“Black Americans’ understanding of America is too realistic, too cautious, too conscious of the lessons of history to possess an unbridled patriotism. We know at best, our country is a work in progress and that the battle to perfect it is an uphill climb.” — Read Until You Understand by Farah Jasmine Griffin. If there’s any book that captures the soul of a curious Black girl this one is it. The gentle yet fierce belief and approach she has towards literature and reading is heartbreaking and inspiring. I’ve marked up this book so much I need another copy. I mean, just look at how she proves the time traveling Black people are forced to do at any given moment: “That sense of profound loss is always with us, exacerbated by each new death. It is my mother and I calling each other when we hear of Baltimore’s Freddie Gray in the ambulance and are both immediately snatched back to that Philadelphia night…It is every time we witness yet another police killing…And in between, we live with the knowledge that the grief is just below the surface; there is no closure, just a scab that can be ripped off easily…” — Here Griffin references the sudden and tragic loss of her father when she was a young girl. But she shows us her grief by its fresh arrival at any given disruption of peace for Black people — a lethal act of violence against another Black body.
“There is so rarely an occasion in this modern life when your body takes over, when you find out what it will do, the smells and sounds it will release when it’s trying to survive.” — Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
I fully judged this book by its cover when reading the giant black and red “soon to be a Netflix series!” endorsement on the front. Whenever I see something is based on a book I have to read the book — I’m always curious about how the adaptation works or doesn’t. The book is a good read. It is not a great piece of literature if we’re going by some canonical standards. But if we’re defining greatness by the strength of storytelling then this is a great book. Knoll gives good story, period. The main character, (Tif)Ani FaNelli, presents as a conflicted woman but, while we learn about her trauma and what sort of conflicts such trauma brings, it’s just not consistently clear what her present conflict is. There’s an obvious one regarding some truthtelling - secret-breaking around a high school shooting and its aftermath. But its not so straightforward when it comes to just why she and her fiance are also a problem. It probably could have been a longer book.
“Write what you don’t know, about what you supposedly know. Write what you haven’t ever felt permitted to call knowledge, about what you see and feel and live. Show that which exceeds your ability to tell it. Tell that which exceeds your ability to show it.” — How To Read Now by Elaine Castillo
I have mentioned this book in so many conversations with folks. I love it. Castillo is and isn’t saying anything new here when she tells us that perhaps everything we know about literature and reading and its place in the academy just might all be entirely wrong. Given how we’re all getting better at (or closer to) openly discussing the wholly encompassing nature of white supremacy and its role in the founding and progression of this country then why the heck wouldn’t the way we study ourselves and how we tell our stories also be hella racist? Why do I say it is and isn’t new? Because this has always been the presumption amongst marginalized folks. I’m so glad Castillo is giving this truth its proper platform. Runner up quote: “Or, as the contemporary Inuit and Haitian Taino poet Siku Allooloo writes in the poem Survivor’s Guilt: ‘My ancestors say:/ We have always been here// My job is to house the always/ for a while/ My job is to do this/ despite you.’”
‘It doesn’t go away…Once it’s inside your head, whether it’s your own memory or your parents’, or your grandparents’, this fucking pain becomes part of your flesh. It stays with you and marks you permanently. It messes up your psychology and shapes how you think of yourself and others.’ — The Island of the Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
I find that I lean towards white/white-passing women who choose to remain angry when they could easily look the other way and bask in their privilege. Shafak is one of those women for me. I encountered her work many moons ago in the early aughts when she’d released her first novel in English, The Saint of Incipient Insanities. It remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. I can still see the final scene where a main character jumps off a bridge, silver spoon in her hair and all. Shafak has an amazingly powerful voice that carries in all of her works. TIMT is a love story told through the daughter of two soulmates and it involves an animate tree (with proper nods to the staggeringly beautiful The Overstory by Richard Powers). Runner up quote: Some day this pain will be useful to you.
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson - I read Fall; or, Dodge in Hell and found it strange and long enough to keep me distracted during the summer of 2020. Not to say I wasn’t very much involved and affected by all things 2020 but, I needed an equally massive work of speculative fiction to take me out of myself from time to time. Stephenson’s latest TS does the same. Like a lot of new fiction these days the novel takes place in the not at all distant future where people can spend no more than ten minutes or so outside or they’ll die from heat exposure. Stephenson takes that setting to its pretty logical conclusion: what happens when billionaires compete to stop the sun from burning up the earth? In short, wild hogs and sulfur in the air. Look, this book is weird as all hell but weird in a way that keeps you going.
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara — I’m the sort of person who keeps the series finale of “Six Feet Under” on virtual tap for whenever I need a good cry (spoiler alert and, also, the entire plot and, also, the meaning of life: everyone dies). Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life gutted me. To Paradise isn’t as acutely tragic as ALL but the writing remains brilliantly subtle in the ways her words settle under your skin.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu — a beautifully told collection of stories about death and dying.
Bone Black by bell hooks - I’ve read nearly all of hooks’s scholarly and most well-known works but I’m sorry to say I’d never encountered her memoir until this year. It is probably my favorite and I wish I’d read it when I was younger. Previously reviewed here.
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen — Absolutely love love LOVE this book. It better get optioned for a TV series because I’m here for all of the meta-definitions of counterfeit. The way the author plays with this word to touch on first generation identity, immigration, assimilation is just wow.
Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin - I kept waiting for the big terrible thing to happen. The big terrible thing, turns out, is already happening and this book provides a slightly mundane glimpse into that terrifying reality.
Honorable Mentions
“The world is going to eat you alive and I don’t know how to shield you from it.” — Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
“It was in that moment that Pidre realized he had entered the strange world of Anglo myth, characters resurrected from the language of story, populating the realm of the living, side by side, if only for one night and one night only. Pidre came from storytelling people, but as he passed a big top devoted to the reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, he couldn’t help but think that Anglos were perhaps the most dangerous storytellers of all — for they believed only their own words, and they allowed their stories to trample the truths of nearly every other man on Earth.” — Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Killing Eve Series by Luke Jennings
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Under The Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer - previously reviewed here.
Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton - previously reviewed here.
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow - previously reviewed here.
Thanks for reading. See you next month for words on some of the Honorable Mentions above as well as Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer — his book Less is all the things so I can’t wait to dive into this!