By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
Revery: A Year of Bees by Jenna Butler
This book feels like a long exhale. Set on an off-grid farm in Alberta, it follows Butler’s journey as a beekeeper. In the gentle rhythm of tending to hives, Butler unearths something we must remember — that even in collapse, life persists. Her writing is slow and embodied, humming with resilience. Amid stories of bees, she touches on so much more: climate change, capitalism, grief. In these pages, you catch glimpses of Butler’s soul as it learns to listen to the land.
Figuring by Maria Popova
In Figuring, Popova weaves together the lives of scientists, poets, and visionaries into a meditation on thought, creativity, and genius. Across 12 years of writing, she brings you comfort by charting the long arc of human inquiry, in the quiet bravery of lives lived with care. Her prose is delicate and alive, pulsing with the gentle rhythm of curiosity. Reading it feels like looking up into the night sky and trying to grasp the vastness of the Milky Way, then slowly realizing we too are a part of it.
Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec
This book found me while I was studying the destructive legacies of colonialism. It didn’t offer easy answers, but it did offer presence and relationship. As Krawec remaps our history, she invites us into a different kind of future grounded in witnessing, accountability, and love. Her writing is both intellectual and intimate, rigorous in its research and still deeply human. It teaches us about the world by making us witnesses and participants in grief, of a world lost and losing. It asks us to unforget. Reading it is an act of unlearning dominant narratives that we must engage in.
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi
If the world around us is falling apart, this book doesn’t try to glue it back together. The form of this book, with its poems and lists, highlights and strikethroughs, is a refusal to be contained within a single genre and an invitation for imagining radically new futures. Her words fragment and flow, moving with urgency and care, textured by rage and tenderness. Through it, Olufemi reminds us that imagination is a tool of resistance. It is a rehearsal for freedom.
I hope these books will meet you in your exhaustion and fear too, so they may show you a door. Not as a way out, but a way to go deeper in. Into all the complexity, sorrow, and strange beauty that surrounds us. Into community, imagination, and care that defines the human condition. In each story is a reminder that we are still here, loving and losing, and refusing to look away.
