Expanded Empathy Book Club
Let's learn together!
When my heart feels heavy, gratitude lightens the load. This week, I’m grateful for energizing coffee, nourishing plates of scrambled eggs, fuzzy pajamas shielding me from the cold, bridal showers, and trivia nights. Most of all, I am grateful to live in a community committed to protecting the vulnerable.
I am writing from Arizona, an American border state, where political tensions are rising. On Thursday, I channeled my anger into action and joined the Women’s March’s organizing call. The speakers represented various organizations that help causes like immigration, gender equality, and get-out-to-vote efforts. The call reinvigorated my optimism. I’m grateful for the opportunity to collectively write a new chapter in history- a chapter where every character is celebrated for their race, sexuality, ability, gender, nationality, and religion. To write this, we need to read books by and about people from different backgrounds than us. Reading and listening to audiobooks fosters empathy and critical thinking skills. People with those skills are twice as likely to exercise civic duty, volunteer, and work.1 Reading is something we can all do to add light to the world.
I curated a list of my favorite books spanning various topics and genres. I hope that we can use these stories as a catalyst for conversation. Please note, that I am missing books written by trans, nonbinary, Indigenous, and Latinx authors. I would love to hear your recommendations!
Sending Smiles is a space where all emotions are welcome. The group chat and my DMs are open for anyone in need of a venting session, pep talk, or anything in between. Thank you for being part of this community. I am grateful for each of you.
Climate Change
Go Gently: Actionable Steps to Nurture Yourself and the Planet by Bonnie Wright
Genre: Nonfiction
“The opportunity to take action within the climate crisis is limitlessness. We don’t have to choose one thing, and we don’t have to land on it right away. It is a continual inquiry.”
Education
Educated by Tara Westover
Genre: Memoir
“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai
Genre: Memoir
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.”
Feminism
The End of Me: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin
Genre: Nonfiction
“In 1965, women reported doing an average of 9.3 hours of paid work a week and 10.2 hours of childcare. Now women not only do an average of 23.2 hours of paid work a week, but they do more in childcare- 13.9 hours.”
The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Genre: Dystopian
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Genre: Memoir
“They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability.”
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly
Genre: Essays
“A society that does not respect women’s anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.”
Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson
Genre: Poetry
“This is the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one.”
A Spark of Light by Jodi Picoult
Genre: Fiction
“You don’t look at another person’s plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.”
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by Tarana Burke
Genre: Memoir
“when I thought of my experiences, I didn’t hold my abusers accountable-I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong.”
Vox by Christina Dalcher
Genre: Dystopian
“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”
Government Overreach
1984 by George Orwell
Genre: Dystopian
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Genre: Dystopian
“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Genre: Dystopian
“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
Genre: Nonfiction
“For anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told. Not just the activists or the famous writers. You have to look at how normal people manage with such things in their pasts.”
History
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Genre: Nonfiction
“The country therefore was not ‘born free’ but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.”
Immigration
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu
Genre: Memoir
“Violence does not grow organically in our deserts or at our borders. It has arrived there through policy.”
LGBTQ+
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
Genre: Graphic Memoir
“I suppose that a lifetime of hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”
Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America by R. Eric Thomas
Genre: Essays
“The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?”
Race
Another Country by James Baldwin
Genre: Fiction
“Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Genre: Memoir
“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Genre: Fiction
“‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’ she said, ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.’”
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Genre: Fiction
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…Until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Genre: Memoir
“The caged bird sings with a fearfull trill, of tings unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom."
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Genre: Nonfiction
“Officials use the criminal justice system to label persons of color as ‘criminals’ and then they use this label to continue to use old forms of discrimination.”
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin DiAngelo
Genre: Nonfiction
“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out-blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking ‘Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if it were true?’”
Socioeconomic
This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren
Genre: Memoir
“The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty-period.”
Sending Smiles,
Steph
P.S.
This list has given me a number of books to add to my need to read list. Thank you ✌️