A favorite grounding practice at the Law Center is reading! Below is a list of a few of our favorite books and articles from last year. These writings inspired us, brought us to tears, taught us a little bit about ourselves, and so much more! 

Our Favorite Sci-Fi Reads:

Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather (Recommended by Erika)

Featuring a group of nuns traveling through space in a giant living spaceship animal, this short little book and its sequel have everything I would look for in a work of speculative fiction: a sapphic love story, anti-imperialist sentiments, creative sci-fi creatures, collective decision-making, spiritual-ethical conundrums, commentary on religious establishment, women in science, deep friendship among women, and journeys through space.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers (Recommended by Jay) 

In college, a professor told me to never write the word “reality.” In postmodernism, he said, realities exist but not reality. There are only perspectives. More recently though, I’ve been guided by the following aphorism: reality is that which resists misinterpretation. This aphorism claims reality does exist, even though it can’t present itself fully. We can know we’re warmer if interpretations integrate and colder if interpretations get repulsed. Chambers’ “A Prayer for the Crown-Shy” served as a short, poetic mediation on this approach to reality. The book’s guiding aphorism is “Without the use of constructs, you will reveal few mysteries. Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail. Find the strength to pursue both . . . [W]elcome comfort for without it you cannot stay strong.”

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells (Recommended by Sue)

Really this whole series is incredible. I wouldn’t have ever thought I could  love a series called Murderbot!, Martha Wells identifies as non-neurotypical and has written such  an amazing and so relatable neuro spicy character.  So much in this book is about power over, media control but mostly about how we relate to each other, and how we can do it better.

Our Favorite Children's Books:

My Olive Tree by Hazar Elbayya (Recommended by Tia)

Wow. I cried while reading this picture book to my almost three year old daughter for the first (and second and third) time. My Olive Tree is about Salam, a little girl in Palestine who waits and waits and waits for her olive seed to grow, only for it to be stomped on by soldiers once it finally grows into a sprout. Salam’s grandpa organizes all of their friends and neighbors to come together and surprise her by not only replacing her one olive plant, but by planting olive trees as far as the eyes can see.

Our Favorite Nonfiction Books:

The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Recommended by Erika)

This book completely changed the ways I think about community, disability, and mutual aid. I so appreciated the love the author clearly holds for her disabled community and the honest exploration of the messy, confusing, loving, and deep ways that disabled people care for each other and build movements together. The book centers disabled people in a way that uplifts the wisdom and skills they have to offer the world, and reminds us that in a world where most of us are or will become disabled at some point in our lives, it makes no sense to build a world or a movement that only works for people with perfectly able bodies and minds. Rather than reading like a manifesto, this book uses stories to bring its points home with compassion and a sense of realness.

No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred by Klee Benally (Recommended by Veryl)

This is a very challenging yet resonant book for me to read as a radical lawyer who collaborates with Indigenous clients on land back. After decades of participating in litigation and legislation, Klee arrives at a total rejection of all legal and policy interventions as merely reproducing colonial relations. In other words, there is no such thing as de-colonizing the law (a framework that some of us at SELC have embraced). Along the way, Klee reflects back on the betrayal of movement “olders” (whom he distinguishes from elders), discusses meaningful solidarity versus allyship performance, and distinguishes liberal reforms (under which much of our existing work would fall) from liberation. Defense of the sacred necessitates direct action and destruction of the state on the one hand, and ongoing interrelationality and restoration of nonhierarchical relationships with all living beings and the land on the other. A lot of the work we conduct at SELC is rightfully put under critical scrutiny; at the same time, I can’t help but wish that Klee were still alive to hold a conversation with us about some of the interstices that I feel exists between total rejection and tactical intervention towards defense of the sacred and our collective liberation.

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Vincent Bevins (Recommended by Ricardo)

"From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. Acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins carried out hundreds of interviews around the world, guided by a single, puzzling question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?

The result is a stirring work of history that connects events in a dozen countries and reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future."

Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution by Christina Heatherton (Recommended by Dorian)

If capitalism is a global system, then so too are the most potent counterinsurgencies that form against it. This book was an incredible read that situated Mexico on the global stage of struggle, most particularly during the time that the United States rose as the global hegemon in the era of what historians call the New Imperialism. The author took time and diligence  to weave - poetically, spatially, and materially - the threads of internationalism with Mexico. She also showed us how Mexico was the springboard for America’s global hegemony. Without the use of brute military force, the U.S. was able to control much of Mexico through the use of debt, capital, and the appointment of public and private officials. The result of this was a country whose resources, land relations, and institutions were governed by the U.S. This was a recipe for civil unrest, which would help bring about the Mexican Revolution. But because of this, Mexico also became a hub for revolutionaries from all around the world, which the book highlights.  Even so, the author is not suggesting that internationalism was composed of individuals, despite her showing us forms of internationalism that existed beyond organizations. This is no Great Man Theory book. Instead, Christine Heatherton demonstrated how historical conjunctures arrive and manifest themselves on particular individuals of curious importance, and how through their vantage points, we’re able to see the ways in which  internationalism had an existence and impact beyond the organizations of the day. As a Mexican, this book gives me a closer place to work from, and it points me to honor the revolutionary legacy I am a part of. 

Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Recommended by Tobias)

This book has helped me better understand how modernity works and how I am thoroughly enmeshed in its ways of thinking, doing and being on a deep level – and how I can work with others to begin to get out of them. One of my favorite tools in this book is “the bus within us.” It uses the metaphor of a driver and passengers to represent all the voices and feelings inside me that go off when I react to something. 

