Sponsored by Ridgerunner by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi)
After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future. Part literary Western and part historical mystery, Ridgerunner is the follow-up to Gil Adamson’s award-winning and critically acclaimed novel The Outlander.
Welcome to In The Club, a newsletter of resources to keep your book group well-met, well-read, and well-fed. This week’s newsletter was inspired by a moment of intense frustration when I could not twist and bend the way my yoga app was telling me to, and the feeling that this inability engendered. Luckily I have collected several tools to help me with this frustration, but that journey was a long and hard one. It got me thinking about how so many of the conversations we see on health and fitness leave a huge portion of our population behind, or just exclude them altogether. Let’s dive into that. All three of my picks are by Black women (one in collaboration with a white woman), and that fact alone has been so refreshing in redefining what yoga and body acceptance means for me.
Also: I am not ashamed to admit that in my frustration, I forgot I have vertigo and fell flat on my face trying to get into position. I am nothing if not graceful.
To the club!!
Nibbles and Sips
There is this place here in Portland that rocks my socks off with their juicy, smoky, tasty wood-fired chicken and “guns,” these perfectly crispy potatoes dressed with lemon and sea salt, then topped with pickled red onions and either Peruvian aji sauce or chimichurri. I will almost never turn down a good chimichurri, but that aji sauce is the business. It’s a bright and citrusy concoction of jalapeño, cilantro, garlic, and lime.
So today’s nibble is a recipe for Peruvian-style aji sauce. I had the hardest time finding a recipe by a Peruvian chef or blogger, but did find what sounds like the sauce under a different name by Ecuadoran food blogger Laylita. I also found a YouTube video in Spanish, and a version at Food and Wine. I am not familiar enough with Peruvian cuisine to confidently say whether this sauce is “authentic,” but I do know that it tastes amazing. Serve with some crispy potatoes, put it on on eggs, pour it on tater tots, or use it as a salad dressing. Enjoy!
Move Your Body, F*ck the Shame
Two of these books are about yoga, but you don’t have to be a yogi for their message of self love and acceptance to be relevant. Even if there isn’t a yogi among your book club, I could encourage you all to get into those books and try! One of the many, many lessons you’ll learn is that yoga is not just those intense 90 minute flows in a hot room you may be thinking of; even a quick 15-30 minute stretch in the morning (in a chair! on the floor! with blocks! there are options!) can do wonders for your mood and muscles —I am SO much less sore in my day to day life. The third book is quite literally about the radical power of self love, and all three stare down our society’s lack of acceptance for bodies that don’t fit a narrow definition of “normal.”
Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear, Get On the Mat, Love Your Body by Jessamyn Stanley
Jessamyn Stanley is a huge part of the reason I came back to yoga after years of fits and starts. I was disillusioned by all the yoga classes where everyone but me was a thin white person, and where the instructors did little to nothing to offer modifications when poses weren’t accessible to me. I thought there was something wrong with my body and that maybe yoga just wasn’t for me. This book (and Jessamyn’s online presence in general) changed the game. It challenges stereotypes and offers tips and inspiration for finding yoga and self love, whether you’re at the beginning of your yoga practice or have already begun but find yourself hitting a wall. I go back and search for her tutorials at least once a week (I need to repurchase this book, see below to understand why) when I need a little help or encouragement to make a pose work for my body and my ability. It’s also just a really funny book—there’s a section called “The Chick-fil-A Bandit Walks Into Weight Watchers” and I cackle every time I think about that.
A story that sounds made up but is not: I bought this and took it with me to read at a park last summer with a little picnic in tow. A dog beelined it for my sandwich, but I managed to snatch the sammy away just in time. In what I can only call an act of savage vengeance, he/she grabbed my book instead and then hauled ass away in a matter of seconds. And that, children, is how I came to own Every Body Yoga for less than 48 hours.
Book Club Bonus: When you think of yoga, you probably think of a thin, flexible white woman who can effortlessly flow into a perfect chaturanga pushup while dressed in a cute, coordinated sports bra and legging combo that costs what I spend on two weeks of groceries. That’s because yoga is marketed that way pretty aggressively! Discuss that messaging and how completely at odds it is with the core principles of yoga.
Yoga Where You Are: Customize Your Practice for Your Body and Your Life by Dianne Bondy and Kat Heagberg
I first heard of Dianne Bondy on an episode of the Food Heaven podcast about joyful movement. When I found out her book was blurbed by Jessamyn Stanley, I had to cop it. This book and Jessamyn’s go hand in hand for me. They both offer a ton of insight as to the origins of yoga and its modern iterations, break down poses in a glossary format with modifications, and provide sample sequences. While Every Body Yoga speaks more to the individual and their own practice, Yoga Where You Are takes the messaging of accessible yoga further by tying it into activism. Dianne Bondy and Kat Heagberg discuss the whitewashing of modern yoga and its failure to make space for larger and disabled bodies, offering suggestions and solutions for creating truly safe spaces aimed at yoga teachers, while also speaking to individuals looking to find a place in the yoga world that’s accepting of them. I found the chapters on breath work super helpful and love the emphasis that there isn’t, contrary to what we’ve been told, a “right” way to do yoga.
Book Club Bonus: A lot of the same talking points for Every Body Yoga apply here. It goes beyond yoga though: discuss how fitness spaces in general leave a lot of people out of the conversation.
The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor (2nd edition)
The cover of the first edition of the book was stunning and they someone managed to up the ante with the second! My nickname for this one is “f*ck your body shame!” Activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor calls readers to embrace radical self love and shed the indoctrinated body shame that’s so engrained in many of our thoughts. I cried a lot while reading this one when I realized quite how many times a day I think negative thoughts about my body and have spent a lot of time thinking about how and when I learned this behavior.
Book Club Bonus: As prep for book club, spend a day or even a couple of hours paying attention to every negative thought that pops into your brain about yourself. Write down your thoughts on that, then have the group share whatever they’re comfortable sharing, even if it’s just “I shamed my body 12 times in an hour” (you don’t have to share the specifics if you don’t want to). Where do these thoughts come from? At what age or stage in life do you remember absorbing that negative messaging? It’s eye-opening and heartbreaking to have these discussions, but empowering to name and reject the shame once you identify it.
Suggestion Section
Reese Witherspoon’s book club is now an app. Anyone try it yet? Rebecca and Jeff talked about it on this well’s Book Riot podcast and I too am a little surprised by what is and isn’t on the app.
Thanks for hanging with me today! Shoot me an email at vanessa@riotnewmedia.com with your burning book club questions or find me on Twitter and the gram @buenosdiazsd. Sign up for the Audiobooks newsletter and catch me once a month on the All the Books podcast.
Stay bad & bookish, my friends.
Vanessa