Hope you are enjoying the Café! Bookship update, June 2020

Hello from Bookship!

We hope you have been enjoying the Café, our first venture into a public social environment for Bookship. Many people (including me!) have begun participating in public readings, meeting new people, reading books they might not otherwise have read, and hopefully learning and experiencing new things.

We are hard at work on the next version of the Café - if you have feedback or things you’d like to see, please drop me a note.

To those of you who have subscribed to Bookship Premium, thank you. It is greatly appreciated! As a reminder, we donate 10% of our revenue right off the top to great literacy non-profits, including Nabu.org (formerly Library For All, literacy in the developing world), and HawaiiLiteracy.org (literacy here in Hawaii where we are based), so your money keeps Bookship going and helps spread the love of Books.

This month’s tip: Tired of notifications about a book you’ve already finished? Go to that Reading, and tap Done. The book will be removed from your active list (but always available via Account -> My Readings), and you will no longer be notified when others post about that book.

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If you live in the United States ( and probably if you don’t ), you are aware of the all-too-frequent injustice that is occurring. And looking for a way forward. Books, along with family, friends and faith, are where we turn for inspiration, for solace, for learning and growth. It’s why I started Bookship. This month we feature works popular on Bookship that provide important perspectives at this time.

How to Be an Antiracist From the book: The good news is that racist and anti-racist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an anti-racist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what - not who - we are....This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we're all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.

White Fragility If you were accused of being "racist", your likely reaction would be to be offended. I would be. White Fragility offers a different lens to think about the language and concepts of racism. As Claudia Rankine says, “White Fragility brings language to the emotional structures that make true discussions about racial attitudes difficult. With clarity and compassion, DiAngelo allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people.’ In doing so, she moves our national discussions forward...”

So You Want to Talk About Race In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo explores many of the common discussion points into today's national conversation. Part memoir, part guidebook, Oluo relates her experiences growing up in Seattle as a person of color with a white mother, and uses her life experiences to ground these important conversations.