I’m off this week, so I thought I’d drop in and do another video. This week, The Broke and the Bookish set our Top Ten Tuesday topic as ten books we’re thankful for.

I can’t remember whether or not I’d done this one before, or at least since I got married, so I broke my list up into two pieces: books I’m thankful for because my wife and I read them together (or they’re books I recommended to her that she loved), and books that allow me to see my lived experiences. Here they are. Explanations below.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern was one we listened to together. We both love Jim Dale (even though she’s not a huge Harry Potter fan.

Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe wasn’t one I thought she’d read. Then she did, and emailed Ben Saenz and got him to come to the class she was teaching on family therapy (they’d read the book as a class).

The Knife of Never Letting Go was also an early audiobook recommendation. She was listening to it to and from work. At some point I told her she needed to stop listening to it in the car. If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m talking about.

Brown Girl Dreaming was her gift to me on our first Christmas. I’d been talking about it, but hadn’t picked it up. Akata Witch was my gift to her for our first Christmas. She’s a huge Octavia Butler fan and was lamenting that she couldn’t find any scifi authors that she liked as much. Okorafor was a win.

Patina (and Ghost) were the first books I remember reading where all of the characters are assumed black unless otherwise specified. It was an amazing reading experience.

This Side of Home (and Piecing Me Together) are books I was so happy to come across. Black girls doing things and making things of themselves while dealing with the realities gentrification of Portland. I haven’t had to deal with gentrification, but there are other aspects of the protagonists’ experiences that I could identify with.

And finally my Big 3: All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, Dear Martin by Nic Stone, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. These books, along with parallel media stories, make up the data for my dissertation. I am thankful that they exist because they voice some of the fears I have running through my head on the daily.

What’s on your Top Ten list this week?