Author: Alice Burton

Greetings, all. I hope wherever you are, you’re taking care of yourself and taking some time out to read things educational but also things that are fun. No one can do all the work all at once. And now! New nonfiction for the week:

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome by Douglas Boin. Look, I’m a sucker for a Roman history, despite still knowing very little about that time period. Alaric was the king of the Visigoths and best known for the sack of Rome in 410 (you know, that one we’re all aware of). Boin examines the relationship between the Goths and Romans from the vantage point of a marginalized people who were tired of being mistreated by the empire. Great stuff.

Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams. It’s here! Stacey Abrams’s new book! In this, she lays out a plan to “end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country.” She argues for the importance of “robust voter protections, an elevation of identity politics, engagement in the census, and a return to moral international leadership.” Gosh, doesn’t that sound nice? I love moral international leadership.

Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen Fandom by Sarah Glosson. Have you ever hand-sewn a bonnet because of your deep love for Jane Austen, or written a “what if Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet worked as rival pet store owners in the 1980s” piece of fanfic? Well, you are not alone. Austen fans have been around since her work was first published, and if you would like to dive into how she has been celebrated by the people who love her, here’s a new release for you.

Revolutions: How Women Changed the World on Two Wheels by Hannah Ross. I do not ride a bicycle. I live in a city and the very idea is terrifying. But! Bicycles made women more independent, more mobile, and encouraged fun things like dress reform (corsets + long skirts do not a safe bicyclist make). Ross is herself, of course, a cyclist, and here highlights not just the history of women and bicycles, but also tells stories of individual women as well as all-female cycling groups.

Sweet, Savory, Spicy: Exciting Street Market Food from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and More by Sarah Tiong. Traveling might be hard right now, but you can still eat awesome street food at home. Tiong was a finalist in Masterchef Australia and shares recipes for everything from “Malaysian Chicken Satay to Vietnamese Crispy Spring Rolls (Cha giò) to Hokkien Noodles (Hokkien Mee) to Khmer Beef Curry.” There’s also a whole chapter on sweet, savory, salty, and spicy options for sauce/toppings, and it all sounds both fantastic and delicious.

Stay healthy, stay informed, nonfictionites. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

*I have donated my usual fee for writing this newsletter to Campaign Zero and the Loveland Therapy Fund. I encourage readers to join me in donating to mutual aid and racial justice organizations in our communities and nation.

In light of the nationwide protests, marches and vigils held in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota, this week we’re highlighting books that focus on or helped inspire the Black Lives Matter movement, which strives to dismantle America’s systemic racism.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. This came out in 2016, but feels extremely of-the-moment: activist and scholar Taylor “surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.” If you’re interested in a history of the movement, this is for you.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. These early Baldwin essays, written in the 1940s and ’50s, capture “a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America.” The edition pictured here is published by Beacon Press, who do truly excellent work. Baldwin’s eloquent condemnation of American racism is as timely now as when these essays were first written, and many Black journalists have cited his work as an inspiration to theirs.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. In print for ten years now, Alexander’s study on mass incarceration shows that America’s prisons are being used for “the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.” Alexander’s work has inspired many other activists and influenced the creation of Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th.

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele. From Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s website: “Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.”

For more Book Riot book recommendations on this subject, check out 35 Must-Read Books About Racism, 5 Books About Black Movements and Systemic Racism in America, and 20 Must-Read Black American Memoirs for a More Inclusive TBR.

This week for new releases, I’m highlighting women and gender non-conforming people. Because I want to. Here we go:

Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon. This Pocket Change Collective series seems awesome. It’s a teen nonfiction series that focuses on social justice and environmental issues. Amazing. I wish this existed when I was a teenager. In this entry in the series, “poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary. . . Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression.” Awesome.

Girls Garage: How to Use Any Tool, Tackle Any Project, and Build the World You Want to See by Emily Pilloton. 175 illustrated tool guides! 11 how-to projects! 21 essential skills! Again, I WISH this book had been around when I was younger. Pilloton created the nonprofit Girls Garage to teach girls 9-18 to “use power tools and build real-world projects for their community.” Not gonna lie, I’m probably gonna get this for my shelf.

