Esme's Staff Picks

The eye-catching title "How to Do Nothing" may be a bit reductive, but the subtitle gets closer to the book's overall goal. Odell points to the ways that corporate interests monetize our attention and explores spaces, activities, and art that challenge this gospel of productivity. Far from promoting expensive beach vacations, Odell advocates periodic retreat to inspire and reorient future actions that are anything but selfish. This is the perfect COVID read as we all prepare for the long haul of quarantine and protests. Raise hell, rest, repeat!

Wintering is a beautiful meditation on both the dark & chilly season, as well as the periods of "winter" in our lives: stretches of illness, grief, and transition that disrupt our routines and force us inward. This theme felt especially resonant in preparation for the lonely, home-bound winter of 2020.

Although May unfortunately does not address the millions who are violently denied the conditions for "rest and retreat," May imparts wisdom from people and animals of northern regions for surviving in harsh conditions. Whether you are prepared to take a "polar bear plunge" into an icy body of water, as the author suggests, is up to you (that will be a no from me), but the hibernation metaphors might help you give yourself permission to get through your winter however you can!

"Time has a way of eternally looping us in the same configurations. Like fruit flies, we are unable to register the patterns. Just because we are the crest of the wave does not mean the ocean does not exist. What has been before will be again."

Set in a northern region where the seasons oscillate between the permanent darkness of winter and the delirious never-ending daylight of summer, Tanya Tagaq's #ownvoices mythobiography dances between extremes. Presented through gorgeous poetry, prose, and retellings of myths, Split Tooth explores the tenderness and beauty that coexists with the harshness of daily life in a tight-knit indigenous community devastated by colonialism, addiction, and sexual abuse. In equal measure fantastical and brutally real, Split Tooth will appeal to fans of other dark magical realism titles such as Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater

Content warnings: Addiction, domestic violence, sexual abuse, pregnancy & birth, infanticide