Mrs. Malavazos was my first grade teacher. I’m not sure why, but in addition to normal first grade stuff, she was passionate about exposing her classes to different cultures in a way that was notable and extraordinary to me even at the time. I loved it, and the books I remember from her shelves were some of the first I bought when we found out June was on the way. Those faces and stories had nestled in my heart, even after all those years. Books can do that – nestle into and open up our hearts in a way few things can.
Sally Clarkson, one of my favorites, speaks to this in The Lifegiving Home. She’s not speaking about diverse books in this context, but this quote helps illustrate how important it is to have them in our collections:
“Each of [these stories] describes the world to its child readers in terms of beauty, friendship, and joy. Their rich but simple language shapes the minds and hearts of their readers by helping them notice what is lovely, love what is beautiful, and value what is loyal and true. A mind filled with [these stories and images] will look on the real world not with indifference but with interest, curiosity, and affection.”
The faces and experiences we see in the stories we read help shape our ideas of what is good, what is beautiful, what is normal, what is valuable and valued.
Also: diverse books, as my newest Instagram follow, Shakira, points out, not only help diverse kids see themselves as the hero of the story — they help my kids see other kids who don’t look like them as the hero of the story. Both are beautiful and important.
With that, here are a few of our favorite children’s books with diverse heroes – and a few we’ve recently added or plan to add to our library! I’ve starred the books with black protagonists, since that is especially important for this moment we’re in.
One note as you pick and choose for your own kiddos, from this list or others: it might sound obvious, but just as I wouldn’t suggest following random black people in an earnest attempt to “diversify your feed,” don’t just buy random kid books that other people are recommending. June loves rainbows, dancing, and puppies, and Shep loves trucks and puppies, and I easily found books with black leads featuring all of these things :)
One final note: the books I saw dealing more explicitly with racism and anti-racism were recommended for ages 5 or older, and that feels right to me. I look forward to adding our picks in this category to updated book lists in the future!
Books I added this week: Black is a Rainbow Color* by Angela Joy Me & Mama* by Cozbi Cabrera (This one doesn’t come out until August, but it looks so sweet! June is in a mama phase and I think she’ll just love this one.) Love is a Truck* by Amy Novesky Please, Puppy, Please* by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee
For more, I would love to point you toward two accounts I’ve gotten great recommendations from this week and over the years: Here Wee Read and Occasions by Shakira. They both show the inside of many of these books in their Stories, which is so helpful in seeing whether they’d be a good fit for your family!
Friends, I’d love to hear: what children’s books with diverse characters do you love at your house? Or, if you don’t have kids, what grown-up books with diverse characters have you read and loved? I’d love to do a round-up of some of those favorites soon!
Though I’ve linked to Amazon for ease of shopping, I chose not to use affiliate links today. I’m grateful to the ladies mentioned above and others for sharing so many great books with me, and would love to point you toward their accounts to purchase through their affiliate links! If you’d prefer, you can also purchase through a Black-owned bookstore. xo
Though Articles Club has faithfully continued meeting over the last two months, we’ve switched to focusing on “life lately” updates instead of our usual fare. I miss our deep dives into important (and not-so-important) topics, but have also been enjoying the simple, and shorter, time together – after a long day, Zoom fatigue is real!
In honor of Articles Club, I thought I’d collect a few of my favorite recent coronavirus thought-pieces to share – all reads and listens that would be just perfect for discussing around the table. They’re less about current events and more about what life right now means for life beyond the pandemic. I hope they light a little spark in you today!
P.S. Perhaps you’re tapped out on coronavirus reading right now. Been there! Just for you, I’m including a few photos from this weekend’s backyard campout :) Enjoy!
Present in the Pandemic | This sermon from Jon Tyson was a gentle but firm reminder to abide in the midst of difficulty and sameness. He speaks persuasively about distraction, and what it means for our core relationships and our intimacy with God. If you loved The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, you’ll be nodding along the whole time. In the words of Jon, let’s not say at the end of this, “It was kind of a blur, and then it was over.” The teaching starts at about 44:30.
It’s Okay to Be a Different Kind of Parent During the Pandemic | This is perhaps not the essay you’re thinking it’s going to be. Mary Katherine weaves insight from her husband passing away, leaving her and her two young daughters behind, into advice for parents dealing with our current upheaval. A poignant and lovely piece.
When the Small Things are Everything | Another simply beautiful essay, this time about being a “second responder.” If you’ve been moved by the kindness sprouting everywhere, if you’ve been a part of this kindness in any small way, you’ll love this piece.