How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong. Humans need community. Activist Birdsong discusses how the American Dream as we know it can leave us isolated and disconnected. “Showing up–literally and figuratively–points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.” LOVE IT. Yes. Let’s all lean more into community, since there have been appx. 1 million studies that show we as humans need it to survive.

Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love by E. Dolores Johnson. Family secrets! In the 1940s, Indiana still had miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage, so Johnson’s “black father and white mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo, New York.” Years later, while researching her family’s genealogy, she realizes she knows nothing about her mother’s family. This leads to the discovery that her mother had left Indiana without notice, leaving police and FBI to assume she was a victim of foul play. If you’re into complicated family stories, here’s one for you.

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen. Author Gessen spent over two decades covering the return of totalitarianism to Russia, and predicted a number of changes that occurred in America’s political landscape. If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now (good lord, how could you not), this read is pitched as “an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery—or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.” Endurance is probably a key word for our times, yeah? Everyone take care of yourselves out there.

Who Killed Berta Caceres?: Dams, Death Squads, and An Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet by Nina Lakhani. I love a question to begin things. Caceres was a Honduran indigenous leader. In 2015, she won the Goldman Prize, the “world’s most prestigious environmental award, for leading a campaign to stop construction of an internationally funded hydroelectric dam on a river sacred to her Lenca people. Less than a year later she was dead.” Journalist Lakhani, who closely tracked and covered the story as it unfolded, here lays out the pieces.

It’s difficult times, nonfictionites. Take care of yourselves. Drink water, step away from your phones, pet an animal. And as always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot.

Let’s talk about people’s LIVES. If you’re observing social distancing, you are likely not seeing other people very often, at least not beyond a computer or phone screen. So let’s look reeeeeal close at some humans through their recounting of their own lives!

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward. Have you read this book? No, but like, have you read this book? Ward, winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction, is a capital W Writer and this extremely moving and poignant and sad and evocative memoir of her life in rural Mississippi and the loss of four young men in her life is so, so good. If you can handle some heavy stuff now (and no worries if you cannot, my friend), this is highly recommended.

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead. Have you noticed everyone talking about Middlemarch lately? Or is that just low-key happening all the time? Anyway, here’s something cozy! It’s about books, it’s about her life, if you like Victorian lit, then pick this up. Mead goes nerd-deep into why she loves Middlemarch and some background on author George Eliot, as well as talking about how it’s applied to her life throughout the years, which is charming.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. I’ve heard from a number of friends who haven’t liked this! But I love it. Macdonald deals with grieving her father by getting very very into hawks, more particularly, the goshawk. I read it while I was also dealing with the death of a parent, and I found it both relatable and helpful. If you’re on the fence (much like the noble hawk!), check out a preview and see if you like her writing style. I’m genuinely perplexed by my friends, but I feel like I need to throw that suggestion out there now.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. It’s so good! And it won the National Book Award! And it’s all in verse! Ok, so Woodson herself says: “I share what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and my growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. It also reflects the joy of finding my voice through writing stories, despite the fact that I struggled with reading as a child.” It’s so good!

Have an excellent weekend, nonfictionites. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy Almost-June! Yes, things in the world are still weird, but yes, you can also momentarily forget about it by reading about some new nonfiction! It’s why I’m here. I think release dates are gonna be wonky for a whiiile, but I’m double-checking them pretty much up to their date of release, so these should all be available as of writing this. Which is great! Because they look super interesting.

This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman by Ilhan Omar. Omar was born in Somalia, and when war broke out, she and her dad and siblings fled to its capital of Mogadishu, and then to a refugee camp in Kenya. After four years, they came to Virginia. Omar was 12, so this had been her life from eight till then. From that, she became a grassroots organizer, went to college, and was elected to represent Minnesota in Congress. This is her story of that journey.

The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone by Vivian Lee, MD. We all know there’s something wrong with the health care system. Dr. Lee says “The problem with the way medicine is practiced, she explains, is not so much who’s paying, it’s what we are paying for. Insurers, employers, the government, and individuals pay for every procedure, prescription, and lab test, whether or not it makes us better―and that is both backward and dangerous.” Her proposal to fix it is described as “realistic and optimistic,” two words you don’t see paired often.

