Books to Channel Your Anger
This week’s theme was originally intended to be “fun summer reads,” which we obviously need and love in life. But I simply don’t have that in me this week, amidst my compounding rage and fear and hopelessness and outrage. It just didn’t feel right.
And since I think we all have a responsibility to each other to use whatever small voices we have to advocate, to ally, and eventually to act, this week is instead a compilation of a few books to validate and channel your feelings. To hear the quiet voice whisper, “yes, yes, you are not overreacting, you were never overreacting, the wailing dragon inside of you is right.” To honor that your fear is valid and to remind you of your own precious, terrifying power. To perhaps gently turn your helplessness into resolve, and to remind us that the moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice because that is the natural progression, but because we as people have time and again actively powered the collective weight of our ideals to make it bend.
If this is not your book roundup this week because you despair - take care. Fun five-lamby books will be here for you next week, I promise. Our work, unfortunately, kind of is going to be a long haul. There’s plenty of fun and joy in the archive if you need it.
If this is not the book roundup for you this week because you dislike political stances, or because you think the current political environment does not affect you because you’re a man, or pro-life, or live in a blue state … of course you are allowed whatever choice you want to make (ironically.) But remember that “staying out of it” is also a stance, so make sure it’s the one you want to be your legacy.
As the often upsetting but always inspiring Rebecca Traister said, “hope is a muscle.” (I guess I’m going to have to finally read her book Hope in the Dark which has been sitting on my nightstand. DAMN it, do the indignities never stop?) So be mad, be sad, be scared, heck, be withdrawn for a few days if you want - and then apply your perfect, unique gifts to repair and resist that which does not serve the world you want.
And please don’t miss this poem that my beloved shared with me, Gate A-4. I believe not everything is lost.
Leave a comment and please share the works, the novels, the guidebooks, and the portraits of fight and hope that sustain you.
My Life on the Road, to remind us that the road to equity is long, that it travels through community, and that we are all imperfect allies who will get things wrong but we still have to try anyway.
Kindred, which most importantly reminds us of our legacy of considering bodies to be property, and how easy it is to slip back into what we thought was long past.
The Handmaid’s Tale, an almost humiliatingly obvious choice but selected to remind us that Atwood’s dystopia did not invent a single horror visited on (mostly Black and brown) women, but simply pulled from what theocracies and countries and men and women have actually done.
The Power, to remind us that fortunes can shift so suddenly, and that power corrupts women too, and that none of us are innately resistant to the seduction of dominating others.
How To Survive a Plague, which faced a biological threat, but which reminds us that the government has so profoundly failed us before and left groups of people to suffer because they were deemed less than and threatening, and how unlikely coalitions of regular people can still band together to make change (and how not everyone survives that fight.)
Fates and Furies, to remind us of good old-fashioned, shake-through-your-clenched-smile female rage. (See also: Gone Girl, My Brilliant Friend, The Change.)
Don’t forget Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister