Book Club Selections #WeNeedDiverseBooks #BookClub
The Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group, our local in-person book club that specializes in books about race in America and other diversity topics, had our annual book selection meeting this week.
Our group has been meeting since the summer of 2008 and we have read 170 books together.
For our selection meeting, people brought twenty-three titles to consider. From that list, we chose these ten books to read in our 2026-27 reading year.
- The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land by Aziz Abu Sarah and Maoz Inon
- We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat
- The Trees by Percival Everett
- Black in Blues: How A Color Tells a Story of My People by Imani Perry
- Fearless and Free: A Memoir by Josephine Baker
- My Seven Black Fathers: The Men Who Made Me Whole by Will Jawando
- The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O’Shea
- How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
- They Called Us Enemy by George Takei
- Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice by Tony Messenger
Three of those titles have local connections for us here in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Josephine Baker was born and grew up in St. Louis. The Veiled Prophet was (is?) an influential and secretive group in St. Louis. Tony Messenger is a columnist for our major newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
We had a hard time choosing. These were the other books that we considered and they all have merits:
- America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries by Eddie S. Glaude
- Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity by Laura Meckler
- Here We Are: A Memoir by Aarti Namdev Shahani
- Kin: A Novel by Tayari Jones
- The Mighty Red: A Novel by Louise Erdrich
- The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America’s Forgotten War by Jamie Holmes
- Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age by Ibram X. Kendi
- Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire by Alice Wong
- The Payback: A Novel by Kashana Cauley
- Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
- Backtalker: An American Memoir by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
- American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress by Wesley Lowery
- The Revisioners: A Novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
I have made many of these posts over the years. For more lists of books, check out these posts: