Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.
While we at the Riot take some time off to rest and catch up on our reading, we’re re-running some of our favorite posts from the last several months. Enjoy our highlight reel, and we’ll be back with new stuff on Tuesday, January 3rd.
This post originally ran July 19, 2016.
Florence Welch — aka leading lady of Florence and the Machine — has been one of my favorites for a long, long time. But she earned my life-long respect when I saw her live for the second time this summer. It was the morning after the horrific Orlando shooting, and Florence had the entire audience hold a moment of silence. In a venue of over 30,000 people, the silence was Earth-shattering, and Florence continued to play tribute to the victims of that massacre throughout the show.
I’ve never been a crier, but I cried more than once. This was how one uses their art.
Florence, for those who may not know, is a mega book lover. And more than that, she’s got her own book club online that she participates in. But it’s not a club she began; it was through a tweet by a 14-year-old girl named Leah Moloney that the “Between Two Books” club began. You can read the whole story here and marvel at how one fan’s tweet started something so big…and something that involves the singer herself. Between Two Books has an impressive 41,000 followers on Instagram. Check it out, and if you’d like, take part in the club, which not only chooses books to talk about together, but which offers up reading challenges, too.
Let’s take a look through some of the books that Florence has read, loved, and talked about both for her book club, as well as through her own personal social media challenges. She is, as one would expect, an eclectic reader, traversing the worlds of fiction and poetry and non-fiction. It’s neat to see such a range of books, so many of which aren’t the big bestsellers we may already be familiar with.
Not to mention some of the gorgeous bookish places.
You can also keep up with the Between Two Books club on Twitter, with their official account here. And if you want to be inspired by the reach of this group, you can do no wrong searching the hashtag for it or searching people talking @flo_tweet. It’s incredible the reach this club has had and continues to have.
