08/02/2026
If you’re looking to add some books to your reading lists, I’d highly recommend each of these. 📚💛
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
- Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Masterful, brilliant and one of the most important books of our time. Wilkerson dives into race, class and the powerful caste system that has influenced leaders and everyday people since our nation’s founding. With historic accounts and personal experiences, Wilkerson writes with a poignant, yet hopeful message about how we can move beyond the destructive nature of caste and find ourselves in one another’s humanity. A must read.
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“Secrets. Some humans are crammed full of them. How do they not explode? It seems to be a hallmark of the human species: abysmal communication skills … Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures.“
- Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures
I never thought I could fall in love with an octopus, but once you are introduced to Marcellus, you will fall in love too. This book is wonderfully written, full of complex characters and worlds that collide in miraculous and beautiful ways. It tugs at the heartstrings and Van Pelt writes in such a way that the reader shares in the grief, loss and joy of each of these characters, and you can’t help but believe in second chances after its final pages. The film adaptation is equally beautiful and a definite must see!
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“There is no love without justice.”
“Countless biographies by women reveal that girl children witnessing a mother’s suffering at the hands of male tyrants … are deeply, traumatically affected.”
“We must learn to be truth tellers, to break with the sexist notion that a good woman never tells what she really thinks.”
-Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks
This book is so much more than about romantic love. It is about love in all forms, and mostly, love for ourselves, our aging bodies, our complexities … women often withhold love from themselves, for a variety of reasons, but bell hooks wrote how we have changed our ways of thinking about aging and we have changed our ways of thinking about love. How beautiful is that! It’s a deep dive into feminism and how both men and women need not fear it as something negative, but liberating from the patriarchal norms that are inflicted upon us without our consent. It’s a powerful book with many beautiful messages, with the most important one being we must first find love for ourselves.
