Catching up on this year
I've read several books by PoC this year, though there's no way I'll get to 50. Here's the list through July (9 so far). I'll try to add others as I get to them (I have several in my to-read stack).
I really enjoyed Ayize Jama-Everett's The Liminal People. Jama-Everett is clearly working from famous comic-book ideas (especially the X-Men), and doing very different things with them. I especially appreciated the ways he fleshes out (quite literally) those ideas with a level of detail that wouldn't work in comic books at all. It should almost go without saying that I appreciate the focus on people of color (just about everyone of importance in the book is not white). And his ending is the kind of ending that is going to get me every single time, but I won't spoil it for you beyond that. (I now own the sequel, The Liminal War, and hope to get to that soon.)
laurieopal has been strongly recommending Nell Irvin Painter recently, and especially The History of White People, and as usual, she is right. Painter’s subject is the long, complex, internally contradictory history of how European peoples have divided themselves and been divided by observers. So we get to how “Caucasian” became the weird substitute for “white” that it is now, how German, Teutonic, and Aryan changed value over the years, and how Britain came into the equation, but much of the book is also set in the New World, and covers the amazing contortions of “race science” over the centuries. Painter, who is African-American, has a knack for reporting the most ridiculous positions and attitudes with a quiet, dispassionate air, and then she will throw in a quick word like “cockamamie” just when you think she was making no judgments at all. The book is well-written, thoughtful, and not too dense; I am so glad I read it. Between my pleasure in it and Laurie’s urging, I will probably read a lot more Painter, too.
I read all of the Aqueduct Press Grand Conversations series, which brought me to Lisa Bradley’s The Haunted Girl, a completely excellent mix of poetry and prose. Most of the stories and poems are creepy, all of them are original, some draw heavily on Bradley’s Latino background. I showed Steven one of the formal poems, because it was beautifully done in a form I’d never heard of (a “kyrielle”) and he was as impressed as I was. Highly recommended.
Jennifer Brissett’s Elysium is an Aqueduct Press novel which was honor listed for the Tiptree Award and was an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award (which does not generally give honorable mentions). This book follows three characters who shift their genders, ages, relationships to each other, and settings frequently; the shifts are marked by failed computer code, so the reader is aware of something somewhere trying to program the situations for the characters and failing. Their situations vary from bittersweet to desperate, and their personalities shine through the shifts. A real tour-de-force and extremely original.
A friend gave me Ann Mah’s Mastering the Art of French Eating, a memoir by an American woman of Chinese ethnicity who spent a year alone in France while her diplomatic corps husband was in Iraq, traveling the countryside and learning about the foods of various French provinces and areas. The food writing is good and I learned a lot, but the author’s voice drove me around the bed-she is irritatingly privileged and selfish, and I kept wanting to shake her. Worth a try if you can tolerate the author.
Some time ago, waywardcats lent me Anita Hill’s (yes, that Anita Hill) Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. This never looked attractive to me, but I was short on nonfiction and didn’t want to read another food book, so I picked it up, and it was way better than I imagined. The title and cover led me to think it would be preachy, but instead it is anecdotal and thoughtful, and I was very drawn to her essential point, which is that laws and regulations can only go so far to create racial equality, and we must look to other means as well. She concentrates on what home is and why it matters, and in particular what it means to black women of roughly my generation and why. Like Isabel Wilkerson and others, she does this with stories of people’s lives, including her own family’s lives. She only mentions her own public history once, to make a point. Well worth reading.
When my partner and I were in Portland last November, we went to Powell’s, and I continued my practice of always buying something by a writer of color whose work I haven't read. This one was Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie gets talked up a lot, and I’ve read very little Native American literature, so I’d always meant to read him. Absolutely True Diary is a young adult novel, based on some of his life experience. It’s a very easy (though often painful) read, with delightful illustrations by Ellen Forney. It is apparently also one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S., and I cannot figure out why. I will read more Alexie.
Atul Gawande is a favorite essayist of mine. I think of myself as being very calm and level about the subject of death, so I was looking forward to his Being Mortal, which turned out to be one of the most painful and upsetting books of recent memory (and really worth reading). He thoughtfully and compassionately examines both old age and death, how we deal with them as a culture, how the medical establishment deals with them, and what needs to change. Like Hill (and Wilkerson and Malcolm Gladwell and others) he offers up his own family experience as example. The book made me cry several times, and made me think and worry throughout. More valuable to me than anything else was his crystallization of the questions doctors (and family members and friends and society) can ask people who are aging and/or dying to help tease out true wants and needs from the welter of confusing emotions. I can’t genuinely recommend this, because it’s so hard, and at the same time I hope everyone will read it.
Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, Eight Essays, and a Speech is a collection by the lovely and talented Andrea Hairston. The plays are 17 and 15 years old, and they read as a little bit slanted toward the didactic for my tastes; on the other hand, I completely agree with everything she's being didactic about. I think they would both perform better than they read, especially since they depend a fair amount on visual and linguistic efffects. Most of the essays are movie reviews, and I really appreciated those. She made me think more about Wall-E, and once again reminded me that I want to watch Pan's Labyrinth. As you would expect, she never loses sight of marginalization and whose voices are valued (and whose voices are not). The speech was, well, familiar, since we were WisCon guests of honor together in 2012. On the whole, an excellent book and well worth your time, especially if you read plays for pleasure, which I do.
