While the Republican Party officially aligns with those who choose to attack ‘woke’ culture (i.e. being a moral and decent human being) certain racist and homophobic parents are working to ban books. Why would anyone want to ban a book that celebrates Americans is always going to be a mystery to me, but hateful people have never made much sense. In some small push against that, here are two books that you should definitely read as they are not only studies in exceptional Americans, they are also the work of amazing writers and stand-out citizens. If you’re against that, and if you want to ban or stifle such messages in any way, you are definitely the problem. If you don’t agree with them, that is absolutely your prerogative – it’s when you want to prevent the rest of from accessing and reading them that you become hateful.
First up is Amanda Gorman’s ‘Call Us What We Carry’ – a collection of poems that contains ‘The Hill We Climb’, which is what she read at the Inauguration Ceremony for the 46th President of the United States. Just days after the January 6 insurrection, her words brought our country back together, healing and lending comfort to the resilience that is America. Find more of her work at her website here.
The second book that is a must-read for the summer (and beyond) is Chasten Buttigieg’s ‘I Have Something To Tell You’ which was recently re-released in a Young Adult edition. How I wish something like this had been available when I was growing up. It wasn’t – and all the feelings I had made me feel like something was wrong, like I didn’t belong anywhere, like there was no one else like me. It was a feeling of isolation, and the world was once designed to make me feel like that. We have made some progress, and books like this remind me of how far we have come. Find links both versions of the book on his website here.
