Books that moved me.
The headers rotate like a game of Cards Against Humanity (iykyk) — reading should stay fun even when the topics aren't, and the humor is how I keep moving. I read a little of everything. The books in my lists lean heavy and serious, though: ultimately the ones that changed me.
My TBR
Four I'm itching to crack.
Headed to Europe soon — so I'm taking myself there on the page first.
The Shortlist
The ten I'd hand over first.
The ones I keep reaching for, across everything. Fiction, history, memoir — the heavy and the human, all of it.
Twelve Years a Slave
A free Black man in 1841 New York is kidnapped and sold into Louisiana bondage. Northup kept his literacy secret for twelve years to survive. The account is unrelenting, and impossible to forget.
Lonesome Dove
Two aging Texas Rangers drive a cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana in the dying days of the frontier. The friendship between Gus and Call might be the truest thing in American fiction — I’ve read it three times and cried every time.
The Fire Next Time
Two essays on race, faith, and what America owes itself. Baldwin’s 1963 letter to his nephew still lands like it was written this morning. The prose is so precise it feels like being gently, completely unmasked.
Between the World and Me
A father’s letter to his son on inhabiting a Black body in America. Coates writes with the grief of a parent and the clarity of a lifetime spent on this question. Asks you to sit with uncomfortable truths, and then to keep sitting.
Demon Copperhead
Dickens’ David Copperfield reset in opioid-era Appalachia — a foster kid’s first-person account of getting chewed up by systems that were never built to protect him. Earns every inch of its Pulitzer.
East of Eden
Two California families retrace the Cain-and-Abel story across three generations. Steinbeck’s widest canvas — the one where he tries to say everything he knows about inherited sin and free will. Timshel.
Project Hail Mary
A lone astronaut wakes up light-years from home with one job: save the sun. Weir makes orbital mechanics and xenobiology feel like the plot — funny, earnest, and the friendship at the center blindsided me.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
From Lansing hustler to civil-rights preacher, in his own voice. Malcolm’s arc is the closest American history has to a self-reinvention myth — except he actually did it, repeatedly. A case for reading the primary source.
Stoner
The quiet life of a Missouri farmhand turned English professor. Almost nothing happens, and somehow everything does. Small, devastating, and the best case I’ve read for why literary fiction earns its place.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
A Palestinian historian’s century-long account of settler colonialism and resistance. Khalidi draws on family letters, political records, and decades of scholarship to trace what has actually happened since 1917. Essential if you want the full record, not a soundbite.
The Dashboards
When a paragraph sent me looking for numbers.
Three live dashboards that grew out of books on this shelf — because sometimes a passage sends you looking for the data behind it. Full treatment on the dashboards page.
Conflict Casualties
war deathsLive casualty figures from the war on Gaza, drawn from the Gaza Ministry of Health, UN OCHA, and The Lancet Global Health.
Open dashboard →Lacunae
wealth gapThe racial and gender dimensions of wealth concentration in America — who holds what, and who's been locked out.
Open dashboard →Post Roe
abortion accessAbortion access across the states after Dobbs, paired with a plain-language education on the biology of pregnancy.
Open dashboard →