I really enjoyed Ayize Jama-Everett's The Liminal People. Jama-Everett is clearly working from famous comic-book ideas (especially the X-Men), and doing very different things with them. I especially appreciated the ways he fleshes out (quite literally) those ideas with a level of detail that wouldn't work in comic books at all. It should almost go without saying that I appreciate the focus on people of color (just about everyone of importance in the book is not white). And his ending is the kind of ending that is going to get me every single time, but I won't spoil it for you beyond that. (I now own the sequel, The Liminal War, and hope to get to that soon.)
laurieopal has been strongly recommending Nell Irvin Painter recently, and especially The History of White People, and as usual, she is right. Painter’s subject is the long, complex, internally contradictory history of how European peoples have divided themselves and been divided by observers. So we get to how “Caucasian” became the weird substitute for “white” that it is now, how German, Teutonic, and Aryan changed value over the years, and how Britain came into the equation, but much of the book is also set in the New World, and covers the amazing contortions of “race science” over the centuries. Painter, who is African-American, has a knack for reporting the most ridiculous positions and attitudes with a quiet, dispassionate air, and then she will throw in a quick word like “cockamamie” just when you think she was making no judgments at all. The book is well-written, thoughtful, and not too dense; I am so glad I read it. Between my pleasure in it and Laurie’s urging, I will probably read a lot more Painter, too.
I read all of the Aqueduct Press Grand Conversations series, which brought me to Lisa Bradley’s The Haunted Girl, a completely excellent mix of poetry and prose. Most of the stories and poems are creepy, all of them are original, some draw heavily on Bradley’s Latino background. I showed Steven one of the formal poems, because it was beautifully done in a form I’d never heard of (a “kyrielle”) and he was as impressed as I was. Highly recommended.
Jennifer Brissett’s Elysium is an Aqueduct Press novel which was honor listed for the Tiptree Award and was an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award (which does not generally give honorable mentions). This book follows three characters who shift their genders, ages, relationships to each other, and settings frequently; the shifts are marked by failed computer code, so the reader is aware of something somewhere trying to program the situations for the characters and failing. Their situations vary from bittersweet to desperate, and their personalities shine through the shifts. A real tour-de-force and extremely original.
A friend gave me Ann Mah’s Mastering the Art of French Eating, a memoir by an American woman of Chinese ethnicity who spent a year alone in France while her diplomatic corps husband was in Iraq, traveling the countryside and learning about the foods of various French provinces and areas. The food writing is good and I learned a lot, but the author’s voice drove me around the bed-she is irritatingly privileged and selfish, and I kept wanting to shake her. Worth a try if you can tolerate the author.
Some time ago, waywardcats lent me Anita Hill’s (yes, that Anita Hill) Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. This never looked attractive to me, but I was short on nonfiction and didn’t want to read another food book, so I picked it up, and it was way better than I imagined. The title and cover led me to think it would be preachy, but instead it is anecdotal and thoughtful, and I was very drawn to her essential point, which is that laws and regulations can only go so far to create racial equality, and we must look to other means as well. She concentrates on what home is and why it matters, and in particular what it means to black women of roughly my generation and why. Like Isabel Wilkerson and others, she does this with stories of people’s lives, including her own family’s lives. She only mentions her own public history once, to make a point. Well worth reading.
When my partner and I were in Portland last November, we went to Powell’s, and I continued my practice of always buying something by a writer of color whose work I haven't read. This one was Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Alexie gets talked up a lot, and I’ve read very little Native American literature, so I’d always meant to read him. Absolutely True Diary is a young adult novel, based on some of his life experience. It’s a very easy (though often painful) read, with delightful illustrations by Ellen Forney. It is apparently also one of the most frequently banned books in the U.S., and I cannot figure out why. I will read more Alexie.
Atul Gawande is a favorite essayist of mine. I think of myself as being very calm and level about the subject of death, so I was looking forward to his Being Mortal, which turned out to be one of the most painful and upsetting books of recent memory (and really worth reading). He thoughtfully and compassionately examines both old age and death, how we deal with them as a culture, how the medical establishment deals with them, and what needs to change. Like Hill (and Wilkerson and Malcolm Gladwell and others) he offers up his own family experience as example. The book made me cry several times, and made me think and worry throughout. More valuable to me than anything else was his crystallization of the questions doctors (and family members and friends and society) can ask people who are aging and/or dying to help tease out true wants and needs from the welter of confusing emotions. I can’t genuinely recommend this, because it’s so hard, and at the same time I hope everyone will read it.
Lonely Stardust: Two Plays, Eight Essays, and a Speech is a collection by the lovely and talented Andrea Hairston. The plays are 17 and 15 years old, and they read as a little bit slanted toward the didactic for my tastes; on the other hand, I completely agree with everything she's being didactic about. I think they would both perform better than they read, especially since they depend a fair amount on visual and linguistic efffects. Most of the essays are movie reviews, and I really appreciated those. She made me think more about Wall-E, and once again reminded me that I want to watch Pan's Labyrinth. As you would expect, she never loses sight of marginalization and whose voices are valued (and whose voices are not). The speech was, well, familiar, since we were WisCon guests of honor together in 2012. On the whole, an excellent book and well worth your time, especially if you read plays for pleasure, which I do.