Basement Books | November reading wrap-up
November reading wrap-up
Basement Books
Kaitlyn
• Dec 2 2025
Here's a look at all of the books I read in November and what I thought of them.
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Book Review
Book summary
A collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster from Chamorro human rights lawyer and organizer Julian Aguon.
My review
This book touched me deeply. Aguon's writing feels like a warm hug and creates moments of hope amidst the nightmares in today's world. I learned so much from reading this book and this book is a rallying cry to do something about it.
Everything I learned
- In the 1900s, the US navy established a leper colony in Guam where Chammorros thought to be afflicted were quarantined on a beach. In 1912, they were forcibly deported to the Culion Leper Colony in the Philippines.
- From 1946-1958 the U.S. conducted a nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands where it detonated 67 automatic and thermonuclear weapons. The worst of these tests was "Bravo" which deposited life-threatening quantities of radioactive fallout (3x the estimated external dose people in Chernobyl were exposed to) onto the Marshallese.
- The U.S. Department of Defense is relocating 5,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, destroying historical and cultural sites in order to build a firing range complex, which is dangerously close to Guam's primary source of drinking water.
Further reading
Other Posts
[I've been meaning to read "Braiding Sweegrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer for literal years now. As someone who loves nature writing, up until now, I have never read the quintessential book of the genre. Finally, this year, I picked up Kimmerer's "The Serviceberry" and knew that I had to read everything else she's ever written as soon as possible, and so I did.
This is an absolutely brilliant and necessary book to understand our symbiotic relationship with plants and what we can do to make it more equal. This is the kind of book that will definitely change my day-to-day perspective as I walk through life.
Braiding Sweetgrass: review and quotes (link): Braiding Sweetgrass