A Reading List for the Next Four

Building community, finding messages of hope, and beginning the fight

As I prepared for this post, I did a lot of research across the many book groups I’m in (here on Substack and on TikTok). I also collected recommendations various friends and colleagues were suggesting. As a union employee, I’m always collecting titles about organizing, so I dug into that list as well. I read a lot of reviews of the ones I haven’t read, in an attempt to bring you the best recommendations. I’ve linked all of them to my favorite local bookstore, but encourage you to order from your local bookstore if you’re able.

One great way to begin building community might be to gather a group of friends and read and discuss one of these titles together! This could even be done via Zoom if your community is spread out.

Please drop additional recommendations in the comments!

Understanding Fascism
These two have really been making the rounds since election day. You’ve probably seen screenshots of On Tyranny on social media. These books offer important insight, from history, on the markers of a fascist take over.

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them By Jason F. Stanley
As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century By Timothy Snyder
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

Messages of Hope
Many of us feel hopeless, but it’s important to remember that we aren’t the first to take on tough fights. These next few books offer essay collections to remind us that battles will be won and that the fight is worth it.

Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times by Carolina De Robertis (Editor)
Radical Hope is a collection of letters—to ancestors, to children five generations from now, to strangers in grocery lines, to any and all who feel weary and discouraged—written by award-winning novelists, poets, political thinkers, and activists. Provocative and inspiring, Radical Hope offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of the love and courage needed to navigate this time of upheaval, uncertainty, and fear, in view of the recent US presidential election. (Published in 2017. Who would have thought we’d need these essays to weather another Trump presidency?)

Hope in the Darkness by Rebecca Solnit
Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable.

Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--And How You Can, Too By Ijeoma Oluo
Oluo aims to show how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Looking at many of our most powerful systems—like education, media, labor, health, housing, policing, and more—she highlights what people are doing to create change for intersectional racial equity. She also illustrates various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live.

Get to Work
The following books feature movement creators and organizers who offer tips and experiences from the front lines to help you begin thinking about how you will get involved in the next four years.

How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong
In How We Show Up, Mia shows that what separates us isn’t only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. In response to the fear and discomfort we feel, we’ve built walls, and instead of leaning on each other, we find ourselves leaning on concrete. Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up—literally and figuratively—points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together By Heather McGhee
McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm—the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others…McGhee [also] finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: the benefits we gain when people come together across race to accomplish what we simply can’t do on our own. The Sum of Us is not only a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here but also a heartfelt message, delivered with startling empathy, from a black woman to a multiracial America. It leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

Do The Work: A guide to understanding power and creating change By Megan Pillow and Roxane Gay
Power is complex. But Do The Work is a guide to navigating those complexities. From ancient theories of power to contemporary examples, from cultural patterns to personal insights, this guide provides a foundation for examining hierarchies and inequalities and establishes a framework for understanding power and how it shapes our lives and communities. Between these pages, theory, commentary, and analysis create an engaging, creative, and mindful reading experience. This guide features approachable overviews of complex topics, thought-provoking questions, evocative illustrations, pages for your reflections, and steps we can all take to reframe our relationship to power and reinvigorate our desire to empower the people around us.

The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart By Alicia Garza
Long before #BlackLivesMatter became a rallying cry for this generation, Garza had spent the better part of two decades learning and unlearning some hard lessons about organizing. The lessons she offers are different from the “rules for radicals” that animated earlier generations of activists, and diverge from the charismatic, patriarchal model of the American civil rights movement. She reflects instead on how making room amongst the woke for those who are still awakening can inspire and activate more people to fight for the world we all deserve. This is the story of one woman’s lessons through years of bringing people together to create change. Most of all, it is a new paradigm for change for a new generation of changemakers, from the mind and heart behind one of the most important movements of our time.

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice By Mariame Kaba
“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.

Let This Radicalize You By Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, Maya Schenwar
Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue, and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers.

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want Ruha Benjamin
Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Vividly recounting her personal experiences and those of her family, Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects…Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

Some Historic Context
These are a couple books that take a historical look at how ordinary people can make great change. I’d also recommend following Sharon McMahon on Instagram @SharonSaysSo or here on Substack. She is a former social studies teacher and has great info and insights.

Normal Women by Philipa Gregory
In this ambitious and groundbreaking book, [Philipa Gregory] tells the story of England over 900 years, for the very first time placing women—some fifty per cent of the population—center stage. Using research skills honed in her work as one of our foremost historical novelists, Gregory trawled through court records, newspapers, and journals to find highwaywomen and beggars, murderers and brides, housewives and pirates, female husbands and hermits. The “normal women” you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency, and built ships, corn mills and houses. They committed crimes or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things, and rioted. A lot.

The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon
In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time… This is a book about what really made America – and Americans – great. McMahon’s cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

Personal Resistance
I wasn’t sure exactly where to place this one, but it’s a book that I think might appeal to many. I have seen a lot of buzz around this book and thought it went well with my “Merry Resistmas” post. I think it will be important for us to understand capitalism and its power over our lives in order to resist it.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to Do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.