Book ✨

All About Love

All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in our private and public lives.

In eleven concise chapters, hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She offers a rethinking of self-love (without narcissism) that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most important love of all.

Book ✨one of the best I’ve ever read✨

The Dispossessed

Note from Lissie - this book is absolutely incredible. It is not a dystopia but a utopia book—Le Guin built a beautifully realistic human world that, while it has its flaws, embraces possibilities of healthier relationships with natural systems and eachother. Hers is not a saccharine dreamscape but a thoughtful, wildly imaginative and hopeful world :) I am in love with her spirit.

Winner of the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner of the 1975 Locus Award for Best Novel

“A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—a civilization of warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to reunite the two planets, which have been divided by centuries of distrust. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart.

To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. But the ambitious scientist's gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.”

Book ✨

The Dawn of Everything

Note from Lissie - This book is an imagination toolbox. If you feel hopeless that humans are on some preordained set course to doomland please read at least the first few chapters. It engages with the indigenous critique of European and capitalist culture in a way that turns the human story into a web instead of a line.

“An exciting collaboration between the late American anthropologist and renowned activist David Graeber and British archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything radically overturns the enlightenment project, recasting our distant ancestors as socially and emotionally complex human beings, and offers radical lessons for how we might rethink society and our future.”

Book ✨

The Science of Trust

Note from Lissie - yes, this book is marketed as one for couples, but I personally feel that the lessons in emotional attunement are relevant in nearly all human relationships. All relationships require trust-building. This book and Gottman methods have greatly helped my relationships with family and friends.

For the past thirty-five years, John Gottman's research has been internationally recognized for its unprecedented ability to precisely measure interactive processes in couples and to predict the long-term success or failure of relationships. In this groundbreaking book, he presents a new approach to understanding and changing couples: a fundamental social skill called "emotional attunement," which describes a couple's ability to fully process and move on from negative emotional events, ultimately creating a stronger relationship.

Book ✨

The Body Keeps the Score

Note from Lissie - this book has been so so helpful in uncurling the pain in my own life and that of those around me. It has helped me build empathy, face traumas, have hard conversations, and find resources that have built calm. If you’re unable to read the whole book part 3 has a ton of suggestions for things to try (EMDR, IFS therapy, neurofeedback therapy, yoga/meditation, journaling, theatre, dance, etc. Could be worth at least googling some of these :)

“Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society.” —Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.

Book ✨

Acid Test

"A book that should start a long-overdue national conversation." —Dave Barry
With the F.D.A. agreeing to new trials to test MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) as a treatment for PTSD--which, if approved, could be available as a drug by 2021--Acid Test is leading the charge in an evolving conversation about psychedelic drugs. Despite their current illegality, many Americans are already familiar with their effects. Yet while LSD and MDMA have proven extraordinarily effective in treating anxiety disorders such as PTSD, they still remain off-limits to the millions who might benefit from them. Through the stories of three very different men, award-winning journalist Tom Shroder covers the drugs' roller-coaster history from their initial reception in the 1950s to the negative stereotypes that persist today. At a moment when popular opinion is rethinking the potential benefits of some illegal drugs, and with new research coming out every day, Acid Test is a fascinating and informative must-read.

Book ✨

Strong Towns

“A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States.”

They also have a website and facebook & instagram.

Book ✨

The Order of Time

Note from Lissie - this might also seem like an unlikely choice, but this quick little book really helped me reimagine what my own perception of my life—and life itself—is. It pulls you out of your own timeline, it dissects what a “timeline” even means, and it is written in an empathetic and thoughtful way that’s easy to read.

“Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to flow? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. 

For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe.”