Letters of Recommendation #3

Lucky #3! Thank you for all your kind sentiments towards the two previous Letters of Recommendation editions. As usual, here are recs for one new release and two others came out more than a year ago (that’s usually when books will be published in paperback and how I’m defining “old ~ish”). This installment is admittedly a young crop.

Below, you’ll find three titles that I hope will help you metabolize this horribly unjust moment: one to underscore the deeply evil powers that be, one to understand partially how we got here, and one to hopefully provide a moment of relief.  


One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Omar El Akkad
2/25/25 - NEW!
208 pp

If you’re looking for a book that explains the historical complexity of Israel's genocidal bombardment of Gaza, this is not the one. More than anything, this is a book on morality both in the personal and political realms—about seeing right and wrong, twisting those realities, and who’s allowed to do so (spoiler: it’s always the wrong-doer). In the canon of books on Palestine being published after October 7th, 2023, of which there will be many, Omar El Akkad’s nonfiction debut is much less of a what happened and more of an ethical reckoning of how it happened. With incredible lucidity, anger, and an unwavering commitment to justice, El Akkad discusses how the first livestreamed genocide highlights the failures of Western liberalism* and the depthlessness of the 2025 democrat. The ten interlinked essays that makeup the book put words to the incomprehensible sentiment that so many feel: how can it be, if we say that we care about human rights and lives, that nobody is stopping this? I don’t know if I’ve ever underlined so many passages in one book—One Day is a true social critique and a condemnation of those who chose to look away. Plus, has there ever been a more effective title?

*When asked to define “Western liberalism”, Akkad says: “I have no useful definition of it beyond something at its core transactional, centered on the magnanimous, enlightened image of the self and the dissonant belief that empathizing with the plight of the faraway oppressed is compatible with benefiting from the systems that oppress them.” 


Doppelganger
Naomi Klein
9/12/23
416 pp

Naomi Klein’s resume is bananas. She cemented her position as a great thinker with No Logo, a book on how individual people can develop personal brands way before that was common sense. She then went on to write books about climate change, capitalism, the intersection of the two, and, critically, brain trauma. In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Klein describes how people in power use moments of public vulnerability caused by shocking events (natural disasters, terrorist attacks, market crashes) to push forward their own agendas.

See where this is going? Enter Doppelganger. The book shows how the COVID-19 pandemic created a space and an audience for a new wave of right-wing conspiracy theorists, thanks to the huge swaths of people that were extra susceptible to believing the false realities (raw milk, immigration, vaccines) fed to them under the guise of health and safety. The effects of this, Klein argues, have created a “mirror world”: two polarized halves of the population whose thoughts and beliefs rely on their radical opposition to each other.

Klein describes this through an incredibly compelling personal framework: her own doppelgänger. During the pandemic, she begins to be repeatedly mistaken (mistagged on Twitter) for Naomi Wolf, a former feminist academic turned far-right conspiracy theorist. In Doppleganger, Klein blends memoir, research from her past books, political analysis, and an examination of the Gothic double to make sense of the seemingly upside-down world that the far-right occupies. It’s gripping! I highly recommend listening to the self-narrated audiobook and washing it down with COPY’s very own piece on all the doubles in culture right now.


Alphabetical Diaries
Sheila Heti
2/6/24
224 pp

“Grandma says sex is the glue. Grandma said, and she knew from experience, never leave your home. Great literature: the only thing on earth that doesn’t scare me. Greener pastures, read everyday. Grow my brain and my knowledge. Grow out bangs. Grow up.”

And so on goes Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries. Reading this book has a hypnotic, dissociative effect, similar to that of scrolling short-form video. Heti gathered ten years of journal entries, typed them up, and alphabetized them by sentence. It sounds insufferable on paper, I know, but I promise it works. The result reads like a continuous string of epiphanies about art, sex, relationships, money, and ego, broken up only by mentions of places or characters (without introduction, of course) that remind us that we’re reading a journal. Each sentence’s lack of context and fleeting nature frees readers from becoming preoccupied with the who-what-where and instead connects us with something less tangible. I felt myself believing that I understood Heti’s core as though she was a close friend of mine in a way no other memoir or published journal has ever accomplished for me. This is not a book to read in one sitting. It is a book to spend time with—to read on the subway, while waiting for your date, or when trying to fall back to sleep. This is a book that I hope you’ll, like me, keep on your shelf and often return to, one that is rewarding and funny and spilling with life.