Books line every corner of my apartment, and I’m constantly reading whenever possible. I read about 50 books from cover to cover this year and my two favorite books published this year were of course the first two published titles I edited at Random House, Victor Ray’s On Critical Race Theory and Hafizah Geter’s The Black Period. I’m inspired everyday by the brilliant authors I partner with as an editor, and although I have read both books many times, I still leave each reading with new insights and calls to action.
Overall, it was difficult to choose what to share since I try to read about a book per week outside of work and I grew as a result of my time spent with everything I’ve read. Thus, I decided to focus on a few books aligned with my resolutions for 2022 as I start voraciously pre-ordering for my 2023 reading plan.
Every year, I ritualize the process of choosing several words to define my intentions or themes to focus on and live into for the months ahead. To give you a sense of how seriously I take these intentions, I make them into either a collage or cross-stitch each year depending on where my creative instincts take me to symbolize my commitment to the process of discovery, they might offer me over the next 364 days.
When I reflect on the books I read in my personal time, they all align with one of the aims I set for the year. In the spirit of revelation one of the covenants I made with myself for 2022, I will share the books that most enlivened the spirit of my other aims, persistence, sovereignty, grace, balance and transcendence during what was both a triumphant and tumultuous year for me in many ways.
As I wish you all a prosperous new year, I invite you to consider your own intentions and what books you need to nourish them with to help you realize your own awakenings—the cross-stitch is optional.
Revelation
Daisy Hernandez’s genre-defying book The Kissing Bug encompasses so many of the elements that thrill me as a reader. I’ve been a long-term fangirl of Daisy’s work since the first edition of her and Bushra Rehman’s collection Colonize This first made me and so many intersectional feminists of my generation feel seen and supported in its visionary pages two decades ago. The Kissing Bug takes an intimate deep dive into the realities of poverty, immigration, class, policy, and for-profit health care by exposing the history and present-day impact of how “marginalized diseases” are perpetuated in a system in crisis.
Persistence
Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency, translated by Mariam Rahmani, is one of the books I most eagerly anticipated this year since it was acquired during my tenure at Feminist Press. Mohebali’s raw and gripping novel satirizes gender, the avant-garde, and authoritarianism amid late-stage capitalism in present-day Iran. As a devotee of delightfully unlikeable feminist antiheroes, dark comedies and books about cities in watershed moments, I found the powerful pulse of this book riveting from start to finish. I read In Case of Emergency almost a year before the chants of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement reverberated worldwide as a call for liberation from repression and state violence, and I have thought about what we can all learn from Mohebali’s cutting and prophetic prose every day since. For anyone who finds themselves navigating through the complexities of personal, familial, political, cultural or any other form of chaos, Mohebali’s mordant voice and irreverent characters will shake your foundation.
Sovereignty
Amidst the rise of authoritarianism worldwide, I spent a lot of time over the last seven years journaling, reading and exploring how to govern oneself amid interpersonal institutional and cultural dynamics that fail to align with one’s own conscience, moral and ethical code. Despite the gripping effect each of his well-argued essays had on me, one gut-punching line in Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point made it onto a post-it note on my writing desk. His words “real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain—in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism” motivate me every day to focus my energies on amplifying the voices of truthtellers and surfacing the stories that opponents of justice and equity would prefer to shroud in darkness.
Grace
As a spiritual seeker and progressive Christian mystic, I read a lot of books about faith and religion. I’m active in several faith communities and interfaith spaces because I experience deep enrichment from learning from how folks make sense of the world and what happens (or doesn’t happen) beyond this mortal plane. One of the biggest joys of my life has been the heart-opening expansion interfaith women’s circles have offered me for over a decade and I’m especially grateful for what I’ve learned from teachers and leaders outside of the tradition I grew up in. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s On Repentance And Repair: Making Amends In An Unapologetic World came into my life during a period where I meditated daily about the meaning of grace and how I could better actualize, embody, and model it through my actions and interactions with others. Ruttenberg’s writing through the lens of philosopher Maimonides’s work about how we can create repair in the aftermath of harm-doing without eschewing accountability helped provide me with a compass for how to forge forward, without forgetting trespasses but instead creating space for restoration and reconciliation through the ownership of harm, restitution, different choices, and real apologies.
Balance
The Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance launched the day after my birthday, and her manifesto was the gift I needed to start planning for the new year during a whirlwind fall. As I explored my discomfort with cultural messages about “returning to normal” with the pandemic still looming, I reflected on the power we gain when we pay more profound attention to patterns that need to be interrupted and systems desperately must be healed and transformed. Hersey’s book expanded my thinking as I contemplated how to apply what we’ve learned over the past few years to reimagine and refocus on what helps us thrive as humans beyond our corporeal productivity. Hersey’s daring ode to the power of rest and its sacred relationship to our minds, bodies, and systems of justice is both an affirmation and a clarion call to return to our truth.
Transcendence
Actor Michael K. Williams’s Scenes From My Life begs the question for me: What does it mean to leave a legacy of both tenderness and brutal authenticity? While I read his poignant memoir, I wept several times as I grieved our loss of not only a sagacious talent who left this realm too soon but also an artistic catalyst who’s community vision had the power to move hearts and minds. As someone who is still in the depths of grieving several beloved people who gave their all to a world that relentlessly takes too much, I found space for deep healing in his hopefulness and joy beyond the impressions of life’s scars.
