Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!
E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!
📚books that shaped my brain
20
items Books that broke something open in my brain and put it back together differently. Abolition, history, feminism, fiction. Linked to ThriftBooks because reduce, reuse, recycle.
Sections
4
Abolish
Fiction
Geopolitics & World History
Feminism
Abolish
History, politics, organizing, and abolition.
A must-read for anyone who wants to wants to grow as an activist and organizer.
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and... book by Kelly Hayes
This book expanded my understanding of abolition - highly recommend
We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist... book by Mariame Kaba
Angela Davis connects struggles across movements and borders. Essential for understanding abolition as a global project, not just a US one.
Freedom is a constant struggle book by Angela Y. Davis
If you want to understand how we got to Trump’s America, read this.
Jesus and John Wayne: How White... book by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
If you read one book about the US carceral system, make it this one. Alexander lays out how mass incarceration functions as a racial caste system.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in... book by Michelle Alexander
Written as a letter to his son. One of the most honest and devastating accounts of what it means to live in a Black body in America.
Between the World and Me book by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The history they didn’t teach you in school — told with no filter and a lot of well-earned fury.
Black AF History book by Michael Harriot
Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine and writes about how stories shape what we’re allowed to see.
The Message book by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A journalist goes undercover as a prison guard. What he reports back is horrifying and completely unsurprising, which is the point.
American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover... book by Shane Bauer
Fiction
Stories that wrecked me in the best way. The kind you think about for years after you finish them.
The one that broke me in the best way. An epic about family, free will, and whether people can actually change.
East of Eden book by John Steinbeck
Heavy but worth it. Every major question about faith, morality, and human nature gets wrestled with here.
The Brothers Karamazov book by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A couple’s lives get torn apart by a wrongful conviction. Devastating look at how incarceration destroys relationships and futures.
An American Marriage book by Tayari Jones
Sprawling and messy in the best way — a fugitive hides out in Bombay and finds community, love, and chaos.
Shantaram book by Gregory David Roberts
A memoir about growing up without a father and finding family in a neighborhood bar. Surprisingly tender, very real.
The Tender Bar book by J.R. Moehringer
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous book by Ocean Vuong
Geopolitics & World History
The history they didn’t teach you.
The Nazi regime was high on meth. literally. This one reads like a thriller but it’s all real and it reframes everything you thought you knew about WWII.
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich - By Norman Ohler - ThriftBooks
I didn’t learn any of this in school. Lee traces 500 years of Asian American history and makes clear that this community has always been here, always been essential, and always been fighting.
The Making of Asian America: A History book by Erika Lee
Explains exactly why Latin Americans come to the US — because the US was already in Latin America first.
Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos... book by Juan González
Feminism
Books that named things I already felt but couldn’t articulate. Required reading.
Gay dismantles the idea that feminists have to be perfect. Funny, smart, and deeply human.
Bad Feminist book by Roxane Gay
A reexamination of how the media treated women in the 90s — Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, Britney. Infuriating and clarifying.
90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the... book by Allison Yarrow