📚Books for the Long Weekend
📚Books for the Long Weekend
It's Memorial Day weekend in the US
In the US, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer. High schoolers are graduating! Grills are dusted off from their winter slumber! Stores have another excuse to have a sale! And (hopefully) book nerds have some peace and quiet to dive into a book.
Here are some recent releases that have caught my eye and are on my pile. I read multiple books at once. You can find all of these on my “Reading Now” Bookshop.org list (yes, these are affiliate links). Titles are listed here in alphabetical order by author last name.
Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation by Christa Brown
Christa Brown was featured in chapter 6 of Disobedient Women, a book I’ve highlighted before. This is her book, and I’m excited to give this a read. Brown is a longtime advocate for survivors of abuse that occurs in Southern Baptist Convention churches and organizations, and is a survivor herself.
Who Is A True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture by David W. Congdon.
It’s a national election year in the US, and despite the mainstream press getting wiser about how evangelicals act politically (as well as how they use language), one aspect of our political discourse that has regrettably stayed the same, and that’s people accusing one another of “not really being Christian.” (
has been a squeaky wheel on this point for a very long time—if someone says they are a Christian, take them at their word. )Congdon takes the question of who gets to “claim” the mantle of Christianity seriously.
The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor
Vallor’s book Technology & The Virtues is one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last few years—I draw upon it in my forthcoming book. That book tackled how various virtue ethics traditions could be adapted to respond to a changing technosocial landscape. This book tackles AI directly—and uses the metaphor of a mirror to explore the promise & peril of building dependencies on AI.
Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by
Cait West’s memoir tackles her own journey away from Christian patriarchy, which is also known under other terms such as “quiverfull,” or the “stay at home daughter movement.” I am early into the audiobook version of the book, which I also recommend. Memoirs like these do such a powerful job of portraying what life is like under fundamentalist theology and practice. It’s not abstract. It affects people’s lives.
Bonus Pick: The Krakoan Era of X-Men Comics
Since 2019, the X-Men line of comics have been operating in what comics fans call a “status quo” where mutants have had their own island country known as Krakoa. (I wrote about it at length here.) That status quo, which has been a ton of fun and lead to a lot of interesting stories, is ending in the next month or so. But if you like comics, high-concept sci-fi, and soap opera-inflected entertainment, pick up the book that started it all, House of X / Powers of X.
What are you reading? Let me know in the comments.
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