This summer I started leaving books around the house and reading them in little bursts while I watched my toddler play. There’s still a stack on my nightstand, but having them in other places has made for more book time (and less screen time).
Here’s the 5 books I loved most this summer, plus some pictures of how we do books around my house.
1. I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
I live primarily in white spaces and have almost always ministered in majority-white churches. It is so important for me to listen to what Austin Channing Brown is saying, and to reckon with the ministry I have (and don’t have).
If you are in a white-majority church and/or have ever thought or heard someone say, “What can we do to get them [a.k.a. people of color] to come to us,” then you need to read this book.
Here’s a taste:
“I am convinced that one of the reasons white churches favor dialogue is that the parameters of dialogue can be easily manipulated to benefit whiteness. Tone policing takes priority over listening to the pain inflicted on people of color. People of color are told they should be nicer, kinder, more gracious, less angry in their delivery, or that white people’s needs, feelings, and thoughts should be given equal weight. But we cannot negotiate our way to reconciliation. White people need to listen, to pause so that people of color can clearly articulate both the disappointment they’ve endured and what it would take for reparations to be made. Too often, dialogue functions as a stall tactic, allowing white people to believe they’ve done something heroic when the real work is yet to come.” — Austin Channing Brown in I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, p.170
The book’s last chapter, “Standing in the Shadow of Hope,” and Brown’s recent blog post “What If?” are sticking with me, reverberating in my soul as I figure out how to live in a world that isn’t as nice as I thought it was—a world made by God but marred by death.
2. The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
I believe that my body is fundamentally good and that, in my body, I will experience eternity with God. While this isn’t a Christian-qua-Christian book, so much of the author’s message resonates with the belief that what God made is good. It’s a quick read (i.e. I read it in one naptime), and I’m still thinking about what it means for me.
Here’s a taste:
“Removing ourselves as a barrier to other folks’ radical self-love only becomes possible when we are willing to fear-facingly examine our beliefs. It is not enough to transform our relationship with our physical and emotional selves and leave the world around us unexamined or unaltered. Messages we received about the validity and invalidity of our own bodies did not occur in a vacuum. We were simultaneously receiving and spreading those messages. Dismantling oppression and our role in it demands that we explore where we have been complicit in the system of body terrorism while employing the same compassion we need to explore our complicity in our internalized body shame. Regrettably, this is where too many of us choose to exit the radical self-love train. We desperately want our good intentions and niceness to be enough. Although each of us is inherently ‘enough’ to be loved, valued, cared for, and treated with respect, our efforts to raze systems of oppression and injustice will require more than our niceness. ‘But I am a good person; I am nice to everyone’ never toppled one systemic inequity nor interrupted the daily acts of body terrorism levels against humans throughout history. You are enough. Being good or nice is not.” —Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love, p.77
3. Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans
Reading the Bible is a little weird for former evangelicals. I haven’t really figured it out, but Held Evan’s new book is helping me see the way forward. Oddly enough, my biggest takeaway from Inspired is greater comfort in children’s Bibles that are retellings of the Bible’s stories, not just verbatim, copy-and-paste from the Bible.
Here’s an intro to the book, and here’s a taste:
“No one lives in general—not even Christ or his church. The Christian life isn’t about intellectual assent to a set of propositions, but about following Jesus in the context of actual marriages, actual communities, actual churches, actual political differences, actual budget meetings, actual cultural changes, actual racial tensions, actual theological disagreements. Like it or not, you can’t be a Christian on your own. Following Jesus is a group activity, and from the beginning it’s been a messy one; it’s been an incarnated one. The reason the Bible includes so many seemingly irrelevant details about donkeys falling into pits and women covering their heads and Cretans being liars and Jews and Gentiles sharing meals together is because, believe it or not, God cares about that stuff—because God cares about us.” —Rachel Held Evans in Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, p.206
4. I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make The Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam
While the target audience is moms who work fulltime (e.g. me), I found the book applicable to my husband’s work/life balance since he’s the one with a time-consuming, inflexible job.
Biggest takeaway: think about life in terms of a whole week and even a whole month or year, rather than focusing on the shape of individual days. All the time spent with family on your days off counts as family time and is just as real as the long shifts at work.
5. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink
A practical, research-based study of when to do things—from timing meetings to understanding the mental impact of beginnings, midpoints, and conclusions. The author has these great resources if you’re curious.
Biggest takeaway: midpoints are powerful motivators if you notice them. You can make the midpoint of a project a milestone for gauging your process and refocusing your work.
P.S. Here’s how we do books at my house….
I think there are at least 8 places we stash books for my toddler—so we can plop down just about anywhere to read a book. The game-changer was putting a cookbook holder on the dining room table so I could read to him and still have my hands free to eat.
