Ever since I started posting things on the internet, people have been asking me for a reading list. Today’s the day I give you one!! Contained here are the books that make me up, and that I return to when I need a reminder of what I believe.
Before we get into it: I’m currently fundraising to help a family of 6 escape the war in Sudan! If you’ve gone out for coffee in the last week, if you have a very specific favorite pen that you loyally buy, if you’ve ever forgotten to cancel a gym membership for months after you stopped using it, I’m going to guess you could probably give Asjad $5 without it being a huge deal!! If not, could you send their link to someone you know? Let’s save some lives and uplift those facing genocide together.
I’m pretty sure this list will be a bit different from what the people who asked for it were expecting. Honestly, so much of the learning that created who I am today didn’t even happen through reading, but through necessity. I came up against the realization that the way I’d been taught to view the world and relate to myself was eating me alive and that, if I wanted to survive, I couldn’t keep standing on this rotten foundation. I felt around in the dark until I found truths that could nourish instead of shrivel, and one by one started trying them on.
Many of the books I cherish didn’t teach me as much as they permitted me to be confident about what I had found in that process, in the dark.
When I think of the books that have shaped my worldview and relationship with myself, there’s not a single self-help or mental health book on that list. Instead, it’s an array of novels, poetry, and political theory. Books that let me envision something new, and put words to the old feelings that had been swirling tongue-tied in my chest.
While, of course, I’ve learned a lot from various psychology practitioners and modalities, what changed my mindset more than anything else was not the language of therapy, but the one of liberation. My belief that I am correct and lovable is fueled by writers who remind me that I am more than just some cog in an economic machine, who contextualize what I am experiencing within the systems that have shaped our collective sense of self for centuries. Who encourage me to move away from any mentality that leads to me dehumanizing myself or anyone else.
I find that a lot of self-help/mental health writing focuses on symptoms. It helps us be aware of and handle the solitary things we are feeling in our individual experiences. Of course, this can be needed, life-changing work, but when I stopped being so preoccupied with picking apart the granular sensations of every thought and feeling I had and started approaching them as simply expressions of the systemic, collective currents that make up our world, things started making a lot more sense.
Angela Davis said that “radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’”, and radical writing has helped my healing work stay centered on root causes.
My very literal brain needs me to stress that this list is not exhaustive or unchanging. There are many other teachers and mediums that deserve credit for creating and holding me that aren’t represented below.
I’m also realizing that another reason why it’s taken me so long to compile this list is that I worry it will be too basic, that its titles are all too popular, that it’ll say something silly and unintellectual about me that I didn’t mean to communicate. I’m holding that fear in soft hands. I’m thinking of the genuine impact each of these works has made on me. I’m extending so much gratitude that any possible embarrassment gets diffused and dissolved in its glow.
So. With all that being said. Here is the reading list on the Sunshine Hunters 101 syllabus.
Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi
Bitter is a YA speculative fiction book about a teenager trying to find her place in a time of social and political unrest. Reading Bitter is like standing in our world as it is now and looking through a window at the world that could be. Much of the book taking place standing directly in that portal, on the precipice of possibility. It showcases a path towards transformation that is led by love, full of diversity, and spacious enough to hold all of our humanity - all of our messiness and apathy and shame and rage. The fact that all of this exists in a young adult novel is deeply precious to me. I read it in an afternoon and my heart was never the same!
Miss Virtue looked amused. "How do you know your way is the right way?"
"I don't. But we moving with love, and I figure that can't be wrong.”
Joyful Militancy by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman
The closest thing I have to a bible!! Joyful Militancy is an answer to the despair and pessimism we see take up so much space in movement work. It invites us to set down rigidity and embrace tenderness, joy, and experimentation. It asks us to explore new ways of being with ourselves and others that aren’t based on trying to be right, or convincing others they’re wrong. And gives us a framework for things like enjoyment and hope that don’t require us to ignore or downplay injustice or grief. This book birthed my obsession with uncertainty. Being willing to not know what comes next and being freed from the obligation to act like we do will change everything!
The whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. [The] name for this process is joy…Joy is not an emotion at all, but an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. It is the capacity to do and feel more.
Joyful Militancy was our book club pick back in October! If you’d like a companion in your reading, the podcast discussions from October are free to listen to and linked below.
