87 Books Like The Morning Bell Brings the Broken Hearted

This book is so horribly, deliciously meta. 

This was a book I’d meant to read since it was released, but I never did. Then I was asked about the accuracy of Kuang’s depiction of the publishing industry and curiosity made me crack it open. Kuang crafts a slow-moving trainwreck that you can’t turn away from, even though, at times, you desperately wish to. It gave me hives and heart palpitations. Twice, I fell asleep listening to it and had nightmares.

It wasn’t just the industry descriptions that produced such a visceral reaction. Instead, it’s because Kuang nails that emotional author spot in the Venn Diagram between your writing as a piece of your soul and your writing as commerce. Also, she’s only 28. And I’m not bitter about that at all.  

Frank Furedi is one of the world’s leading intellectuals. He has written on a wide range of issues from parenting, reading, education, therapy culture, risk, and on philosophical topics. I think this book brings together his many sociological books and papers with a concrete focus on one institution, the university. It provides a wider and more detailed discussion of the therapeutic university than Kathryn Ecclestone and I could in our book. He covers issues such as ‘safe spaces,’ ‘micro-aggressions,’ and ‘trigger warnings’ that suggest the university is dangerous place for vulnerable young minds. The tragedy of the contemporary university for Furedi, and me, is that it has become just a ‘big school’ in which students are treated like children. 

This is a poetic masterwork with the potter’s wheel as a metaphor for creating our lives as “an ongoing process” in which every act integrates all of life. In our current era there is a tendency to cry cultural appropriation when we look beyond our immediate context and study art healing principles within the whole human community and find ourselves in others. Mary Caroline Richards offers good art medicine for this myopia in demonstrating how ideas are not the property of persons “but live in the world” as people and all of nature do. “The deeper we go” in the contemplative process of centering, the more separations “dissolve.”

As a Zimbabwean sarungano, Ndlovu is an expert storyteller, and that skill truly shows in this collection of fourteen stories chronicling the strangeness and surrealism of the lives of African women at home and abroad.

Exploring everything from the legacy of colonization to cultural appropriation and from literalized metaphors to exploring the nature of time in African thought, this is a collection that is clever and funny and emotionally astute, rendered in poetic and clear prose.

As a collection, the stories reinforce each other making this an experience to read. I highly recommend it.

Full confession here. I’m not a big romance reader and so I’m baffled by why Mennonite/Amish mystery romances are such a huge genre. Maybe it’s the perceived simplicity and innocence of the sect? Maybe they take people back to a time they never experienced themselves? That’s why I found Weaver-Zercher’s book helpful in clarifying why so many people love these books. Her writing is witty and engaging and kept me reading even though the subject itself is on the academic side. If you do want to explore the genre, the best source for a recommendation is the podcast Just Plain Wrong where three Mennonite librarians irreverently dissect Mennonite romances on a weekly basis.

Susanna Barkataki is a teacher, inclusivity promoter, and yoga culture advocate with an active social media presence who compassionately and playfully nudges the West to honor the original tradition of yoga. Her book takes many of her teachings and presents them in one place. Her wisdom is essential for anyone who wants to understand what yoga is beyond the physical practice. For Westerners, her book is a generous offering and necessary to ensure we are being reverent with the practice of yoga and not appropriating it.

I remember Jane Rogers talking about the book when it was first published and made into a TV series in the 1990s. She said she wrote about the past because it was a way of shining a forensic light onto the issues which surround us today. In this case, the subject was religion - hard to write about in the modern world without treading on toes or being accused of cultural appropriation. But the past belongs to us all. In this way, I can write in The Prisoner's Wife about what happens when Fascism is allowed to flourish, and in my next book, Acts of Love and War about the refugee crisis caused by war. What I particularly admired about Mr. Wroe's Virgins was the way that each section was told from a different character's point of view, examining the complexity of history itself, as well as telling a rollicking… show more.

Griffith’s book is a study of capoeira teachers and students in the USA, how American capoeira students experience trips to Brazil to take classes in its homeland, and how their ‘pilgrimages’ are experienced.

Understanding capoeira outside Brazil is important for making sense of capoeira in Brazil and all over the world today. Griffith’s book, focused not in the global cities of San Francisco or New York where it was first established, but in an all-American city with few cosmopolitan characteristics, and few Brazilian residents, captures the world of the ‘typical’ capoeira teacher in exile and his or her students.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and yet knew little about the variety and value of its native peoples. I found this book to be a moving and compassionate telling of how white settlement impacted Pacific Northwest Indians. It is also uplifting because it details how a present-day tribe embraced self-determination while manifesting their strong environmental values.

Deloria draws the connection between the universally held Indian respect for the earth and its creatures and the emergence of the nation’s tribes as leaders of the environmental restoration movement. It is a movement that has become particularly strong and effective in my region.

This short book completely changed how I think about nature and our place in it. This book provides a new framework for thinking about how modern Americans might be able to work with the natural world instead of against it. I also loved the concise but thought-provoking insights that Richard White provides.