The Library

Dear Books, I Love You — by Laura Green

I love paper books. I love how their stories sit in them all quiet on the shelf; stories that feel endlessly spacious all slotted into one tidy row. I love how they change and evolve while they’re sitting there – I pick the same book up after days or years and the story inside it is changed. Subtly, quietly. Just like me. I love that there are physical marks from the last time I read it or, if it’s a used book, the last time you read it. I love marks that show me what made my heart leap last time. Or your heart.

I love reading the same books as you – you open the cover and a story unfolds inside you, and it’s the same story that’s unfolded inside me. In that moment there’s a space in us that’s the same. We overlap. And it’s the same space that’s been inside thousands of other people over time and across the planet.

When I’m broken up and broken open books help me feel connected to the bigger space around me. They make me feel like, though I might be lost, the space I’m lost in is known, and it might know me, and I might be able to trust it even though I cannot see the map of it.

I want to share books with you - the books that have held me well during times of wild unknowing. 

All of us, here on this page, want to share books with you. 

Want to share books with us? Click here to do just that!

​Here are the books that I read over and over...

• Wilding; Returning Nature to our Farm, Isabella Tree.

• Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction, and Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger.

• Rumi especially translated by Coleman Barks

• Hafiz especially translated by Daniel Ladinsky

• Everything Pema Chodron has written

• The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali the translation I have (which I like) is by Sri Swami Satchidananda

• The Sonnets to Orpheus by Ranier Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell

• Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu - Here is a translation by Stephen Mitchell

• Incarnadine by Mary Szybist

My best friend, librarian Emmy Garr:

• When Sadness is At Your Door by Eva Eland

• The Rabbit Listened by Corru Doerrfield

• Sad Book by Michael Rosen

• Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant

• Big Boys Cry by Jonty Howley

• My Happy Life by Rose Lagercrantz

• The Goodbye Book by Todd Parr

• The Invisible String By Patrice Karst

Here are some books Emmy recommends that deal specifically with race:

• Not My Idea; A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham

• The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López

• All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman
   

Emmy would also be happy to help you come up with a reading list curated specifically for your family’s need. Email her at for personalized tending by the world’s best librarian.

My cousin, Karen Green:

• The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

• Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine

• Radical Acceptance (or anything else) by Tara Brach

• When Things Fall Apart (or anything else) by Pema Chodron

Poet and niece, Hayley Jones:

• The Power, by Naomi Alderman (creepy!)

• The Nickel Boys, by Colso Whitehead (powerful!)

• The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (heart-wrenching!)

• The Library at Mt. Char, by Scott Hawkins (thrilling!)

• Magical Negro, by Morgan Parker (lyrical!)

• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erika L. Sánchez (relatable!)

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tkarczuk (that is a hard name to spell!)
   

At this point Hayley stopped being about to parenthetically (and enthusiastically) summarize the books’ effect. We don’t know why, and it’s not really our business - but I hope it had something to do with joy and starlings...
 

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen María Machado

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

• There There by Tommy Orange

• Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

• Pachinko by Min Jin-Lee

• Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enriquez

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang 

• The Water Museum by Luís Alberto Urrea

• Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell 

My dear friend and Grief House co-parent, she who brings us Recipes for Quarantine, Alyna O’Hanon:
 

• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius By Dave Eggers

• Living Beautifully with Uncertainty & Change by Pema Chodron

• When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

• The Book of Joy; Lasting Hapiness in a Changing World by The Dalai Lama Desmond Tutu and Carlton Abrams

• Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with The Universe by Yumi Sakugawa

• How to Breathe By Ashley Neese

Artist Chelsea Granger (she who made the gorgeous header and cover art for our new site!) has a long and beautiful list of helpful books on her website. Click here to see her recommendations.

Click here for an Anti-Racist Reading List for Children  
Offered by EmbraceRace - an organization working to raise a generation of children who are thoughtful, informed and brave about race.

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Click here for an Anti-Racist Reading List for Adults
Offered by The Stacks - a podcast about books that support independent bookstores.

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Click here to read novelist Jesmyn Ward's Vanity Fair article: "Even in a pandemic, even in grief, I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead that sing to me, from their boat to my boat, on the sea of time."