Putting this list out there because I love getting book recommendations from friends and enjoy reading the many lists that people put out at the end of the year. This year I decided to include books that I have read aloud to my children at bedtime. As you can see, we like to choose an author and read as many of their works as we can access (usually through the local library). If you’ve read any of these books, or have recommendations for me, I’d love to chat!
Like last year, I sorted books by category: Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction Faith-Based, Memoir, and Fiction. All of the children’s books are fiction, and I even would recommend them for adults! I included my favorite quote from each of the books I read, which you may find helpful when deciding which book you’d like to add to your list.
A People’s History: “My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.”
Sing, Unburied, Sing: “Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”
The Fire This Time: “You can’t tiptoe toward justice. You can’t walk up to the door all polite and knock once or twice, hoping someone’s home. Justice is a door that, when closed, must be kicked in.”
Men We Reaped: “I wonder why silence is the sound of our subsumed rage, our accumulated grief. I decide this is not right, that I must give voice to this story.”
Salvage the Bones: “After Mama died, Daddy said, ‘What are you crying for? Stop crying. Crying ain’t going to change anything.’ We never stopped crying. We just did it quieter. We hid it. I learned how to cry so that almost no tears leaked out of my eyes, so that I swallowed the hot salty water of them and felt them running down my throat. This was the only thing that we could do. I swallow and squint through the tears, and I run.”
Rules, Britannia: Regions and their Differences and Words that Guarantee Confusion were most helpful sections
Slaves Among Us: “Complete psychological restoration of survivors takes a minimum of 6 months--and this is the best-case scenario. It could take up to three years.” Important as governments and organizations consider time frames for survivors and their reintegration into society.
Art + Faith “The art of waiting requires us to die to ourselves and depend on God...There is no art without waiting for the paint to dry.”
Culture Care “To make culture inhabitable, to make it a place of nurture for creativity, we must all choose to give away beauty gratuitously.”
Silence and Beauty “Doubt is not the opposite of faith but only an honest admission of our true condition, wrestling against the fallen world in which God seems to be silent.”
Animal Farm “Whatever happened she would remain faithful, work hard, carry out the orders that were given to her, and accept the leadership of Napoleon. But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled.”
Hamnet “He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”
The Vanishing Half “The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.”
Four Hundred Souls “Looking back on the past 400 years, this nation’s story of racism can seem almost inevitable. But it didn’t have to be this way. At critical turning points throughout history, people made deliberate choices to construct and reinforce a racist America. Our generation has the opportunity to make different choices; ones that lead to greater human dignity and justice, but only if we pay heed to our history and respond with the truth and courage that confronting racism requires.”
Suffer Strong “God made you to do the hard thing in the good story He’s writing in your life.”
A Woman Is No Man “She had been raised to think love was something only a man could give her. For so many years she had believed that if a woman was good enough, obedient enough, she might be worthy of a man’s love. But now, reading her books, she was beginning to find a different kind of love: a love that came from inside her, when she was all alone, reading by the window. And through this love, she was beginning to believe, for the first time in her life, that maybe she was worthy after all.”
Dear Ijeawele “Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person.”
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks “The story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.”
Adorning the Dark “The Kingdom is coming, but the Kingdom is here. That’s why we’re homesick, and it’s also why we might as well get busy planting.”
The Gospel Comes with a Housekey “Those who live out radically-ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom.….Radically ordinary hospitality is reflected in Christian homes that resemble those of the first century. Such homes are communal; they are deep and wide in Christian tradition and practice. As Christians, we are a set-apart people, and we do things differently. We don’t worry about what the unbelieving neighbors think, because the unbelieving neighbors are right here sharing our table.”
La casa de los espíritus “Blanca se rió con la historia y dijo que eso era imposible, porque las gallinas nacen estúpidas y débiles y los zorros nacen astutos y fuertes, pero Pedro Tercero no se rió. Se quedó toda la tarde pensativo, rumiando el cuento del zorro y las gallinas, y tal vez ése fue el instante en que el niño comenzó a hacerse hombre.”
