Books that make a bigger difference than stuff

A short list of what I'd read if I was trying to enrich my life without spending a lot of money

I hope you took a break last week to enjoy some nourishing food and company of folks you care about and want to spend time with. (Or, maybe you took a real break and didn't gather, didn't fuss with a big meal, and rebooted!) I figured no one needed another blog post/newsletter/whatever in their inbox, so I skipped last week. You're welcome. ;)

And now, here we are, facing down the avalanche of sales pitches and flashy ads and compelling (let's be honest!) discounts.

So, I'm re-visiting a list I made this time last year.

As I re-read this post, I found myself mostly agreeing with last-year-Bethann:

• I do love giving gifts.

• I absolutely love sending (and receiving!!!! hint, hint) snail mail.

• I am, again, basically done with prepping gift materials for this year, thanks to a method I discuss in that post.

• I wouldn't remove any books from the list that post centers on. Those books have absolutely changed my life.

But, last-year-me and this-year-me diverge on a few points. I'm going to tell you about them because I find it very helpful to eavesdrop on people when they think through showing care for themselves and others.

In last year's post, I didn't actually mention how I feel (or felt) about receiving gifts.

Truth is, I LOVE them...IF the gift is actually meaningful. It doesn't need to be costly, but if it's junk and trinkets just because someone felt they needed to give something, I actually feel the gap in meaning harder than not receiving anything.

So this year, I'm going out of my way to make it easier for people to materially show care to me, if they so choose. I have ZERO expectation of gifts, but if someone is going to buy something, I have ear-marked (ahem, sent links to hubby and others) some things I'd be delighted to receive this year. I may or may not get any of them. Better, maybe I'll get homemade things!!! Something to eat, hang on my fridge or from my ears--now that would make my day!

There are now, however, some other books I'd put on my "change my life for cheap" list, along with some other goodies. These include [1]:

Social Change Now is a workbook for figuring out which of your skills and interests are best suited to helping improve your community and the world while not overworking yourself or turning into a hero-complex megalomaniac. This little workbook kicks ass! Get it!

Try re-reading books that were meaningful to you as a kid, or in a previous phase of your life. As I mentioned a while back, doing that helped me fall back in love with reading and writing for fun.

Rosalie Edge: Hawk of Mercy will blow your mind if you're interested in wildlife and habitat conservation. This is an untold story that needs to go viral. Let's just say you never knew the Audubon society could be the bad guys...(HT a little free library where I found this, and my dad--who I gifted it to last holiday season--for hopping up and down insisting I read it.)

In Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl puts everything into perspective. If you're feeling sorry for yourself, this book shouldn't shame you or drive you to play some misery comparison game. But, in it's very few pages, it really can give you some perspective on how to deal with human suffering.

Four Thousand Weeks --I know I'm late on this one, but yes. This one is worth reading. Understanding where our industrialized sense of time came from really helped my time-blind/hyper-focusing brain. And, it was liberating to be forced to admit my to-do list will never be done. (Those insights only scratch the surface. I really did appreciate this one.)

The Lemon Tree is a classic analysis of how the situation in Palestine got to where it is. This one pulls no punches, is loaded with historical context, and yet uses the narrative of two kids and their families living (at separate times) in the same house, with the same fruit tree. This book utterly transformed my understanding of Gaza when I read the book soon after it came out. My book club read it this year at my suggestion, and I was again boggled by the significance of so many historical decisions and where that has led the world. If you want to understand this situation better, you can't go wrong reading this one.

Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight, from Ursula K. Le Guin, is an astounding, not-what-it-looks-like, raunchy allegory of human-wildlife relationships in North America, packaged like a children's book. I read it months ago, in about 20 minutes, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

Our Souls at Night, Group Living & Other Recipes, and The Other Significant Others are three books I read (or re-read, Our Souls) this year that profoundly inspired me to reconsider the isolated, nuclear family framework for how we life and care for (or don't) each other. I'm not saying this just because I don't have kids (by choice). I'm saying this because I have for years been interested in alternative kinship, alloparenting, and various other models of thinking about how we commit to people who we deeply care about...even or especially when we're not legally tied to them through blood or marriage. These three books will get you thinking about what we think is normal, what we judge as acceptable, and how much richer our lives could be if we embraced lifelong commitments to more people.

And I'll end there, because the vital work of caring for our fellow humans is the spirit of the season [2]--no matter what holidays you celebrate in the next month-plus.

How about you?

What have you read this year that significantly impacted how you think, live, and relate to people, more-than-human animals, and the planet?

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P.S. You still have time to get 30% off of Teaching and Mentoring Writers in the Sciences! Just use the code UCPNEW. Pre-orders started shipping TODAY!!!, so if you want to get your favorite scientist(s) a stocking stuffer, place your order directly with the press and there's a good chance (if you're in the U.S.; can't make any promises about international shipping). This is a labor of love I co-wrote with Stephen Heard to help folks in the sciences connect with the 50+ years’ of research on how to effectively teach writing. It comes out from University of Chicago Press in a few weeks!

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NOTES

[1] I'm not linking to any of these because you'll know best where you want to find them: your public library, audio book apps, or your local brick and mortar shops or second-hand book stores.

[2] If you're wondering what any of this has to do with academia or scicomm, I'll invite you to just splash around in the archives here for a bit. Caring for humans and the planet is what this is all about.