This edition of Rally Reads has been a long time in the making.
If you’re new to the concept, Rally Reads is a series of blog posts where we ask the people who’ve left their mark on us to share the books, documentaries, articles or films that have had the biggest impact on their careers and their thinking. And to explain why.
This edition features Rachel Erskine who we’ve been a big fan of for many years.
She’s worked in the international solidarity sector for over 12 years, five of them as communications lead for the UK branch of Nairobi-based public health NGO Amref Health Africa. Now a freelance consultant, she provides tailored support to INGOs and charities that are seeking to review their communications and fundraising through the lens of ethical storytelling and representation.
And she is doing amazing work.
Rachel approached us to write this edition, and that made us very happy. Enjoy…
““For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.”
”
For much of the past three years, I’ve felt like I was wading through treacle. The French call it cycling through semolina (or sauerkraut, depending on which part of the country you come from). Whatever your carb or condiment of choice, it has been - and continues to be - a slog.
As the daughter of two librarians and a huge word nerd, reading has always been one of the things that keep me sane and bring me solace. But in recent months I’ve struggled to lose myself in any one book: instead, I’ve lurched from one thing to another, finishing next to nothing and returning to old favourites in search of what I might have missed. I have been a roving reader; a literary loose woman. Throughout, the books below have given me comfort, joy, and / or a much-needed kick up the arse. They have all made me sit up and pay attention. In different ways - not always deliberately - they have renewed my faith.
Lost, Found, Remembered, Lyra McKee
I left Northern Ireland more than half my life ago. The longer I’m away, the more I find myself drawn to cultural artefacts from and about “the Province”. There is so much great writing coming out of both sides of the border at the moment - much of it by women.
Lyra McKee was a freelance journalist who was shot dead in 2019 at the age of 29. She was a champion of Northern Ireland’s young people and a beacon for its LGBTQ+ community. She writes with clarity, courage, and compassion about post-conflict Northern Ireland, the fragility of peace, and the ways in which the past remains present for so many people. Her work is luminous, and the world is poorer without her.
A documentary, Lyra, has just been released - and is available on All 4 for those in the UK.
Travelling While Black, Nanjala Nyabola
This is not a travel memoir, Nyabola makes clear, but a set of reflections prompted by a life spent “on the move” in both personal and professional capacities. She grapples with “dislocation, disjuncture, exile, alienation, belonging and their logical opposites”, displaying extraordinary compassion for “a broken world and the people who slip through its cracks”. She is scalding on European hypocrisy when it comes to borders and who they are open, or closed, to.
How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell
More than once, I caught a fellow passenger sneaking a peak at this as I was reading it on the Tube. Its cover is stunning. Its title is intriguing, and deliberately misleading. Odell is not suggesting we lie down and let life wash over us: rather, she’s interested in how we can resist the onslaught of demands for our attention. She wants to help us reclaim physical and mental space for creativity, connection, and care. Once I put my phone down long enough to focus, I felt #seen, and spurred on to do better.
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Lola Olufemi
Almost every page of this slim volume sent shockwaves through my very basic brain. Olufemi writes with clarity and urgency about the feminist project, which she casts as a creative act. Her definition of feminism is expansive and inclusive. She encourages us to “shun a simplistic, consumerist and neo-liberal feminism” and embrace its radical roots; its transformative vision of liberation for all. I loved Olufemi’s focus on the joy that can be found in imagining, and then creating, a more equitable world.
Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit
An extremely tepid take, this one - but here is a book that never fails to ease my bunched-up brow.
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson. It might be flighty - but that doesn’t make it fragile. The hope Solnit makes a case for here is solid, determined, powerful. Reading her, I’ve come to imagine hope as one of those green parakeets that light up London’s parks; the ones that are thought to have escaped captivity and adapted to the capital’s climate. Hope, says Solnit, is a tool we can all wield: “an axe you break down doors with”. She draws on victories won by movements global and local, high-profile and unfairly overlooked, to show what might lie on the other side.
On Connection, Kae Tempest
This is one of those books I didn’t know I needed until I found it - or rather, it found me - on a Sunday afternoon at The Word in New Cross. Written under lockdown in 2020, it’s a meditation on creativity: how art, of any kind, can help us get out of our own way and open ourselves up to others. Connection, believes Tempest, “is the first step towards any act of acknowledgement, accountability, or responsibility [...] It is jubilant. Ecstatic. Without fear”. This tiny book is a true tonic, and I’ll be foisting it on friends for a long time to come.
My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women
Published before the 2021 Taliban takeover, this collection of short stories is sad, subversive, creepy, darkly funny, and enraging. It would be a life-enhancing read in any circumstances - but now feels like a good time to seek out the voices that are being silenced and suppressed as the rest of the world looks away.
We liked this line, “Hope is an axe you can break down doors with”. Wonderful. Just wonderful.