Show & Tell: Kamala Is Back with a Book!
Unstacked Digest for the week of July 28 - August 3
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
For those wondering, Demon Copperhead is still kicking my ass. After over two full weeks of reading, I have switched from the page to the audiobook, and I am still just at 65% through. I have however finished four other books, so all is not lost. I am determined to be finished with this little pre-teen ginger by this time next week. If I am not, check on me, Demon will have won.
In other news I am working on a new project that is outside my comfort zone and I am really feeling my creative juices flowing again in new and terrifying ways1. I look forward to sharing it with you all in the next few weeks.
This Week in The Stacks
Reminder: There is a genocide going on.
Our Toni Morrison book club episode dropped this week with author and professor Dana A. Williams and it was a really good time.
Cats out of the bag, our August book club pick is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Check out this post for details and key dates if you plan to read with us.
I ranked everything I read in July and told you all about way too many books I’m hyped about for August.
Books I Read This Week
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins by Barbara Demick
The story of twin girls separated as infants due to China’s one baby policy — one stayed with the family, the other was kidnapped and adopted by a family in the US. This book captured my interest and kept me entertained, but I found the book littered with choices that smacked of racial and cultural bias. She was thorough in her research and reporting, and rightfully tough of the Chinese government’s policies, but left international adoptions mostly glossed over. I felt this acutely with her lack of any rigorous critique of transracial and transnational adoptions by white conservative Christians in the states. I was interested in this story but ultimately underwhelmed with the execution.
The People’s Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward edited by Maggie Smith and Saeed Jones
This collection, written as a response to Project 2025, could have easily been trite or cutesy, but somehow Smith and Jones pulled it off. Every contributor hit on something that felt like a life line or, a at the very least, an invitation. The book starts with an absolute banger from Alexander Chee, and is followed up by piece after piece that adds to the whole. I will return to this one at least once more before the year is up.
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find--and Keep--Love by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S.F. Heller, M.A.
A self-help book about attachment styles. I don’t know why I sometimes think I want to read these popular science self-help books. I never actually want to read them. I have yet to like one. The book offers some interesting ideas and research but it is so redundant and lacks anything outside of the obvious.
Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
A Black Southern family drama about a pastor, his son, and the women who love them. I was bowled over by this book. A thrilling debut. It starts off witty and effortless, an easy portrait of a church and its people, and then slowly the ground shifts under our feet and the whole book has flipped before you ever really notice. I don’t want to say too much, but it really works. Citchens nails the alternating narrators and their voices. She taps into the ways desires, loyalties, and power dynamics are ever shifting, even imperceptibly so. She has a gift for evoking a whole person with one quick off-handed observation or bit of dialogue. The commentary on masculinity, hypocrisy, and the barriers to accountability are great. My favorite fiction of 2025 so far2.
Fave of the week!
Housekeeping
The final part of my journey with Caroline and
discussing The Hunger Games series came out this week. It was a real blast talking about those books with Caroline. I need Suzanne Collins to keep churning them out so we can keep discussing them in extreme detail.
I was featured in
last week for a little interview.I also was on The Mom Room last week but completely forgot to share it because I was knee deep in sprinkles and baked potatoes. This was a fun one that talked a bit more about my reading life and being a parent.
And we’re getting closer to this event with Cleyvis Natera for her novel The Grand Paloma Resort at Reparations Club on August 28th.
They keep adding names to the Mississippi Book Festival in September. The line up is so dang good. My panel is amazing. So come on down to Mississippi on September 13th. You will not regret it.
Things I Love…
Books
Kamala Harris wrote a book, 107 Days. It is about her titular 107 day run for the presidency. It will be out on September 23rd. I will be reading this book, and I will be using the next 50 days to do everything I can to get Kamala Harris on the podcast. If you are reading this and work at Simon & Schuster, hook it up.
Pop Culture
I have officially excommunicated myself from the church of Bachelor. It has taken way too long, but I just found out that Bachelor in Paradise is going on right now and I had no idea, and so like truly, this means I am free of that god-awful franchise. This isn’t a big thing, but it is a big thing for me.