Rainbow Revolutionaries: Fifty LGBTQ+ People Who Made History by Sarah Prager and Sarah Papworth. It’s almost Pride Month! Read some gay books! But for real, you’ve gotta love some brief biographies that launch you into learning more about amazing people. This one focuses on queer people around the world  and, as is the trend with these, has some ~fun illustrations~, which I am all about. Huzzah!

Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food by Gina Rae La Cerva. Dang, I like this cover. Do you like anthropology and adVENTURE? La Cerva “embarks on a global culinary adventure to trace our relationship to wild food.” Love it, yes, great. She “reflects on how colonialism and the extinction crisis have impacted wild spaces, and reveals what we sacrifice when we domesticate our foods —including biodiversity, Indigenous and women’s knowledge, a vital connection to nature, and delicious flavors.” Look, I don’t know why I love books about the history / extinction of food, because I don’t cook, but I LOVE them. This looks super interesting.

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson. Eels! They’re so weird! Apparently, scientists have also thought so for QUITE some time: “scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether?” What are they indeed! Svensson looks into all this in…*dramatic pause*….The Book of Eels.

BOY, I cannot believe we’re at the end of May. Time is flyin’. As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Monday is Memorial Day, the day that honors and mourns military personnel who have died while serving. While this technically focuses on those who served in the United States Armed Forces, I thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight some nonfiction reads by or about soldiers from other countries as well. There are many military books out there basically called “I Love My Gun.” They have not been included.

Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon. This tells the story of “a groundbreaking team of female American warriors who served alongside Special Operations soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan­—including Ashley White,” the first Cultural Support Team member killed in action. These women were banned from combat but worked as soldiers to build relationships on the ground.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. This was highly recommended to me as a book that is very hard but very good. Beah was a child soldier at 13 in the army of Sierra Leone. He was forced to fight alongside other children for almost three years before he was able to flee to America. There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers fighting today. Beah has become a spokesperson for their welfare. (note: I saw TW on Goodreads for rape and drug abuse, so be aware)

One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC by Charity Adams Earley. Soon after the U.S. entered World War II, Congress authorized the organization of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and Adams Earley became the first Black woman commissioned as an officer. This is her story as the WAC’s first Black officer and as commanding officer of the only organization of Black women to serve overseas during World War II. This. looks. awesome.

Undaunted: The Real Story of America’s Servicewomen in Today’s Military by Tanya Biank. As of when this book was published (2013), women make up fourteen percent of the total U.S. active-duty forces. Biank highlights the challenges they face (like still being expected to emotionally take care of family), while focusing on some particular stories, like of Second Lieutenant Bergan Flanagan, who was on the frontlines in Afghanistan, serving in the same military police company as her husband.

A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II by Elizabeth Wein. If you’ve read Code Name Verity, you know Wein loves to talk women in the service in WWII. This is about the Night Witches! AKA the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Union. This is YA nonfiction, which I’m always delighted to recommend. These were women bomber crews who would fly into Russia and were ordered to never be captured or to retreat (or their families would pay the consequences).

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Happy New Release Day! Which was technically yesterday, but we’re talking about them today, as we do every Wednesday! I’m extremely excited about the number of woman-written nonfiction titles coming out this week, so let’s look at some:

Troop 6000: The Girl Scout Troop That Began in a Shelter and Inspired the World by Nikita Stewart. I love a troop story! Troop Beverly Hills, Troop Zero, and now we’ve got Troop 6000. This is the story of the “Girl Scout program specially designed to serve girls in the New York City Shelter System.” A Girl Scout mother and her five children had their rental home sold out from under them and ended up in a shelter. She volunteered to start a chapter and Troop 6000 has now served over 700 members. People and the things they do are sometimes amazing.

No, You Shut Up: Speaking Truth to Power and Reclaiming America by Symone D. Sanders. If you’re looking to find your voice, here y’go. Sanders says that “change doesn’t just happen at the ballot box. We need people fighting oppression, injustice, and inequality—in the workplace, on the cultural battlefield, in government, in every corner of the world.” Here she shares her personal stories and the stories of other changemakers to help inspire you to take action and speak up.

Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour. If you’ve been waiting for Khakpour’s latest after 2018’s Sick: A Memoir, here you GO. Here she writes about her family’s immigration to the United States in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, trying to negotiate “Tehrangeles” while also trying to assimilate into her new country, and post-9/11 and post-2016 life for an Iranian-American.

Weird But Normal: Essays by Mia Mercado. Racial identity! Gender roles! Workplace dynamics! Beauty standards! Don’t you love books that tell you that thing you thought only you dealt with / were embarrassed by is in fact common to many people? Add in essay titles like “Depression Isn’t a Competition but, Like, Why Aren’t I Winning?” and “Bath & Body Works Is the Suburban Nonsense I Crave” and you’ve got a new release I am very excited about.

America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster by Mary Kay McBrayer. We haven’t done a true crime new release in a while! And the author writes for Book Riot! What unexpected synergy. Ok, so in 1902, Jane Toppan, aka Jolly Jane, confessed to 31 murders, most if not all of which were in Massachusetts. This biography of her is for people “who are fascinated by how serial killers are made.” And by a woman writing about women instead of Harold Schechter for once.

As always! You can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Or horse boy! Or anyone who loves horses! But I love the concept of horse girls, because almost everyone either knows one or was one. So identifiable. So real. The Preakness Stakes was scheduled for this month, and if you used to be a horse person, you know that that is one of the races in the Triple Crown (the other two are the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes). Horses like Man o’ War and Secretariat won the Triple Crown, and those races are a Big Deal. The Preakness has been delayed this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t read some horsey nonfiction in honor of it!

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. Ol’ Seabiscuit! Ok, I did not know anything about Seabiscuit, but Hillenbrand wrote Unbroken, so she’s really into like, tough survival tales and perseverance, etc. He was a STAR of the 1930s, though described as the “crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail.” It’s an underdog story, but a horse. An underhorse story. Honestly, with the way things are now, even seeing a picture of Seabiscuit makes me tear up, so I’m pretty sure I’d sob through this one. Horses!

Black Winning Jockeys in the Kentucky Derby by James Robert Saunders and Monica Renae Saunders. The first black jockey won the Kentucky Derby at its inauguration in 1875. Between 1875 and 1902, black jockeys won the Derby sixteen times. This looks at why that trend stopped (the answer is racism) and the early and immense success of black men in the field of horse racing. Note: the first woman jockey rode in the Derby in 1970, and the first black woman jockey in the Derby rode in the Derby never.

Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America’s Premier Racing Dynasty by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach. I love a rise and tragic fall! Drama-wise. When it’s deserved. A favorite Goodreads review of this is “The subtitle of this book should be ‘Greedy, selfish people excel at destruction.'” This story also involves the “Bluegrass Bubble,” which I also love as a concept. Basically the story sounds like, rich people try to get richer through horses and then fail at it. And that’s why you never misuse a horse.

The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation by Elizabeth Letts. ANOTHER UNDERHORSE STORY. Snowman was a plow horse that his rider bought for $80. He went on to become an incredibly beloved show jumper and oh no, I’m gonna cry again. If you think Snowman doesn’t have his own entry in Horse Stars Hall of Fame, you would be MISTAKEN (they call his story nags-to-riches!!). All the feelings for Snowman.

The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland by Walter Thompson-Hernández. We’ve definitely talked about this on For Real, but I want to talk about urban cowboys (and cowgirls!) again. The Cowboys have their roots in a program from 1988 called the Compton Jr. Posse. The Compton Cowboys became friends in that program. Their motto is “the streets raised us, the horses saved us” and oh no, I’m gonna cry again because humanity’s precious bond with horses, oh no my feelings. Part of their work is to combat negative stereotypes about African Americans and the city of Compton.

As always, you can find me on social media @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

Can you believe it’s May? Super weird. Release dates for books are shifting at a rapid pace, so if any books you were hoping for now have been pushed ahead, remember you can always pre-order. That’s fun because then you forget about it and months later you get a thing you wanted to read. Win-win (since pre-orders also help authors). And so! Here’re your new nonfiction release highlights for the week:

50 Drag Queens Who Changed the World by Dan Jones. Okay, sure, you know RuPaul and maybe Dame Edna or even Alaska and Latrice Royale, but do you know Amrou Al-Kadhi or Victoria Sin or historical queen Princess Seraphina? This guide is super colorful and gives you not just bios of each queen, but also fun illustrations. I love overview books like this because they can serve as a jumping off point to learn more about the people who stand out to you.