Discussion 1 - Discussion 2 - Discussion 3 - Discussion 4
West Wind by Mary Oliver
I wasn’t sure how to pick just one Mary Oliver collection. Her work as a whole found me in a time when I was very disconnected from myself, and while it would still be years before I properly started the journey back towards presence, her poems always landed like a siren song or a memory, reminding me that presence existed and was possible, even if I wasn’t choosing it at the moment. I’m so grateful for the way she models connection to the earth and willingness to learn from it. I chose this collection simply because it was the first one I ever read of hers and contains what is still to this day my favorite poem (Black Oaks).
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
“radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.” Emergent Strategy provides us with crystal clear principles and practices to help us create relationships that nurture. With ourselves, with others, with change, with the land. adrienne maree brown teaches us how to move from deeply grounded love. So many of the core principles and foundations of Emergent Strategy walk with me through every step of my life…from biomimicry (the belief that what we see in nature will be mirrored within us, and that we can learn deep truth by watching the way the earth moves), to the constant encouragement to trust the people (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
Another YA book, this time a fantasy installment of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (which stands on its own perfectly fine even if you haven’t read the prequels). I’m feeling another reread of this one coming up soon. It tells the story of an 11 year old witch in training, Tiffany Aching, who is coming to terms with her powers and purpose. It’s SO funny and SO fun, and also always makes me cry, as it explores connection to land and home and confidence and self, as it reminds us how magical our everyday tasks can be, how true power cannot exist without humility and presence.
There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.
Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua
My favorite ever quote by Rebecca Solnit is actually from a facebook post of hers that was posted after some terrible headline broke - I can’t remember what it was now.
She wrote “I am committed to recognizing the unpredictability of the future and not replacing it with false certainties. Externalizing the powerlessness of worry as the power of [false] prophesy is not helpful. I also see this as people's inability to say "I feel anxious" instead of "we are all doomed." To try to take hold of what will happen--usually by prophesying and preaching despair, not the opposite. To manage worry by making what you fear might happen into (false) certainty is perhaps not the best way to manage worry.”
I come back to that every time I look at the era of climate change we exist in now. The future might feel incredibly fixed and sure (and hot and deadly), but in truth, it will be whatever we make it into. This essay collection shows us all the possibilities that do still exist, and helps us imagine a future that could be created by our hopes instead of our despair. There’s no bypassing, no downplaying the severity of the crisis we are in, there’s just a lot of perspective and potential added to that understanding so many of us feel trapped under.
To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible.
THIS IS OUR BOOK CLUB PICK FOR JUNE! If you’re feeling the summer (or winter, for our southern hemisphere friends) climate anxiety already settling over your shoulders, and if you’d like to have conversations with people who feel the same (but who are also moving towards hope alongside you), you can join the June book club by signing up for a paid subscription!
All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews
The most recent addition to this list! This litfic novel tells the story of a young immigrant woman making her way in 2015(ish) Milwaukee, and slowly stumbling her way towards community care, mutual aid, and a liberation mentality (and discovering the truth behind all of those buzzwords). In an era where we’re so surrounded by the teachings of social justice, that tell us what to think and believe and how to be a good person by adopting a certain ideology, this book depicts what it’s like to authentically move towards these “progressive” beliefs, simply because we actually, truly feel the need for them. Because we want better for ourselves and those we love. The main character is as selfish and scared as any of us, and her journey of fucking up and failing and realizing she wants to try again is deeply resonant and honest.
We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Lastly, and also obviously. Lately, I’ve been feeling a little at a loss when I try to tell someone about the constant pull I feel to be outside. Like, “I love nature” or “I love wildlife” feels too trite and elementary school to actually capture the kinship and care I feel for the earth, and the deep care I receive back from her. Braiding Sweetgrass captures that relationship and invites me further into it. Its invitation to reclaim our connection to the land we live on is so sorely needed. I pray more of us accept it.
Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
I plan always to be a student of life and of hope. I want to surround myself with people who share that plan! And I’m eternally so grateful for the books that draw me deeper into those practices and give me the words to share them with others. If you made it all the way to the end of this list, thank you for being here. Feel free to tell me about your own life changing books, always in the market for more things to borrow from the library!
This is a *chef’s kiss* reading list, and I’m so glad that there happen to be some fiction novels included! Sometimes trying to get myself to read non-fiction is like pulling teeth, and then I absorb none of what I’ve read😅
Also happy to report that I recently bought joyful militancy because of how you’ve talked about it on Instagram, so here’s hoping I’ll get some of the guidance from it (or it inspires me to find guidance in other places) that I desperately need💗
Do you use StoryGraph or goodreads or any other app to track what you’re reading?