First book of 2024! ❤️‍🔥

This quick, six-hour audiobook had me going back and forth between “this feels too woo-woo for me” and “wow, that was really profound”. 

bell hooks is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class, focusing on the exploration of the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender. All About Love, unsurprisingly, focuses on love, our misguided expectations of it, and how flawed our understanding of it can be. 

I’m not a self-help book girl most of the time, so I struggled through parts of this. It’s broken down into thirteen chapters ranging from values, romance, spirituality, community, loss, and commitment among a few others. The community chapter resonated with me the most and I think everyone should read it. Other chapters lost my interest pretty quickly either because they weren’t personally applicable to me or felt too subjective. That being said, I appreciate how open hooks is about love and her thoughts on how it can change the world. We need something to do just that and loving one another more freely, especially those from outside our circles, certainly can help. 

If you’re an introspective person who wants to better understand love and improve your relationships (and don’t mind self-help vibes), you’ll likely enjoy this one.