Our Unruly Book List

Books that open our eyes and untame our minds

“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My house bursts with book piles: they live by my bedside, in our living room, on our coffee table, on every shelf and surface. For better or worse (I still can’t decide) I’m always living in at least five books, all at once.

My current writing setup, where books became a makeshift shelf for my words. I imagine my words resting on the shoulders of giants as I type away.

When I was a kid, I’d construct my dream home in my mind, changing it, molding it, redesigning it in the depths of my imagination. Two rooms remained steadfast in my many years of culling and shapeshifting this dream house: one is an art studio, made of floor-to-ceiling glass walls that I could perpetually paint on, wash away, begin again. The other is the library. I imagine its nostalgic smell of old books, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a gliding wooden ladder to climb and reach the highest, most out-of-reach collections, oversized chairs with throw blankets to flop in, sun-soaked by the windows on the far wall, inviting those who enter to curl up and read a while.

In my actual house, every surface of my home becomes my library.

Last week, I posted about what it takes to cultivate an untamable mind, and for me, books play such a foundational part of that. Together, we started to make Our Unruly Book List—books that have cracked us open, decolonized our minds, refused to let us see something the same way again.

Thank you, everyone, who took the time to share your seminal books! Keep adding your titles in the comments or by replying to this email, and I’ll keep updating this list so we have it all together in one place.

I’ve organized the list in three categories:

1. My Unruly Books

2. Readers’ Unruly Books

3. An embarrassing-but-honest category called “Books I Should Have Read,” which I know will further expand my thinking and analysis, but I still haven’t made my way all the way through (because of the five-books-at-once habit). I added this as a sort of accountability to myself for my forthcoming reading list, and to normalize that we are all just still learning as we go, or as the Zapatista phrase says that I learned from my current read Palestine 1492 , we are caminando preguntando, asking questions as we walk.

I updated my bookshop, so you’ll find all these books linked there. You can support my work by ordering them from there, or better yet get them from your local indie bookshop or your local library (but please not from Amazon!)

Without further ado, below is our Unruly Book List!

From Aida (refugee) camp, I learn sometimes we must ask questions as we jump. May we learn the answers together.

Lomda Quiquivix from her book Palestine 1492

My Unruly Book List

*Books with an asterisk are repeated across lists

Nonfiction:

All About Love by bell hooks

Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown*

They Called me a Lioness by Ahed Tamimi & Dena Takruri

Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work by Akilah S. Richards (thanks, Kate!)

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Teaching to Transgress and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks

Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley

Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

How To do Nothing and Saving Time by Jenny Odell

Palestine 1492 by Linda Quiquivix (I’m still reading this but it already falls in this category)

How we Show Up by Mia Birdsong

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire*

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer*

The Book of Delights and Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

Sacred Instructions by Sherrie Mitchell Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset (She Who Brings the Light)

Fiction:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (I’m still reading this but it already falls in this category)

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

All This could be Different by Sara Thankam Mathews

Poetry:

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz (reading now but already it falls into this category)

Readers’ Unruly Book List

Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown* (thanks, Addie!)

Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work by Akilah S. Richards (tanks, Kate!)

Anything Audre Lorde (Thanks, Fran!)

Anything bell hooks (Thanks, Fran!)

Descent & Rising by Carly Mountain (thanks, Addie!)

Everything David Graeber wrote! (thanks, Alec!)

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad (Thanks, Fran!)

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (thanks, Edward!)

Anything Mariam Kaba (Thanks, Fran!)

No Logo by Naomi Klein(Thanks, Fran!)

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire* (Thanks, Fran!)

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer* (thanks, Addie & Edward!)

Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering by Rosemarie Freeney Harding with Rachel Elizabeth Harding (Thanks, Sasha!)

Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruja Benjamin (thanks, Christine!)

Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy and Borders By Vanessa Angélica Villareal (Thanks, Christine!)

Books On The Docket:

(but are in some state of not yet or half-read, on my shelf, ready to imminently expand my mind)

A People’s History of the United States and by Howard Zinn (I’m maybe most embarrassed that this lives on this list as half-finished books…eep)

*Three Mothers by Anna Malaika Tubbs

*Erased by Anna Malaika Tubbs

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

*The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

*What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcom X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish

Except for Palestine by Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick

We Do this ‘Til we Free Us by Mariame Kaba

Let this Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshimi and Piepzna-Samarashinha

The Hundred Year War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Inflamed: Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Murya and Raj Patel

*Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Between the World and Me and The Message by Ta-Nehesi Coates

* means added after the original list was written. I’ll keep adding!

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