Happy Monday!
I thought I’d do a quick list of book recommendations to start off the week.
Here are some of the books I’ve read recently that have helped ground me in contentment, joy, and gratitude in ordinary life. These books are thoughtful and focused around living with intention and purpose. If you’re looking for the next book to read or a gift for the holidays, perhaps one of these will spark your interest.
In no particular order:
12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life
by Heidi Barr and Ellie Roscher
From the publisher: 12 Tiny Things guides us in curating a spiritual practice that promotes a more reflective, rooted, and intentional life. Regardless of how the ground feels underneath your feet, trust that there are roots there to tend. By trying on one tiny thing at a time, you can slowly, deliberately, and playfully remember who you are. You can nourish that being with tenderness. Together, we will reach and grow toward the sun.
IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World
by Chris Stedman
From the publisher: Activist and writer Chris Stedman explores authenticity in the digital age, shining a light into and beyond age-old notions of realness—who we are and where we fit in the world—to bring fresh understanding for our increasingly online lives. Stedman offers a new way of seeing the supposed split between our online and offline selves, one in which online spaces and social media become new tools for understanding and expressing ourselves—and where the not-always-graceful ways we use these tools can reveal new insights for incorporating far older human truths into modern life.
How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
edited by James Crews
From the publisher: More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere.
Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection
by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie
From the publisher: Written gently and with humor, Good Enough is permission for all those who need to hear that there are some things you can fix--and some things you can't. And it's okay that life isn't always better. In these gorgeously written reflections, Bowler and Richie offer fresh imagination for how truth, beauty, and meaning can be discovered amid the chaos of life. Their words celebrate kindness, honesty, and interdependence in a culture that rewards ruthless individualism and blind optimism. Ultimately, in these pages we can rest in the encouragement to strive for what is possible today--while recognizing that though we are finite, the life in front of us can be beautiful.
Share Your Stuff. I’ll Go First: 10 Questions to Take Your Friendships to the Next Level
by Laura Tremaine
From the publisher: In spite of the hyper-connected culture we live in today, women still feel shamed for oversharing and being publicly vulnerable. And no matter how many friends we seem to have, many of us are still desperately lonely. . . .
Laura's stories about her childhood, her complicated shifts in faith and friendships, and her marriage to a Hollywood movie director will prompt you to identify the beautiful narrative and pivotal milestones of your own life. Each chapter offers intriguing and reflective questions that will reveal unique details and stories you've never thought to tell and will guide you into cultivating the authentic connection with others that only comes from sharing yourself.
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver
by Mary Oliver
From the publisher: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career.
Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as far and away, this country's best selling poet by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years.
And here are a couple books on my TBR (to be read) shelf for the new year:
Seasons of Wonder: Making the Ordinary Sacred Through Projects, Prayers, Reflections, and Rituals
by Bonnie Smith Whitehouse
From the publisher: Seasons of Wonder is designed to allow you to gather together weekly with your loved ones and expand your understanding of divinity, specifically the radical but faithful idea that everything is sacred. This devotional is designed around weekly contemplative activities as well as interactive and transformative practices that connect us to surprise, awe, and wonder . . .
Bonnie Smith Whitehouse invites us all to consider the life-changing idea that small, intentional moments of wonder are charged manifestations of the grand presence of Christ in me, in you, and in this dazzling, vast—and imperiled—blue planet we call our beloved home. By spending a short amount of time together with Seasons of Wonder every week this year, you can transform an ordinary meeting into a sacred gathering.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
From the publisher: Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
I would love to know what books you would add to this list, so be sure to comment with your own recommendations. What books are guiding you toward purpose and intention? What should I read next?
Blessings on your week,
—NK
I have one to add to the list: Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren