As it’s the summer and perhaps we have a little bit of time on our hands, or just want to change the pace a little, we’ve pulled together 3 summer reading explorations for you. They are loosely themed and we hope you’ll enjoy diving into these themes in a slightly different way. We find we often skim the latest book release, grab at articles and TED talks, looking for ideas to implement and to support our practice or area of interest. To balance that we are remembering that there is pleasure too in taking a meandering journey through a topic, going where our whim takes us with no objective other than to explore and consider from a new angle. These short trips are not intended to be exhaustive or complete…they are to prompt curiosity and interest. Over the next three weeks we’ll post some of our recent meanders…
Some women’s worlds
Maria Popova’s blog, Brainpickings is an inspiring everyday resource and so when she realised her book project ‘Figuring‘ we romped through her re-visiting of the lives of scientists and artists and their connections. In scientific method it is similar but stylistically different Caroline Criado-Perez’s ‘Invisible Women‘ is an eye-opener about the world we live in.
Seeing as we’re now heading into the territory of the societal system and structure in which we operate, a good extra circuit at this point may also be ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race‘ by Reni Eddo-Lodge, ‘All God’s Children‘ by Fox Butterfield, Jared Diamond’s mammoth but accessible ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel‘, and Priyamvada Gopal’s ‘Insurgent Empire‘ looking at connectivity
Continuing our voyage into the practical and modern to read a daily dose of women’s achievements Sandy Toksvig’s Almanac starts the days off well. Laura Bates deserves some of your day to be inspired by the Everyday Sexism project. Perfect for teenagers and the middle-aged alike is Caitlin Moran’s self-discovery story ‘How to Be a Woman’ and it is nicely accompanied by Luvvie Ajayi-Jones making trouble with The Fear-Fighter Manual: Lessons from a Professional Troublemaker to activate our inner activist and consider what it is we’re here to do.
We hope you enjoy celebrating and including.