Happy Friday, Wildcats! The Falvey Memorial Library is happy to announce the start of a new weekly blog series: Weekend Recs, a blog dedicated to filling you in on what to read, listen to, and watch over the weekend. We’re scouring the internet to find new, relevant, and thought-provoking content that will challenge you and prepare you with knowledge for the upcoming week. Have a busy weekend? No problem. We sorted our recommendations by length of time. That way, whether you have four minutes on the train or an entire day to tackle a novel, Falvey has something for you.

Source: Villanova.edu.

The Center for Peace and Justice Education is pleased to announce the 2019 Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote Address with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi.

The lecture will be held on Wednesday, January 23, 2019 in the Villanova Room at 7:00 p.m. The presentation by Dr. Kendi is titled “MLK’s Legacy and Antiracism Today.”

Kendi comes to Villanova with a long list of accomplishments. He is a renowned speaker, columnist at The Atlantic, a New York Times best-selling author, and a National Book Award winner. 

Kendi recently re-tweeted a picture of a stack of books about “race, gender, sexuality, and other social issues.” In preparing for MLK Day as well as Kendi’s lecture, it seems only fitting to recommend some of the works from Kendi’s stack.

If you have 4 minutes:

Watch Danez Smith’s reading “Dear White America” from their most recent poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead:

If you have 7 minutes:

Listen to NPR’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me.

If you have 22 minutes:

Watch Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility) deconstruct white privilege in a  TED Talk.

If you have 90 minutes:

Watch I Am Not Your Negro.

In 1979, author James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, “Remember This House.” The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin’s death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.

If you have a day:

Read Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. The novel, compared to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, was the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, selected by Time magazine as one of the top ten novels of 2017, and listed by former president Barack Obama as one of the best books he read in 2017.