What to Read Today Before the Internet Makes Your Head Explode

Aka, 55 books to read to slow yourself down and reimagine yourself as part of the creative, fun, difficult, and beautiful new/old resistance. The story of creating the list follows the list. I’m refusing to organize or categorize this list. The point is to explore, find something important to you, leave the Internet, and go find some books to read!

1. Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl.
2. The Slave Ship. Marcus Rediker.
3. The Half has Never Been Told. Edward E. Baptist.
4. The Civil Disobedience Handbook: A Brief History and Practical Advice for the Politically Disenfranchised. James Tracy, Editor
5. A Fighting Chance. Elizabeth Warren.
6. Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Tom Friedman.
7. Poetry as Insurgent Art. Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
8. Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Sunil Yapa.
9. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Danielle Evans.
10. Teaching the Cat to Sit. Michelle Theall.
11. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. Alice Walker.
12. Overcoming Speechlessness. Alice Walker.
13. Silent Spring. Rachel Carson.
14. Ishmael. Daniel Quinn.
15. A Chinamen’s Chance. Eric Liu.
16. The Other One. Hasanthika Sirisena.
17. Culture Jam. Kalle Lasn.
18. Power. Linda Hogan.
19. Mean Spirit. Linda Hogan.
20. Solar Storms. Linda Hogan.
21. Republic of Outsiders. Alissa Quart.
22. The Twentieth Day of January. Ted Allbeury.
23. Deceit and Other Possibilities. Vanessa Hua.
24. Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Charles M. Blow.
25. Unbought and Unbossed. Shirley Chisholm.
26. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. Lucille Clifton.
27. Popular Songs: The Political Poems of 1890-1820. Percy Bysshe Shelley.
28. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Cambell.
29. Women, Race, & Class. Angela Davis.
30. Don’t Bite the Hook. Pema Chondron .
31. When Pain is the Doorway. Pema Chondron.
32. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Pema Chondron.
33. The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Pema Chondron.
34. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ursula K. Le Guin.
35. Four Ways to Forgiveness. Ursula K. Le Guin.
36. Tehanu. Ursula K. Le Guin.
37. Sun Dogs. Lee Maracle.
38. Daughters. Lee Maracle.
39. Ravensong. Lee Maracle.
40. Perma Red. Debra Magpie Earling.
41. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks with Barbara Smith.
42. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. Beverly Guy-Sheftall.
43. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Melissa Harris-Perry.
44. Divine Rebels: Saints, Mystics, Change Agents – And You. Caroline Myss.
45. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Audre Lorde.
46. Wretched of the Earth. Franz Fanon.
47. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Sebastian Junger.
48. Indian Killer. Sherman Alexie. (to start)
49. Demand the Impossible. Bill Ayers.
50. Rules for Radicals. Saul Alinsky.
51. Ten Days in a Mad-House. Nellie Bly.
52. India’s Struggle For Independence. Bipin Chandra.
53. Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha). M. K. Gandhi.
54. Emotional Agility. Susan David.
55. Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. Jessa Crispin.

This week I asked my 500ish online friends for recommendations for books to read. These are people I trust, not strangers. A diverse group, although as a middle aged white woman I know I will always be pushing to do better–no friends with disabilities responded, for example.

I need to get off the Internet more often right now, so that I don’t continue to get sucked into the complete partisan hell circus my country is unleashing every single day at us now. I want to more fully join the new creative, fun, difficult, and beautiful new resistance. Be a better accomplice and friend. I will still be online sometimes. Yet, as a creator I need big infusions of slowing down, resting, listening, wandering, and inspiration to be myself and to do my work well. Outrage helps my work too, but not all outrage all the time. That’s just not me. I’ve aged out of being able to sustain rage. When I don’t demand these other things, I become a reactor, not a creator. I become unrecognizable to myself. I end up sharing “news” that is actually lies. (Yep, I did that just yesterday. Thank God for smart friends who check when in my outrage I forget to!) I don’t think that being just another reactor and tantrum thrower is what we need right now (although I really needed to be that for a while this week). I think we need to remember who we really are. And by “we” I mean me and most of the people I know.

I asked specifically for creative, inspiring, resistance books. Both fiction and non-fiction. This is what I heard back in 3 days! Wow. I forgot what a deeply curious and gloriously book nerdy group of humans my friends are. Yay! The numbers in the list just represent the order in which I received the recommendations from various parts of my online world. I am not categorizing them–the point is to explore the list and find something new and important to you. Personally, since I want to read all these books, I will be reading them out of order in whatever order I can borrow the books from others, check them out of our library, afford to purchase them (some came very highly recommended), and find them personally inspiring. I own the Viktor Frankl book and all the Ursula K. Le Guin books if you live nearby and want to borrow them. Also, if you’re a friend and you notice that we’ve missed a creative resistance book that you love (in our few days of collective online brainstorming), please share it with me and I’ll add it to my reading list.

If you don’t have time to read 53+ resistance books this year, then follow me on FB or Twitter. I will be reading and sharing excerpts from these books online in 2017 and beyond. Trying to recommend specific books for specific friends. And hopefully, one day soon, I’ll find myself writing a book of creative resistance too. But this is not that year for me. This is a year of listening even more closely to my/our ancestors. To all of the people and groups who have already been doing this for a long time. Some for a very long time.

Note: I occasionally update this list with new books as trusted people and authors recommend them to me.