Parenting in the Age of Anxiety | Though this is not, strictly speaking, an article focused on coronavirus, it is The Atlantic’s most-recent cover story and couldn’t have debuted at a more relevant time. This is an eye-opening, sobering, and yet hopeful read about the current epidemic of anxiety, focusing on the impact parental anxiety has on children. I think this is a must-read for basically everyone right now.
Have you read anything notable about our current times – something that moved you to action or made you see things in a different light? I’d love to hear. You know I’m always down for a good read!
P.S. Backyard camping was a success! June fell asleep about 10 and woke up with the birds at 6 :) John came inside and promptly crawled into bed next to me, ha!
While I don’t plan to write about every book on my 2020 reading list, I just couldn’t not share my thoughts on this one – and invite yours! My copy of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry has been underlined, dog-eared, read aloud to John, discussed with friends, applied to my life, and recommended several times over just within my first month of reading it. Let’s dig in :)
First, a brief overview. John Mark Comer (we’ll call him JMC) sub-titled his book “how to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.” It’s divided into three sections — the problem, the solution, and four practices for unhurrying your life — with a bonus section defining spiritual disciplines. I found it to be a pretty quick read, except for the fact that I wanted to share something aloud with John every few pages.
In the first section, JMC outlines where we find ourselves today: “throwing our lives away” as we live spiritually-mediocre days, days spent in “irritation and fear and self-preoccupation and frenzy.” He traces the rise of many compounding factors, like the disappearance of Sabbath and the explosion of smart phones, that are resulting in “hurry sickness” (the symptoms include hypersensitivity, restlessness, nonstop activity, emotional numbness, out-of-order priorities, and isolation). A quote I underlined:
Even as I found myself nodding along with most of what JMC was writing (this is my jam!), not much of what he shared was new to me – I was already familiar with most of the trends, studies, and articles he was referencing. (And he referenced a LOT – this section almost read like a compilation of other people’s thoughts versus an original work, which felt a little cheap.) But, if the background on the “hurry era” is new to you, this section would probably be eye-popping.
Interestingly, the first section had many similarities to the infamous “millennial burnout” article, except for one glaring difference: where that article ended without positing a solution, this book does: Jesus and his easy yoke. In the second section, he writes, “the solution to an overbusy life is not more time. It’s to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.”
(He argues that if we all had 10 more hours in a day, we’d just fill them up with more “good” things, and then we would be “even more tired and burned out and emotionally frayed and spiritually at risk” than we are now. This rings true for me — if we don’t exercise restraint around our allotted 24 hours, why would we with 34 hours? It’s the same with our money – if we can’t manage a small amount well, why would we suddenly do better with a large amount?)
JMC’s solution to hurry is Jesus, and to organize our lives around three basic goals:
“We read the stories of Jesus,” JMC writes, “his joy, his resolute peace through uncertainty, his unanxious presence, his relaxed manner and how in the moment he was — and think, I want that life. We hear his open invite to ‘life… to the full’ and think, Sign me up. We hear about his easy yoke and soul-deep rest and think, Gosh, yes, heck yes. I need that. But we’re not willing to adopt his lifestyle.”
“That’s why Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: ‘equipment.’ He offers his apprentices a whole new way to bear the weight of our humanity: with ease. At his side. Like two oxen in a field, tied shoulder to shoulder. With Jesus doing all the heavy lifting. At his pace. Slow, unhurried, present to the moment, full of love and joy and peace.”
If we’re willing to consider a new yoke – a fresh way to bear our responsibilities, not to escape from them – he has four suggestions in the final section. They are: silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. This section was by my favorite of the book – it was practical, challenging, and gave me lots of good ideas to try in my day-to-day. It also connected the dangers of our distracted age (of which I consider myself well aware) to my spiritual life, a connection I haven’t always made clearly:
“The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God,” JMC writes, “drowning out the one input we most need. I mean, how do we have any kind of spiritual life at all if we can’t pay attention longer than a goldfish? How do you pray, read the Scriptures, sit under a teaching at church, or rest well on the Sabbath when every chance you get, you reach for the dopamine dispenser that is your phone?” This is why our relationships with our phones matter. It’s not only about our phones and how much we do or do not use them and what affect that has on us and the people around us. It matters because it degrades our ability to do things — really important things! — that have nothing at all to do with our phones.
Needless to say, I loved this book and will be grappling with it for quite some time. As I figure out what, exactly, it means for my own life, here is something that I’ve been turning over in my mind, and I wonder if you’ve been seeing the same.
