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reading is political book recs

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reading is always political. this book rec list is needed now more than ever. education and intellect is power.
 
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Amid a violent student uprising in south korea, a young boy is shockingly killed. the story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony o...
Human Acts by Han Kang
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Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an ...
Enemy Feminisms: Terfs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis
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Based on a dystopian vision of the future where the freedom of the individual is subjugated to the conformity of society.
1984 by George Orwell
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Fable about an uprising of farm animals against their human masters, it illustrates how new tyranny replaces old in the wake of revolutions and power corrupts even the noblest of causes.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
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Illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby,...
Beloved by Toni Morrison
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A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African-America...
Ain't I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth
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When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.
All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt
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For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught b...
Babel by R. F. Kuang
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A radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women's rights.
Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria
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It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is...
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
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From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media – Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see th...
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
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Stunning rendering of present-day palestine. a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
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A bold and unabashed novel about a young palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at an nyc middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
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A sweeping and lyrical novel that follows a young palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family.
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
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Khalidi describes the zionist claim to palestine in the century spanning 1917–2017 as late settler colonialism and an instrument of british and then later american imperialism, doing so by focusing on a series of six major episodes the author charact...
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
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Explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the united states and that in palestine, and beyond.
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Brian Bean and Sumaya Awad
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Focusing on key junctures, Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the palestinians'. but this outcome was never inevitable.
Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat
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On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses...most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are comm...
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
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Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market for the first time in decades. Set up with a job co...
How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
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A thoughtful and incisive analysis of how progressive commitments to racial and social justice are undermined by the 'palestinian exception'.
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill
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One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports o...
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
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Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena's a literary darling. June Hayward is literally nobody. So when June witnesses Athena's death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena's just-fin...
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
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A coming-of-age novel about a young palestinian american woman who struggles with her identity as she navigates her cultural, religious, and sexual identities.
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
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Poetry examining the violence, racism, politics, and culture of the middle east.
Born Palestinian, Born Black: & the Gaza Suite by Suheir Hammad
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A meditation on the state of world affairs, with special attention paid to the current hardships faced by palestinians near and within the west bank and gaza strip.
The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
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Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities "cultish," revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven's Gate, but also how they pervade o...
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
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This book explores through ten innovative essays new insights into ways of understanding and building solidarities with Palestine.
Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities with Palestine by Mahdi Sabbagh, Yasmin El-Rifae, Keller Easterling, et al.
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A subtle psychological portrait of the author’s relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh
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Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day in...
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
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In this urgent, insightful essay, a respected historian places the israeli-palestinian war in context, challenging western attitudes about the region.
Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso
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The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
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Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on reproductive rights, politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a m...
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
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Miller's story of trauma and transcendence illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicting a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shining with the courage required to move through suffering an...
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England's irrevocable transformation.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
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The aim of Who's Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how "gender" has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book,...
Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
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With a poet's devotion to truth and an activist's demand for justice, Clare deftly unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds. His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanin...
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation by Eli Clare
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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 ...
Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba
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A young black woman who gets involved with a middle-aged white man in an open marriage.
Luster by Raven Leilani
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Chilling short story collection about fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history--with bracing urgency.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
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Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland lif...
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
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Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy--it is his ow...
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
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In a time when nearly every institution (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claims to value diversity in its mission statement, Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at ...
I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown
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Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will b...
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
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With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today's transgender children are a brand new generation--pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transg...
Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
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A page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
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A deeply honest investigation of what it means to be a woman and a commodity from Emily Ratajkowski, the archetypal, multi-hyphenate celebrity of our time.
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski
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Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unsc...
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
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Greer is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women's movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to inf...
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
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King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. Here on his island, women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them f...
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
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