Summertime and the reading is… fulfilling. Expanding. Joy-giving. Perspective-shifting.

Whether you’re heading to the beach in a far-flung locale, making your way out to the local park, or sitting at home in the AC, I’ve put together your reading essentials that span genre, vibe, and intention. 

Read on for kink, soul-searching, and an unforeseen adventure in Paris… xx

Existential Kink – “A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don’t,” the tagline of Existential Kink reads. This deep dive into our shadow worlds preaches and teaches embracing the uncomfortable, the taboo even, in order to integrate as full selves. The “kink” part acknowledges embracing the pleasure and the desire of the game along the way. A quick read, but one that has been lingering in my periphery and one I will come back to for many years to come. 

Deacon King Kong – This novel is one of the best I’ve read. Period. Not just this year. It takes a look at a housing project in Brooklyn and the entirely expansive community that surrounds it – not just the project residents, but the local church, the police unit, the drug dealers, the organized crime network, the nursing home. On a deeply human level, you get to know characters as individuals and see how all of these webs interact, overlap, and influence each other endlessly. It’s a brilliant look at both the collective at the macro level and individuals on the micro level and how we all shape each other’s stories, whether we realize it at first or not. 

The Untethered Soul – A hot take, this is not (this book has a cult following that I know understand to be completely warranted). I have so often found my internal monologue to be all-consuming – the ruminating, the spinning, the not able to shut it off-ness of the human mind. The Untethered Soul is about the work of separating ourselves and freeing ourselves from that constant conversation, from those patterns, in order to show up clear and free in our daily lives.

Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived – The idea of mortality and how we face death has been fascinating to me lately, and this memoir of someone who left this world earlier than expected is a beautiful rumination on that concept. When one knows that the end is approaching, how do they think about their life? What made them happy, what do they want more of, what do they regret? Having that runway before passing through gave Peter Barton the space to reflect, and it is captured, in its messy and human glory, in this book. 

Bringing up Bebe – This one came in at the buzzer, as my girlfriend who is a new Mom leant it to me this past weekend. She billed it as an entertaining and quirky look at parenting in the U.S. versus in France, and seeing as I love Paris and am highly interested in becoming a parent someday, I figured “why not?” What I did not anticipate was how fully sucked in I would become to this book, demolishing it in 100 page increments. Not only is it written from the firsthand perspective of a woman experiencing life as an American parenting in Paris and seeing the visible divide between the two styles, but I found myself thinking deeply about my own ethos about parenting (and how much of what the author sees in Paris that I would want to bring into my own home). 

Anatomy of the Spirit – I am not an energy healer myself, but have experienced the awesome power of too many modalities to not want to learn more about this energetic craft and its magic. The author is a doctor who combines energy medicine research with ancient wisdom that spans religion and tradition to bring a comprehensive look at the body and the spirit. 

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