Conversation Pushers #1: A Post-Election Bookish Column

Every month, I'm going to help spread the word about books that arm us for critical real-life conversations.

Hi, friends.

I spent most of Wednesday sitting on the floor with my 4-month-old daughter as I ate pizza and watched The Lord of the Rings. Like you, I’m sure, that’s all I had the emotional capacity for.

But it’s not in my nature to linger in despair for very long. When there are bad things that I can’t control, I throw myself into something that I can. Usually that turns out to be something like a house project or a race training plan, but this time I want it to be something that makes a difference.

On Monday, in an effort to keep myself from doomscrolling and steep my brain hopeful media instead, I started listening to What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (which, by the way, I could not recommend more). In the introduction, she asks the reader to consider where your skills, time, and interests overlap, and then do whatever that thing is.

I don’t have a lot of spare time right now (see: 4-month-old baby). I can’t take on anything new. But I’m never going to be too busy to read books, and I’m already carving out time for this newsletter, which reaches hundreds of people. This is the place where my skills, time, and interests overlap.

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I don’t believe we live in a country where more than half the people are bad people. I can’t believe that. I do, however, believe there is a concentrated group of bad people, many of whom have an above-average amount of power. And I believe that many, many good people lack the lived experiences with oppression to make equal rights or social justice or climate change feel more urgent than the fact that they don’t know how they’ll afford to buy groceries for their families or put gas in their car to get to work. And I believe those good people live in echo chambers that make it easy to fall for the strategic, manipulative messaging the bad people put out there.

I have loved ones who voted for Trump. That’s true for nearly all of us now — more than half the country voted for him; it’s just how the math works out. It’s impossible to cut so many people out of our lives, nor should we. That didn’t fix what was broken in 2016, and it’s not going to fix it now.

Truly fixing this country is going to be a long-term battle — one in which I believe community and good-faith conversations will be critical. Especially for people like me who walk through the world with some degree of privilege, for whom the risk is so much less and the responsibility is so much greater.

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On her podcast, The Stacks,

Traci Thomas

recently interviewed

Jessica Valenti

, author of Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win and the

Abortion, Every Day

newsletter (listen here). Jessica talked about how her book isn’t preaching to the choir — it’s arming the choir. Arming them with facts, science, and media literacy so that they’re equipped to make a difference in a conversation or debate.

As I finished my pizza and listened to Gandalf remind Frodo that there are more forces at work in the world besides the will of evil, I thought about that. And I thought about Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s call to arms. And I made a decision.

I’m starting a new column in this newsletter dedicated to books that “arm the choir.” It’s (tentatively) called Conversation Pushers. My plan is to:

• Read and spread the word about timely, relevant books that are both informational and actionable — books that will give you the ammo you need to make a difference in incremental but critical conversations.

• Do my best to find journalism, podcast episodes, or other books that you could pair with the book in question to go deeper on the topic.

• Provide Bookshop.org and Libro.fm affiliate links where the book can be purchased, donate the commissions to an organization working to make a difference on that political issue — and then match the total with a donation of my own.

My hope is to publish at least one such newsletter a month. That might mean I drop into your inbox slightly more often than weekly — I still want to have time for plenty of bookish fun around here. But I hope you’ll dive in with me.

I’m going to start with Valenti’s book, Abortion. If you have other recommendations for me, I would love to hear them — please leave a comment below or hit reply to this newsletter.

Okay, my book darts and I are ready.

With love and gratitude,

— Deedi (she/her)