Elephants: Birth, Life, and Death in the World of Giants by Hannah Mumby. Who doesn’t love elephants? Probably the people who hunt them. Stop doing that. If you want to learn about elephant society (you should), Dr. Mumby has been studying it for over ten years and is here to share her findings. She “explains how elephants communicate with one another and demonstrates the connection between memory and trauma—how it affects individual elephants and their interactions with others in their herd.” Amazing.

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta. This is being pitched as akin to Sapiens, but bringing “a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability.” Yunkaporta is a member of the Apalech Clan in Far North Queensland, Australia. The title Sand Talk is the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. This looks awesome.

The Museum of Whales You Will Never See and Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums by A. Kendra Greene. I LOVE A MUSEUM. The more specific the better. Iceland has one museum/public collection for every ten people, so why have we all not gone there?? Fortunately, we can stave off our impatience with this. Greene highlights some of the 265 museums and collections, including the Icelandic Phallological Museum, and the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft. Yesssss.

BACKLIST BONUS

For the backlist, I want to focus on Aboriginal books! Not enough of those. Let’s look at two:

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia ed. by Anita Heiss. Love an anthology! This one’s from 2018 and highlights 51 stories from Aboriginal people in Australia. They function as snapshots, memoirs, and, I’m gonna say it, poetic MUSings. If you live in Australia or not, these lives are worth hearing about and learning from.

Too Afraid to Cry: Memoir of a Stolen Childhood by Ali Cobby Eckermann. Eckermann is one of the Stolen Generations (also known as the Stolen Children): Australian Aboriginal people removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions. In her memoir, she discusses the “devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities” as well as her own reconciliation with her birth family.

As always! You can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.

I’ve been catching up on every single season of RuPaul’s Drag Race in its many iterations, and the one I just finished had a very good MAGIC theme, so let’s talk about books about magic. Or magick if you want to be fun and also write things like folk songstress Loreena McKennitt.

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies. I personally do not do anything with magic, possibly because I saw too many episodes of MTV’s Fear back in 2000, but I am very interested in the HISTORY of it. This looks at magic books ranging from centuries ago in the Middle East to modern America. Grimoires are a sort of how-to manual and people have loved them for forever (because magic!). Davies also highlights the “role they have played in the spread of Christianity, the growth of literacy, and the influence of western traditions from colonial times to the present.” Cool stuff.

Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisah Teish. This first came out in 1985 and combines memoir with folk magic and spiritual practices. In other words: it’s got it all. She travels from New Orleans to San Francisco, offering charms and rituals in every chapter. It seems to primarily focus on the ’60s and ’70s, which is honestly perfect, because those are the decades I want to hear about re San Francisco.

Cottage Witchery: Natural Magick for Hearth and Home by Ellen Dugan. Well this is precious. No condescension meant to Ellen Dugan; anything with “cottage” in it is going to inspire that feeling in me (side note: if I had a cottage, I would name it Nutmeg Cottage and you’d all be invited for the weekend). This is much more for the earthy-minded, as Dugan shows you “how to bring the beauty of nature and its magickal energies indoors” (magick!).

Enchantments A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self-Possession by Mya Spalter. It is a pun of a title! Self-possession here is a focus on owning your life and your space. Spalter works at NYC’s “oldest occult shop,” Enchantments. Here she talks altars, money magic, the power of colors (here for it), cleaning your room and why you should do it in more than just a “change your sheets omg it’s been weeks” way, and more. Sure it’s dedicated “To the Moon” but the chapter on Magical Collaboration is sub-headed “Psychic Friend Networks,” so you’re probably gonna want to check it out.

Recommended article for the week: check out Bustle’s For Witches of Color, Books About the Occult Are Scarce by Evan Nicole Brown.

As always! You can find me on Twitter @itsalicetime and co-hosting the For Real podcast with Kim here at Book Riot. Until next time, enjoy those facts, fellow nerds.