A Season of Books Gift Yourself Informative Reads Season’s Readings
TrooRa Staff’s Fiction and Nonfiction Recommendations
TrooRa’s executive editor and other staff members recommend a variety of fiction and nonfiction titles that have been meaningful to them over the years. These titles include Manoj Dias’s Still Together, Sheryl Grant’s FIT for Life, and Regina Lawless’s Do You. Miep Diekmann’s Slave Doctor, Irvin D. Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem, Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and Douglas Stone’s Thanks for the Feedback also make the list.
The holidays often shift people’s schedules, which can free up more time for reading. TrooRa Magazine’s executive editor and other teammates would love to share with our readers the fiction and nonfiction books that have been meaningful to them.
These titles encourage wisdom, physical and mental health, self-development, cultural literacy and appreciation, and solid communication. Others offer insight into how and why inhuman governmental regimes develop and sustain themselves, a wisdom unfortunately necessary for our time.
Clarity and Compassion
TrooRa’s executive editor Trystanne Cunningham recommends mindfulness teacher and brand consultant Manoj Dias’s transformative title Still Together: Connection Through Meditation. This guide helps people uncover and connect with their deeper, higher selves with wisdom from ancient spiritual practices.
Dias guides us one step at a time through practices grounded in his Buddhist tradition but that are open to those of all or no faith, including breathwork and mindfulness, which are intended to guide readers to navigate life’s challenges with clarity and compassion.
While he draws on his personal experience to illustrate his points, Dias acknowledges that we need a transformed society as well as a personal practice for mental wellness.
He integrates social justice into his personal wellness and spiritual practices, advocating for diversity and inclusion in meditation spaces. Dias also does work related to men’s mental health and is the co-founder of the New Zealand chapter of EVRYMAN, a men’s emotional intelligence group.
Ageless Ambition
Cunningham has also been inspired by sixty-two-year-old professional bodybuilder Sheryl Grant’s FIT for Life: Your Daily Guide to Getting Fit in Mind, Body, and Life!, which relates Grant’s journey toward becoming the 2017 Ms. Olympia champion after more than thirty years in Silicon Valley.
Grant challenges conventional wisdom about aging and shares her inspiring personal story and her mission of FIT—Faith, Intuition, and Tenacity. Her book empowers readers to pursue their dreams with energy and determination at any age. Cunningham believes people of any age or gender would benefit from Grant’s story.
Grant seeks to build a movement and encourage others to reach their own physical, mental, and professional goals through her online FIT for Life community. Her channels are such a source of positivity and solid human connection!
Success on Your Own Terms
Cunningham was also riveted by Regina Lawless’s title Do You: A Journey of Success, Loss, and Learning to Live a More Meaning FULL Life, a tale of resilience and determination.
A diversity, equity, and inclusion expert at Meta, Lawless was a woman of color building a growing career in the corporate world. Then, her husband suddenly passed away after twenty-one years of marriage. Do You explores how she navigated her grief and resolved to begin this new chapter in her life on her own terms. She has now left Meta to chart her own path as the head CEO of Bossy and Blissful, a community of Black women executives seeking out sustainable success at both work and home.
To Cunningham, this book is a valuable resource offering practical advice on how to survive and succeed within corporate America without sacrificing one’s own identity or values. She says Lawless’s insights are relatable and grounded in her own experience elevating women of color at Meta.
Also, the book provides insight into Lawless’s personal growth in the wake of great loss and how she redoubled her efforts to live on her own terms while uplifting others.
A Tale of Empathy
TrooRa staff writer Katarina Skipic recommends Slave Doctor by Dutch author Miep Diekmann, also known as Marijn bij de Lorredraaiers.
This book broke her heart when she read it as a child, and then again as a teen, and then again as an adult. She’s certain that if kids would read this story early enough in their childhood, there’s no way they could grow up to become racist. To her, this book should be a part of the school curriculum in both the USA and Europe. She offers special kudos to the fantastic Diekmann, who had the courage to be the first Dutch writer to deal with the topic of slavery and historical racism so openly. Some scenes from this book will linger in her head forever.
Slave Doctor is mainly set on the island of Curaçao, where the author lived for several years. It follows three freshly orphaned children of the local Dutch governor and a Black girl of the same age who lives with them. Officially, she’s a slave, but in reality, she’s more of an adopted sister.
Raised to be open-minded, the girls need to find out how to survive in a world whose rules their family had already been challenging and bending. This falls hardest on Marijn, the middle child and the brother of two sisters, who is the story’s main character.
Also, on the topic of historical inhumanity, Skipic recommends Irvin D. Yalom’s novel The Spinoza Problem, which probes how a Nazi party leader could admire the ideas of Jewish philosopher Spinoza while harboring racial hatred for Jews. A psychologist, Yalom incorporates insights from his field into this character study, which compares Spinoza’s life to Rosenberg’s.
The Spinoza Problem, along with Hannah Arendt’s studies on what she called the “banality of evil,” offers thoughts on the question of what sorts of people and ideas serve to uphold inhuman regimes.
Exquisite Storytelling
Artistic and creative director Goodness Okoro loves Axie Oh’s novel The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, which is a retelling of a Korean folk tale.
The protagonist in the novel sets off on an adventure to restore peace to her village with only her grandmother’s stories as a guide and views herself as only having these stories as a guide. Okoro explores Korean fiction for the first time and is intrigued by the repeated motif of storytelling in this book.
Okoro also devoured Grace Draven’s Radiance, an older novel with a Romeo and Juliet–style plot and exquisite writing.
Guides for a Professional Mindset
As for nonfiction titles, Okoro recommends James Clear’s Atomic Habits. This title helped her understand how even little decisions can have impactful results.
Also, Douglas Stone’s Thanks For the Feedback totally changed her professional mindset. It helped her understand different perspectives and how to share her feedback appropriately.
Wisdom from Fiction and Nonfiction
These titles offer a mix of cultural and historical wisdom, beautiful storytelling, and wisdom for your personal and professional life.
The New Year is a wonderful time to look to nonfiction to begin a mindfulness practice, develop your fitness, incorporate positive habits into your life, communicate and listen effectively, or resolve to live life on your own terms.
Fiction can also help readers develop grounded and informed empathy for others, understand complex and traumatic history, explore global mythology and culture, and celebrate the beauty of finely crafted language.
What books have inspired, educated, or entertained you? We invite you to comment and share them with TrooRa Magazine’s community to inspire others!
TrooRa Magazine
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