and another, and yet another. The same stories circled back, but with a deeper understanding of the forgiveness process as the book moved on. I got a…

I went into Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing thinking I was getting a general "how to slim down your social media usage" type of book, but this completely surprised me! I loved its nuanced, anti-capitalist perspective. Odell discusses the far-reaching implications of how our attention is being used as a commodity, as well as how to subvert that in deeply meaningful ways. She makes great points about how the ability to choose to unplug from social media involves a lot of privilege, and how it misses a larger, more important point. Instead, she encourages readers to resist and redirect our attention in order to regain control, without giving up connection and community. (Including a cool bit about the free,…

It's been a long time since I read a book that had me mark "Did Not Like It" on Goodreads. Southern Lady Code just got worse and worse the longer I read. The humor felt completely outdated, and I didn't find it funny. Ellis romanticizes some really messed up stuff, does that gross "gay friends as trophies" thing that straight women so often do, is casually ableist, and brushes off racism like it's a cute, innocent character flaw. I really enjoyed the stories in Ellis's American Housewife, and I think that's the only reason I held out hope for this book and didn't set it aside.

Pema Chödrön's new book Welcoming the Unwelcome is vital for anyone who wants to do their part to help ease the polarization happening in our communities and our relationships with others. If you wonder how you can possibly affect and contribute to the world when things seem so overwhelming, this book will give you hope! Though Chödrön writes from a Buddhist perspective, she also writes in a humble, down-to-earth style that all readers, regardless of faith, will find accessible and relevant. Welcoming the Unwelcome is her first book in over seven years, and it does not disappoint. This is a balm to all who are weary of the intense divide we are seeing today.

In The Stonewall Riots: Coming Out in the Streets, Gayle Pitman gives younger readers (middle grade and up) a history of LGBTQ discrimination and the fight for equal rights, with Stonewall as the pivot point. In an age-appropriate but non-reductive way, Pitman conveys how dangerous it was for people to be gay in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as how widespread internalized homophobia was. She also puts the gay liberation movement in context with other movements going on in the '60s, giving readers a sense of how quickly and dramatically these movements arose, and how people had to utilize direct action because traditional forms of political activity (naturally) weren't effective. She shows the complexity of everything leading up to…