Our Book Gift Guide: Because Reading Isn’t Dead

Unraveling: What I learned about life while shearing sheep, dyeing wool and making the world’s ugliest sweater

Peggy Orenstein
The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.

Orenstein hoped the project would help her process not just wool but her grief over the recent death of her mother and the decline of her dad, the impending departure of her college-bound daughter, and other thorny issues of aging as a woman in a culture that by turns ignores and disdains them.
What she didn’t expect was a journey into some of the major issues of our time: climate anxiety, racial justice, women’s rights, the impact of technology, sustainability, and, ultimately, the meaning of home.

The Living City: Why Cities Don’t Need to Be Green to Be Great

Des Fitzgerald
The greening of cities is all the rage. From London to New York and beyond, governments are investing billions in planting trees, installing green roofs, and building micro-parks. While not opposed to green spaces, Fitzgerald argues that they aren’t the ultimate panacea: can a line of trees, or an intrusive app designed to show you where those trees are located, truly improve physical and psychological health on a massive scale? Instead of using greening cities, Fitzgerald asks that we examine and fix the root issues, like labor rights and work conditions. He argues for celebrating them in all “their noisy, constructed, artificial glory.”

SUSTAINABLE BADASS: A ZERO-WASTE LIFESTYLE GUIDE

BY GITTEMARIE JOHASSEN

Is your friend interested in living a sustainable lifestyle, but doesn’t know where to start? This book covers the basics of sustainability from plastic to application in every area of life including recycling, fashion, and food. Your friend will be an expert in zero waste.

PLEASURE ACTIVISM: THE POLITICS OF FEELING GOOD

BY ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN

Feminist author adrienne maree brown shares her views about harm reduction, drugs, and sex work. She looks at how our current model criminalizing pleasure is harming communities, and how decriminalizing pleasure can be helpful. She also looks at how the legalized cannabis industry has been run predominantly by white people instead of giving back to the communities that were most affected by criminalization. This is an eye-opening read and will definitely lead to some interesting discussions between you and your friends if you choose to get them all a copy. A book club worthy read.

GIRLS TO THE FRONT

BY SARA MARCUS

Marcus details the history of the 90’s punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl. This book follows the influence that bands like Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsey, and Bratmobile had on the punk scene as well as in feminism. She also focuses on the ways it fell short, namely that this was a movement led and predominately followed by white cis bisexual women.

racism untaught: Revealing and Unlearning Racialized Design

BY LISA E. MERCER & TERRESA MOSES

Anti-racist design interventions can be difficult. Well-intentioned conversations can fuel tensions, activate racialized trauma, and lead to misunderstandings, especially in spaces not typically focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Even when progress is made, white supremacy culture can resurface. We need anti-racist guidelines and approaches that lay bare racialized systems of oppression and fundamentally disrupt their replication. In Racism Untaught, Lisa E. Mercer and Terresa Moses, two veteran anti-racist educators, deliver this exact approach.

DapperQ Style: Ungendering Fashion

Anita Dolce Vita

For too long, mainstream Western fashion has promoted unattainable beauty standards and restrictive binaries as a means of social control. As editor-in-chief of leading queer style magazine dapperQ, Anita Dolce Vita has provided a platform that transcends these rigid, exclusionary, and oppressive fashion rules.

This book will inspire people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender presentations to think differently about both queer fashion and beauty as art and visual activism. In this refreshing style book, she shows that, no matter your gender identity, race, body size, ability, age, or style, queer fashion is for everyone.

Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

Hannah Carlson
Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality.

So…who gets pockets, and why?

It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all?

Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

Stitch ‘n Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook

Debbie Stoller

It’s the essential guide for chicks with sticks–because knit happens.

From the tools of the trade to the knitty-gritty of techniques and patterns, all with easy-to-follow step-by-step illustrated techniques. Stockinette stitch, rib stitch, seed stitch. Increasing and decreasing. All the bells and whistles: fringes, tassels, cables, intarsia, crab stitch, and Fair Isle. Plus the stitch doctor’s own special bag of tricks and how to hook up with other knitters. After the how-tos come the why-to: forty hop, stylish patterns, as good for beginners as they are for purely pros.

DRESS CODE: UNLOCKING FASHION FROM THE NEW LOOK TO MILLENNIAL PINK

BY VÉRONIQUE HYLAND

Hyland explores fashion and social status since Y2K. She explores the concept of the “It Girl” versus dressing for the self, and whether fashion will continue to be sectioned by gender or expanded beyond. She also discusses how fashion influences culture. Hyland’s fashion commentary has affected culture far before this book. She was the writer who first coined the term millennial pink in a 2016 essay for The Cut.

If your friend is a fashion enthusiast, be sure to pick up a copy.

GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR

BY MAIA KOBABE

This graphic memoir is near the top of the banned books list this year for discussing gender exploration and LGBT content. As always, No Kill finds banned books list as an excellent reading guide to see what is seen as forbidden in this modern world. Kobabe uses e/em/eir pronouns and e guides the reader through their journey of exploring their gender and sexuality to discover that em identify as asexual and non-binary.

TIME IS A MOTHER

BY OCEAN VUONG

Vuong’s poetry provides tender and intimate insights into his process of grieving the loss of his mother. He also reflects on love and his queerness. If you are looking for beautiful poetry to help your friend through a challenging time, this is the book for them.

DREAMING OF YOU: A NOVEL IN VERSE

BY MELISSA LOZADA-OLIVA

Did you know that poetry can be funny, witty, and sarcastic? Do you have a friend who loves witchcraft and Latina singer Selena? Melissa Lozada-Oliva has a mixture of all of this in her latest novel in verse. The speaker grapples with her identity as she brings Selena back from the dead to talk with her. Everything soon goes awry and she struggles to bring the spirits back to rest.

BRIGHT DEAD THINGS: POEMS

BY ADA LIMON

If you are looking to seduce your poet friend or lover, look no further than Ada Limón’s poetry. She is the current (24th) Poet Laureate of the United States as decided upon by the Library of Congress. This book is a heartfelt journey of self exploration and overcoming unfamiliarity and loss.

Cursed Bunny: Stories

Bora Chung (Author) Anton Hur (Translator)

A stunning, wildly original debut from a rising star of Korean literature–surreal, chilling fables that take on the patriarchy, capitalism, and the reign of big tech with absurdist humor and a (sometimes literal) bite

From an author never before published in the United States, Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairy tales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung’s absurd, haunting universe could be our own.

No two stories are alike, and readers will be torn whether to race through them or savor Chung’s wit and frenetic energy on every page. Cursed Bunny is a book that screams to be read late into the night and passed on to the nearest set of hands the very next day.

MILK FED

BY MELISSA BRODER

If your friend has or is currently struggling with an eating disorder, this might not be the right read for them.

This is a queer romance novel about a Jewish woman who struggles with her body image falling in love with an Orthodox Jewish frozen yogurt lady. Their star-crossed story explores the forbidden with queerness and indulging in deliciously greasy foods.

ALL THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT

BY AMY FELTMAN

This book grapples with complex issues of identity, family, and queerness. The main character Morgan was raised by her father because her mother left when she was young. Just as Morgan goes through a breakup with her girlfriend, her mother comes back into her life fresh from her own queer breakup.