016: Hope in the Dark

Bookish News:

  • The LPL staff Best of 2017 list is here! Check it out!
  • Book Riot’s 2018 Read Harder Challenge is live! Some sample categories:
    • A comic written and illustrated by the same person
    • A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
    • A book with a cover you hate (Ughhh. WHY.)
    • A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
  • Book Squad Goals 2018 is coming soon! If you need any recommendations for any challenge items in ANY challenge, let us know!  :D
  • LibraryReads Best of the Best list and January lists are out now

Two Book Minimum:

  • Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (Narrative nonfiction that will draw you and and keep you reading, if you don’t mind reading while mad.)
  • Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard (slim volume that would make a GREAT gift – it’s based on two lectures Mary Beard delivered in 2014 and 2017.)

She Said / She Said: Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (2004, repub 2016)

Hope in the Dark was written (in 2004) to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them–and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable.

Some favorite quotes:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what is may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.”

“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.”

What we’re up to // Library news:

LPL is closed 12/24, 12/25, 12/31, 1/1 – stock up, and/or use our digital resources! 

 Winter Reading Bingo is here!

If you need last minute bookish gift ideas, remember to listen to our last episode


TWICE a month, the librarians are in, with their favorite recommendations in Two Book Minimum, a toe-to-toe discussion on a book or topic, as well as news from the book world, updates from Lawrence Public Library, and beyond.

This episode was produced by Jim Barnes in the Sound & Vision studio. Our theme song is by Heidi Lynne Gluck. You can find the Book Squad Podcast on iTunes, opens a new windowStitcher, opens a new window, or SoundCloud, opens a new window. Please subscribe and leave us comments – we’d love to know what you think, and your comments make it easier for other people to find our podcast. Happy reading and listening! xo, Polli & Kate