Paperback

I picked this memoir up while I was visiting my in-laws in Lagos, Nigeria. We spent a day at an amazing record shop with a bookstore and cafe called, The Jazz Hole, and there I found a copy of Dear Senthuran.by the Nigerian writer, Akwaeke Emezi. I had been meaning to read Emezi’s work since I learned of them, and this felt like the perfect setting and context for their memoir. This book made me realize that I loved memoir as a genre. It showed me how much space you take to tell your own story, how unbound you could be. It was very queer, and very liberatory.

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Paperback

Adjei-Brenyah’s novel is a dystopic and eerily plausible story about corporate-sponsored prison fight matches. I am inspired by the author’s moral clarity in his advocacy for our country’s most marginalized people. I also drew lessons from the kaleidoscopic structure of the book, which moves between various perspectives frequently. This approach felt ecological and dynamic, and served to enrich the humanity of each character, even those most flawed.

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Hardback

This work of narrative nonfiction explores the existential problem(s) of climate change. Rush takes the reader on her journey aboard a research vessel headed to Antarctica. As a journalist, Rush covering the project, Rush travels with a team of scientists studying the region’s ice sheets and the impacts of a warming planet. Her book blends the scientific, emotional, and existential experiences of this event horizon. Her work underscores how climate change is not only a scientific problem to be solved, but a deeply personal and heartfelt phenomenon.

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Paperback

This is a dream-like book that braids mythology and folklore with ecology. Strand is a poet and storyteller who breathes new life into well known mythological archetypes by rooting them in their relationships to other species. Reading while I was writing my book helped me loosen some of the strictures of my scientific training and make more room for magic in my own story telling.

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Paperback

This is the first book in a trilogy called Xenogenesis. A human woman (Lilith) is kidnapped / rescued by an alien species following a human-induced world war and apocalypse. The story is about navigating captivity and the attendant ethical and moral grey areas faced by Lilith as she is both responsible for the continuation of the human species, but is coerced into servitude of her alien captors. This book has officially indoctrinated me into sci-fi fandom. Maybe writing a book myself was the necessary context for fully appreciating the power of such world-building.

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Paperback

I first read this book when I was in an Ecology class in college. I was particularly effected Leopold’s devotion to the species around him, but to also his longterm practice of observation in a small area of Wisconsin. His commitment to noticing the ecologies around him registered as something sacred. Reading this book helped clarify both my own scientific ambitions and my personal ones, helping me see how these were intertwined. I returned to this book while writing Forest Euphoria for a taste of that early inspiration. While he does not reveal a higher-order analysis of capitalism and colonialism — a central lens in my worldview — his warnings about environmental degradation were prescient and rarely held among American settlers of his era.

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Paperback

Mycology and microbiology has taught me that the human body is best understood ecologically, as as a complex consortium of species and their interactions. This is a concept well established in Traditional Chinese Medicine as well. In Inflamed the authors extend this concept from the body into the sociopolitical surroundings and investigate the relationship between one’s health and cultural forces such as poverty and racism. The book is divided into different sections, each representing a particular system of the body (e.g. circulatory, respiratory, nervous, etc.). From there, the authors explore the science of related diseases, causal factors such as environmental racism and chronic stress due to poverty. The authors encourage a more ecological, socially-informed, and ultimately compassionate model for understanding human health.

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Paperback

This Pulitzer Prize winning book is absolutely gripping and harrowing tale of a remarkable act of rebellion that was met with profound violence and depravity on the part of the state. This is an incredibly detailed account of the conditions leading to the uprising, the uprising itself, the violent response, the cover-up, and the legal battles that followed. I am interested in understanding how to resist oppressive institutions and state abuses, and the story of Attica is an essential piece of American history.

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Hardback

Read Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's book, Forest Euphoria, for a delightful read that Robin Wall Kimmerer raves will be "an antidote to the loneliness of our species."

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