Booksology I love how informal and playful this book is. Plett is often very interesting. She jokes, speaks directly to her readers, sharing all sorts of anecdotes about her own community experiences, from absurd to deep people. As she reveals, the book is not serious.teeth Serious. It’s not an academic tone, despite her thinking with many other writers. It’s full of interesting ideas, but it doesn’t try to do it all and explore it.
To my heart, this book feels like a conversation. It made me think about my own relationship with the community. I would often pause while reading, write down notes, or text a friend. It’s an open-ended book. Readers, it is not intended to explain the community to you. It is intended to be an invitation to think more deeply about the vague “community” that we all seem to want, but sometimes it actually finds it very difficult to find.
I think all readers will leave this book with something different. One of the most exciting takeaways for me is Plett’s claims to neutrality in the community. In the circles I run, we often talk about the community like it’s a clear good. Community is the way we take care of each other. That’s where we feel a sense of belonging. It’s the way we survive these impossible times in which we live. But this is not strictly true. Plett highlights a variety of communities that are not explicitly good, from Christian nationalists to others like them moving closer to the same town, to move closer to Jovial’s party-like vibes that rose up around anti-Vax protesters in downtown Ottawa.
Please read this book
One Book Recommendation to Help You Get Through Noise
I don’t think the community is bad or even useless. But how we do our community, what it means when we talk about it — these things are important. Plett can’t open the door to so many rich conversations about which communities, what rich conversations they have in all its iterations.
