August Books
1. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (263 pp.) - I'm fairly confident that if it hadn't been highly recommended that we read this book, I would never have made it past the first thirty pages. That is not to say that I entirely hated the book - if I try to be entirely fair, I can even say that there's quite a bit of merit in it. But the merit, the lessons you learn... you can get them elsewhere, and probably much more pleasurably. What I suppose really ruined this book for me is the ending, which I won't give away but which is so disappointing and ire-inducing that it almost singlehandedly ruins the rest of the book. I did get a kick out of the individual histories of the characters involved, but overall I just could never quite figure out what the point of the book was, where it was going, and I really couldn't begin to recommend it to anyone else.