This week the Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group held its annual book selection meeting. Our book group formed in 2008 as part of an effort to heal community following the tragic Kirkwood City Hall shooting. Our June meeting was our 15th anniversary. We have read 140 books together.

Our method is for each person to bring books to propose that we read in the coming year. From those, we select the nine books that we will read. I will list, below, the books we selected and also the books that were proposed — we had some hard choices to make!

For the last several years, our tenth book is written by the author selected for the One Author, One Kirkwood program. In 2023, we read Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty — he will speak in Kirkwood on October 12. The One Author, One Kirkwood selection for 2024 hasn’t been finalized. Our group is sworn to secrecy until the announcement is made, so I’ll leave that off this list, for now. I’m sure I’ll write about the book in the future.

Here are the books we chose:

• Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price
• A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
• The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs
• Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg
• Being White Today: A Roadmap for a Positive Antiracist Life by Shelly Tochluk and Christine Saxman
• “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker
• Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe
• Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner
• How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Here are the other books we considered:

• Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
• Solito by Javier Zamora
• We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
• The Brightest Star by Gail Tsukiyama
• A Pipe for February by Charles H. Red Corn
• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
• The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle
• Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
• The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
• The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
• Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs by Colin Gordon
• Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law by Richard Rothstein and Leah Rothstein
• Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall
• Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes
• We Need to Talk About Antisemitism by Rabbi Diana Fersko
• Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow
• The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander
• Humans of St. Louis by Lindy Drew, Caroline Fish, and Dessa Somerside
• Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown

I wrote posts like this multiple years, here are previous ones:

• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011

I’ll start now collecting titles to consider next year. Let me know of any books that you think my book club would like.