The Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group held its annual book selection meeting on Thursday. We passed our 14th anniversary in June, and we’ve read 130 books together, so far.

We each bring up to five books to propose to the group. It’s always a hard choice to select from those the ten books that we’re going to read. The book group likes it when I compile a list of both what we selected and what didn’t quite make the cut — some of us will end up reading some of those books, too.

Other people on the internet appreciate good lists of diverse books, too, so I like to put this list up on my blog.

Here are the books we’ll read from October 2022 through August 2023:

• You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation by Julissa Arce
• As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
• Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century by Alice Wong
• Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty
• Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang
• How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang
• Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages by Ray Acheson
• You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn

Here are the other books we considered:

• More Than Organs by Kay Ulanday Barrett
• Asylum: A Memoir and Manifesto by Edafe Okporo
• The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
• There There by Tommy Orange
• The Young Lords: A Radical History by Johanna Fernandez
• His Name is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
• Little Brother: Love, Tragedy and My Search for the Truth by Ben Westhoff
• Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants by Ali Noorani
• White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White by A.J. Baime
• My Seven Black Fathers by Will Jawando
• My Black Friend Says…. by Heather S. Fleming
• On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
• The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
• Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• I Rise by Marie Arnold
• America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal by Larry Ward

I’ve made many of these lists over the years. Here are my previous ones:

• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011

What books would you suggest for our book group? I’ll start my list of books to suggest next year today, with your help.