It's Sunday. Let's Talk BOOKS 📚

Since election season is upon us in full force, I was wondering how many of you have read any of the bazillion books which candidates or former elected or Media who focus on politics have written? 

In my Kindle right now is While Justice Sleeps, a novel by Stacey Abrams; and it is my next book TBR (to be read) after I finish the eight books I’ve borrowed from Kindle Unlimited (all sci-fic/MilSpec or fantasy). 

I’ve previously read Abram’s Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change. That book was a good read — but sadly, it didn’t make a huge impression on me, because most of what she wrote about in that book was aimed at people who don’t or haven’t had much to do with politics or how it works. In truth, reading it was like reading a summary of the past fifteen years of what has been written about activism in American politics here at Daily Kos! 

But did you all know that Stacey originally wrote a number of novels, many of them in the romance genre? 

The Atlantic covers her authorship in this story: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/stacey-abrams-novelist-while-justice-sleeps/618716/

The Story Behind Stacey Abrams’s Fiction Career

How she became a novelist, what politics and writing have in common, and why, at the end of every good story, someone’s got to die

By Ayana Mathis

On the afternoon of my first conversation with Stacey Abrams, she had just moved house. She sat in front of a bay window, sunlight pouring in around the sides of drawn blinds. We were talking over Zoom, and the little square of our interaction was spare and tidy—that is, until she turned her camera around to show me a long, rectangular table crowded with things that hadn’t yet found a home: an open box, an orphaned white vase, a pile of books. In the stack sat biographies of Booker T. Washington and James Madison and, she said, “a book about butterflies.” Why butterflies? “Well, it’s about how butterflies are part of the ecosystem that we rarely think about. Much like bees, when we had the bee-colony collapse.”

I wouldn’t have guessed that Abrams had bee colonies on her mind. It was early March, and Georgia lawmakers had recently proposed a raft of new voting restrictions that Abrams would later describe in a tweet as “Jim Crow in a suit + tie.” Abrams is, of course, best known as the standard-bearer in the battle against disenfranchisement in her home state of Georgia and around the nation, and the founder of two voting-rights advocacy organizations: Fair Fight Action and the New Georgia Project. In 2018, she became the first Black woman to run for governor in any state as a major party’s nominee, but she narrowly lost the general election to then–Secretary of State Brian Kemp, whose office had purged nearly 700,000 voters from the rolls in the preceding two years. After her loss, she doubled down on her long-game strategy of registering and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters—an effort that is now credited with helping flip the state blue, sealing victories there for Joe Biden and Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

If you have a subscription to the Atlantic you can read the rest of the story. 

But I LOVE the way Stacey Abrams thinks, and that comes across in every form of writing she has partaken of, and in the way she has faced politics. Do what you can now and plan so that later you can achieve more. 

So, have any of you read anything written by someone IN or AROUND Politics, and what did you think of that? 

Also, feel free to open any subject on the issue of Books/Authors in the comments! 

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