100 Books Like According to Carley Love

I always have time for what Kai Cheng Thom has to say. A work of non-fiction, this collection of enlightened essays and prose poems should be required reading for those of us interested in queer liberation.

From her earliest pages, it’s clear that Thom is not afraid to have difficult conversations or ask the tough questions, but she unpacks so many of today’s important issues with empathy, honesty, insight, and wit. Ultimately, she’s asking us to look inward and examine how we treat each other as members of the queer community.

What kind of future do we want for ourselves? For those we consider our family? This work remains hopeful and solutions-oriented without being saccharine or unrealistic.

Tales of enemies who become lovers – whether from warring families or rival gangs – are as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and Tony and Maria.

Setting this story during an actual war heightens the tension. This book will draw you in from the start.

Josef Landermann sails aboard a German U-boat, hunting Allied supply ships in the waters of the Gulf Coast. Helen Mason is the embittered Alabama widow of a US Army Air Force pilot killed by the Luftwaffe. How Josef and Helen come together is a remarkable, enchanting true story.

Woven around themes of love and forgiveness, The Heart Mender is a thrilling page-turner that will touch your heart.

Although this book is less about slavery as it happened and more about what took place after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, it is one of the best books I’ve ever seen that explains just how America still hasn’t recovered from its legacy.

This is one of those books where I kept underlining passages, such as one where the racist Southerner said that slavery was like an “apprenticeship” for “savage races” or how nostalgia for a romantic version of the Civil War poisoned our understanding of history. I want to read this book three more times so that I can fully absorb its wise lessons.

Maria Cantacuzino’s favourite emotion is forgiveness. I agree with her it is a powerful emotion and a good way to live. Maria founded a unique and important charity, The Forgiveness Project, which helps victims forgive the perpetrators of their crimes by understanding their back story, and gives perpetrators a chance to understand the feelings of their victim and apologise. There is a very close link between forgiveness and empathy, because when a victim forgives a perpetrator they are setting aside the immediate desire for revenge and hate, to understand the reasons why a person might have done bad things. And when a perpetrator apologises to a victim, they are no longer seeing the person as an object but can now see the person as a subject, with feelings such as pain and loss. Maria explores the limits of forgiveness and argues there are no limits, however awful the crime. Her… show more.

This is my favorite book on the challenging task of why and how to forgive “unforgivable” offenses. Beverly Flanagan was involved in the Stanford Forgiveness Project and is an expert on the subject of forgiveness. I liked this book because it honors the depth of the pain of wounded persons, including from spousal infidelity, in a way that I seldom see in the “forgiveness” literature. My copy is highlighted on nearly every page. Highly recommended for those who still feel stuck in the mire of pain after a wayward partner’s affair or were deserted by an unremorseful, straying spouse. She offers no clichés or trite solutions. Good for both religious and non-religious readers.

This book was absolutely stunning. Beautiful writing, beautiful settings, beautiful love. It is very unique in that it tells the love story of Linda and Thomas backward. At first, we meet them in middle age. Then, in their twenties, they live in Africa. Oh, I was so enthralled with their journey there. I feel like I saw it as a movie, so rich were the details. Then, at the end we see them as teenagers.

The ending of this book was so shocking to me that I actually cried. I have read it several more times over the years, knowing full well what the ending will bring me, and still, my heart breaks! 

I absolutely love and recommend this book to anyone who loves a good mystery or twist at the end of the story. The main characters, three teenage girls, in this book are so well thought out, and every chapter shows the transition of their own thoughts and dialects. It taught me that appearances aren’t always what’s in the mirror, and how much young adults to the elderly struggle and grow throughout their lives. Overall, this book is a fantastic story and worth the read!

As we dive into the difficult work of enemy love and peacemaking, we quickly discover that loving someone often begins with forgiving them. And further, once you forgive someone, this opens the door to authentic friendship.

I have some comical memories of saying “bless you” to a particular bully in school as though this were a magic trick that would completely change the situation. While it may have been a good start, I now realize that forgiveness is more about an ongoing posture of the heart than it is about using “magic words” to fix everything.

This book doesn’t just show us how Jesus forgives us (through the story of Peter’s restoration), it also gives kids a roadmap to understand the deeper realities of forgiveness.

Helen has been haunting the English classroom for 130 years and has never, not once, been seen. And then she feels his eyes on her. Seeing her, really seeing her like she hasn’t been seen in decades. Without wanting to be, Helen is drawn to him. That he has a body and she doesn’t is nothing in the face of their growing love, and the two form a bond that defies death. Let me tell you this book had me in tears. I read it years ago and still think of it with deep affection. I even wrote a song about it when I was far younger and far less self-conscious than I am now!

Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, is among the great minds of our era. In this book she shows – admittedly, at a slow pace – that ability to forgive is essential to individual love, political justice, and the smooth running of society. Today’s politics and social media cultivate recriminations, downplay the moment in which we forgive. Nussbaum describes a better way.