Lately, I feel like I’ve been reading more and more about slowing and a “friction-full” (versus friction-less) life. About people choosing the analog, the stubbornly old-school, the path of most resistance. Washing your car in the driveway instead of taking it through the carwash. Walking the aisles of the grocery store instead of using InstaCart. Sitting in the cul-de-sac while your kids run around instead of running them to three different after-school activities. Shutting down Instagram for days or weeks at a time.
This mood seems a direct backlash to the rapid rise of convenience life, apps, and services that facilitate our hurry: businesses that will help us walk our dog or buy our groceries or deliver a new gadget from Amazon in 24 hours or watch something on-demand. JMC noticed it, too: “you will find more and more teachers of the way talking about the emerging practice of the spiritual discipline of ‘slowing’ as a protest against the new normal of hyperliving. Ortberg defined it as ‘cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in a position where we simply have to wait.'”
In the slowing chapter, JMC suggests 20 ideas for slowing down your overall pace of life, and takes some time to talk about each of them (they include driving the speed limit, getting into the literal slow lane, killing your TV, and setting times for email). I’m always game for a little social experiment and found this section thought-provoking and engaging. John, however, was generally not into it: for example, one of JMC’s suggestions is to deliberately choose the longest lane at the grocery store. He has what I think is a beautiful reason for it in the book, and it resonated with me. However, when I read it aloud to John, he thought it was kind of silly. His response: “why would I want to choose the slowest lane at the grocery store when it’s keeping me from getting home to my family/playing outside/relaxing at home/anything better than waiting in line?”
And that’s, I suppose, where I’ve landed. Modern conveniences aren’t bad or good. The slow lane is not bad or good. Inspired by JMC, the question I’ve been trying to ask myself, even in the seemingly-mundane, is “who am I becoming by making this choice?” Someone who has the space to hear from God? Someone who is more present and compassionate? Someone who indulges in curiosity and wonder? Someone who is able to sit quietly, still, and dig in the sandbox or read a book or have a conversation for an hour or two? The right choice could be ordering groceries so I can go on a walk with my kids, or it could be taking my kids to the grocery store and chatting our way through the aisles — but if I choose an answer that is as faithful as possible to what Jesus would do if he were me, then that’s the right question to be asking.
Anyway. That’s a lot of thoughts :) I acknowledge that this micro-trend of “slowing” and forgoing technological conveniences might just be an anomaly of my little social circle, but I’d love to hear what you think. Have you noticed this? Is it something you consider in your own life? Where do you fall on the convenience versus analog spectrum? As always, looking forward to hearing what you think!
Here’s something I’ve never done before: decided in advance what I’m going to read in a year. I might end up hating this structure and abandoning it two months in, or it might be the most satisfying thing I’ve ever tried – we shall see!
For each month of 2020, I’ve chosen a fiction or memoir and a non-fiction read. (I hope to read more, but two books a month is typical for me and a pace I’m confident I can keep up with!) You’ll also see that I placed a few books specifically to coincide with the 2020 reading plans of friends or other bloggers I enjoy, just for fun.
This is certainly not a book club in the traditional sense, but you are more than welcome to join me for any of these picks throughout the year, if you like! Even if you don’t, you might see them pop up in posts in the months to come :) I’m hoping to share a few brief thoughts on Instagram along the way, too, as well as in my monthly goal posts.
Many of these picks line up with my 2020 goals, which I’ve finalized and am planning to share on Monday! Without further ado…
January: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry | Val’s favorite book of 2019, and hopefully a great set-up for my year as a whole. Long Bright River | A brand-new book (releasing on January 7th!) by one of my literary-agent-brother-in-law’s authors. I got an early copy and have already finished it – it is FANTASTIC!
May: The Secrets of Happy Families | This has been on my TBR list for awhile, and when it popped up on Janssen’s plan I knew this was the year. Save Me the Plums | I’ve read two other Ruth Reichl books and loved them both. Can’t wait to dig into this one about her time at Gourmet.
November: Time to Parent | Can’t remember where I read about this one but reading the description got me excited all over again Make Something Good Today | I’ve always had a soft spot for Erin and Ben since Southern Weddings launched them onto HGTV (true story!). I’ve been wanting to read their memoir since it came out.
December: The Geometry of Wealth | Generosity and contentment seem like perfect topics going into the holidays The Nazi Officer’s Wife | One of the most-starred book on this list to finish the year
I’d love to hear: do you plan your reading in advance? Have you read any of these books? Would you like to read any alongside me in 2020? Let’s chat!
