What I am Reading Now…
Annie Jael Kwan
October 2026

I used to read, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a reckless willingness to dive into rabbit holes. A trip to the bookstore or library would open a wormhole portal outside time — darkness would have fallen before I reemerged onto the street, a time-traveler’s soul still breathless, trying to catch up with stumbling feet.

These days, I move at a much slower speed; counting my steps, watching my rates and levels both inside and outside — mindful now of my chronically ailing body, and the flailing infrastructures within which it resides. I read as palliative care: for my body, and for a world on fire.

I read to understand what good endings are. An ending is also a way home.

Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (Rupa Marya and Raj Patel) begins in the flesh. Marya, a physician, and Patel, a political economist, trace how chronic inflammation (asthma, autoimmune disease, gut disorders) is not simply misfortune or bad genes, but a direct embodied response to colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological rupture. The inflamed body is a body under stress that remembers. A critique of the modern medical industry and big Pharma, this evidence-dense argument is essentially somatic — the body keeps score of what systemic injustice has done to land, labour, communities — to us.

Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living (Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) picks up a parallel thread. It suggests perhaps the work is not to rescue or reform the systems that have caused so much damage, but to sit with their ending, while composting what’s useful for what comes next. It asks that we stay with the passing – and the grief that follows.

The Word for World Is Forest (Ursula K. Le Guin) is a science-fiction novella that reads like prophecy. On the planet of Athshe, human colonisers exploit both land and a peaceful Indigenous population, and violence inevitably ensues. A tale of collective consciousness of irrevocable loss.

The Mirror of Simple Souls (Marguerite Porete). Porete was another stubbornly unruly woman (a forerunner) – a Beguine mystic sent to the stake in 1310 for writing about a soul that “annihilates” itself into total union with divine Love (pushing past the structural constraints of virtue, logic and the Church). By refusing to recant her text, Porete insisted on a radical, unmediated spiritual knowing that refuses institutional authority over the body and mind, and was willing to burn for it.

When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse (Norma Kaweloku Wong). Wong is a Rinzai priest and longtime community organiser. A book of poetry, reflections, wisdom – on how to sit with the “timeplace” on the cusp of collapse – and breathe, and hold each other through it.

Words can stay with you. A good spell can unmake you, or remake a world. Reset a story. I take comfort in a line that stayed with me from Naomi Novik‘s young adult fantasy, The Scholomance Trilogy, where the final spell sutras declared, “You’re already dead, but stay anyway. Stay with us, and shelter all the wise-gifted children of the world.” How freeing, how liberatory – with all endings, come new beginnings.