Loving Corrections, by Adrienne Maree Brown (Recommended by Sue)

Once again AMB brings to us essays and conversations about how to relate and most specifically shares lots of good ideas and examples about how to repair when we’ve acted out patterns that harm our “loving connection."

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Recommended by Ricardo)

This book of over 700 pages (or, if you want to do what I did and listen to it, which takes over 24 hours) talks about how the conventional wisdom regarding human social “evolution” and the development of unequal power relationships is wrong and how human history gives us many more possibilities for how we can structure, organize, and live together. This is part of a larger project by Graeber to “decolonize the enlightenment.” If any of that sounds intimidating, there are many written reviews and recorded discussions that give great summaries of the main points Graeber and Wengrow are proposing, which I won’t try to summarize here. However, some ideas that I appreciated thinking through, and have continued to think about and discuss with my friends and comrades down here in Mexico as well as in the US, are:

• How have our modern systems of governance created play freedoms and real kings and made us all less free in the process? Or, as the authors describe it, “American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like –provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation…. [The Hadza, Nuer, and Wendat societies] were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers).... This might help explain at least some of the apparent confusion around the term egalitarianism: it is possible for explicit hierarchies to emerge, but to nonetheless remain largely theatrical, or to confine themselves to very limited aspects of social life.” See Chapter 4 (“Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not necessarily in that order)”) for more on this.
• How did societies in mesoamerica, like Tenochtitlan, switch from developing palaces and large temples to developing social housing for the large, multiethnic populations that were attracted to live in cities?  See Chapter 9 (“Hiding in Plain Sight: The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas”) for more on this!
• What do we actually mean by “egalitarian” and how do we unknowingly perpetuate colonial, neo-liberal, patriarchal value systems as we actively try to liberate ourselves and our social relationships from those and other systems of oppression? See Chapter 1 (“Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood: Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality”) and Chapter 4 (“Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property (Not necessarily in that order)”) for some deep dives into this question.
• How did societies actively reject hierarchical forms of governance and instead chose to develop horizontal, egalitarian forms of power sharing, develop intricate systems of mutual aid over wide areas, and create multiple versions of “democracy” far before and unconnected to western ideas of the origins of democracy (that is, from Greece)?  See Chapter 8 (“Imaginary Cities Eurasia’ s first urbanites – in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, Ukraine and China – and how they built cities without kings for some great”) specifically for more on this topic. 

There is so much more I could try and lift up but it would take me way too much time to do so (and my partner is waiting for me to go on our evening walk). I’ll just say that this book provides a wealth of examples of how we have actually, to the best of the authors’ understanding, structured societies that made us more free, more compassionate, and more ecologically balanced.

The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life by Kristin Ross (Recommended by Veryl)

Ross rejects the archaic notion of revolution - derived from classical European revolutions - as occurring by one great act, one fell swoop; this is logistically impossible under a state with monopoly over violence, surveillance, and technology. She resituates struggles of the past few decades from the urban core (and industrial labor) - something that popular movement authors like Bevins fixates (see Ricardo’s post above) - to land-based rural struggles throughout the globe - and argues that the defining acts of revolution in this age are defensive struggles over land that has been targeted for development and resource extraction. Within these struggles, new social relations develop (i.e., social and class hierarchies dissipate, as many of these struggles involve industrial labor and students coming to the land and participating in the defense), and new ways of life are created that rupture market-based and transactional relations (i.e., on the land, people share in collective social reproduction and as such, these defensive struggles are not merely defense of land, but defense of a new communal way of being - the commune). As these struggles proliferate globally, they tell us that people in the so-called rural periphery are already prefiguring and actualizing revolutionary anti-capitalist social relations, and it’s worth defending if we are to move away from capitalist totality.

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl (Recommended by Sue)

This was so beautiful. Inspires me to write essays! Listen to the audio, read by the author. i really loved it.

First Generation Farming by Chris Newman (Recommended by Dorian)

First Generation Farming was a great book written in a haste (though not hastily written) by Chris Newman, who saw the need to create a book that would guide young farmers into cooperative agribusinesses, lest they fall into the scam of small-scale farming. I’ve been following Chris for some time and have resonated a lot with the frustrations he finds in the regenerative ag world. Much of what he speaks about parallels the experience that I had while farming and needing to navigate the ill-suited ecosystem of what Chris calls first-generation farmers. There’s a stubborn persistence on small-scale farming being the righteous path forward, and the idea that aggregating enough small scale farmers will fix everything. As a result, large-scale farms are vilified. But what this narrative often ends up doing is hiding poorly planned businesses, labor exploitation, saturated direct markets, and the reality that feeding your community requires the ability to feed thousands and thousands of people. In other words, if we’re serious about changing our food systems, we need to have the courage to operate at scale. At the end of the day, farming is a business, and hiding the practice of farming in romanticized narratives of de-commodified sustenance does not get us closer to building food sovereignty. This book was at times challenging for me in thinking about how the romanticism that is attributed to small-scale farming bleeds into cooperative forms of farming. Both of these are professed but seldom ever actualized. As what Chris refers to as the “moral currency” of small-scale farmers dwindles, young farmers like myself burn out, and the world continues to burn, we have to be willing to find creative ways to change our food system with whatever existing tools we have at our disposal. Building food sovereignty  is a multi-generational project with a lot of un-sexy work and someone had to say it.

Please check out these books from your local library or buy them at a local bookstore or through Bookshop.org!