March Reading List
These books might change your life
Mem by Bethany C Morrow
Soft Magic by Upile Chisala
Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
One by Kathryn Otoshi
Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength by Chanequa Walker-Barnes
Severance by Ling Ma
Find the complete list at Bookshop or on Amazon.
For me, a book with the potential to be life-changing is one that gives you a new perspective on some aspect of your life. It offers a practice that could be transformative, or an insight into a life that I’d never otherwise get to see, or a way of looking at the world that changes something fundamental about my understanding of it. These books offer one or more of these things.
While the the list is mostly non-fiction, my fiction picks on this list were books that left me in wonderment at what the author managed to convey. Mem is a slim work of speculative fiction that questions what is it that makes us whole humans. How do our life experiences, good and bad, shape us into who we are? Can we be ourselves outside of these experiences? What about the things the rock our worlds down to the core? Severance tells a story of surviving a pandemic that turns out to be apocalyptic, and asks us to consider our relationship with our careers, and how much we define ourselves by our ability to keep showing up, even when everything is falling apart.
Tiny Beautiful Things is a book of questions and advice that changed the way I think about how we ask questions. Often the question that we ask isn’t necessarily the thing we’re looking for advice about, there’s often a question behind the question, and feelings that we’re trying to address by actions. Set Boundaries, Find Peace does something similar with boundaries: we often have the language to set boundaries with others, but we struggle with feeling guilty about setting a boundary, so we look for language that will prevent others from reacting in negative ways. This book empowers us to do the work of setting boundaries.
Sometimes, we face burnout because there are areas in our lives that do not allow us to set boundaries, or to find rest. In Too Heavy a Yoke, Dr. Walker-Barnes takes us through the ways that the Strong Black Woman trope is doing serious harm to Black women. Soft Magic, serves to remind Black women that we are more than strong, that Blackness is a thing to be celebrated, that our humanity is complex and beautiful. Finally, the children’s book on this list, One, reminds us the big change starts with small actions, sometimes, just one person who stands up to a bully.
Choose one or a few of these books to read through, and see what comes up for you. One, and Mem are pretty short, Severance will suck you in, and Soft Magic and Tiny Beautiful Things can be read piecemeal. Take your time through Set Boundaries, Find Peace and Too Heavy a Yoke, to sit with all of the things you’ll encounter in those books.
Happy reading!
