I read 97 books this year, tying my previous record. (Didn’t plan it that way, just dove into a book on January 1st and kept going). I’m trying to get my physical TBR stack down in anticipation of moving (which just means my kindle TBR keeps growing, but at least it’s less likely to fall & crush me).
50 of the books I read were for the Popsugar Reading Challenge, a sort of literary scavenger hunt where the object is to read a book in each of 50 categories (an author’s 24th book, a horror book by a BIPOC author, a book where the title is a complete sentence, etc., etc.) I wrote short reviews of those 50 on my obscure website, and linked the reviews below.
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Politics & Current Events:
Laura Bates, Fix the System Not the Women and Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism No One is Talking About
Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Michael Eric Dyson & Marc Favreau, Unequal: A Story of America
Barbara Ehrenreich, Had I Known: Collected Essays
Mike Hixenbaugh, They Came for the Schools
Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism
Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race
Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point
Dashka Slater, Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives it Changed
Bon Tindle, Like the Air We Breathe
The Bates books are very informative but depressing examinations of sexism and misogyny. Bon Tindle’s essays are also about sexism; she has a gift for spelling out things that should be obvious but somehow weren’t until she put a name on them.
The Brown and Olou books are about racism and aimed at people who want to be allies. Unequal is a young adult history book on various aspects of racism (redlining, income inequality, the “war on drugs,” etc), and the people who stood against it. Accountable is also a young adult book, giving a very nuanced look at the fallout from the discovery of a high school student’s social media account showing racist images of his classmates.
The Ehrenreich collection includes the article that was later expanded into her classic book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. The Serwer essays cover a lot of topics, including the way cruelty helps bullies bond with each other.
The Came for the Schools examines the fate of one school district after school board takeover by Moms for “Liberty.” And Maddow’s book on fascism is all too timely.
Memoir:
Alvin Greenberg, The Dog of Memory
George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
Renia Kukielka, Escape from the Pit: A Woman’s Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939-1943
Chester Nez, Code Talker
Tina Turner with Kurt Loder: I, Tina: My Life Story
I tend to prefer memoirs that are about a larger issue, like World War II (Nez, Kukielka), queer life (Johnson), and domestic violence (no matter how bad you thought Ike Turner was — he was worse). The story of the Code Talkers is particularly fascinating, and the book contains an explanation of the code.
Poetry:
Kwame Alexander, ed., This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka, and Daniel Sluman, eds., Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back
Deborah Alma, ed., #MeToo: Rallying Against Sexual Assault and Harassment
Marlon L. Fick & Francisca Esteve, Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets
Charles Ades Fishman and Smita Sahay, eds., Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry of the Oppression and Empowerment of Women
Ellen Goldberg, ed., Of Course I’m a Feminist
Sue Goyotte, ed., Resistance: Righteous Rage in the age of #MeToo
Linda Hogan, Savings
Carla J. Lawson, Where Is My Parade?
Parker Lee, Espresso Shots & Forget-me-nots
Kristina Mahr, It’s Only Words
Honor Moore, ed., Poems From the Women’s Movement
Christopher Nelson, ed., Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry
Joan R. Sherman, ed., African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1927
Clint Smith, Above Ground
W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems
I have two requirements for poetry: I like it to be (1) understandable, and (2) actually about something. There were some excellent themed anthologies about feminism (#MeToo, Poems From the Women’s Movement, and Resistance), queerness (Essential Queer Voices), disability (Stairs and Whispers), and Black joy (This Is the Honey). Of Course I’m a Feminist was very brief, only about 15 poems.
Clint Smith’s first collection, Counting Descent, leaned toward political poems. His latest, Above Ground, is largely about parenting, both funny and poignant.
Xeixa was an unexpected find: I didn’t know much about the Catalan language or culture, but the poems were well chosen and accessible.
I was familiar with Yeats’s timeless love poems; he also wrote a lot about Irish mythology, and some about events in his life that required extensive footnoting to make any sense to me.
Miscellaneous Nonfiction:
Gai Ingham Berlage, Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History
Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti
Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, eds. The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture
David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Langston Hughes, An African Treasury
John Krakauer, Into the Wild
Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
Divine Horsemen was informative but overly academic for my interests. Women in Baseball had a lot that was new to me, going back to much earlier than the “League of Their own” era.
The State of Play is a collection of essays on everything video game related, from graphics to race and gender issues, including pieces by some of the women targeted by g*mer/gate.
An African Treasury is a collection by authors from Africa at a time when countries were achieving independence from colonialism. It includes articles, essays, fiction, poetry, proverbs and even lonely-hearts advertisements.
Killers of the Flower Moon is history that reads like a mystery/thriller. After oil was discovered on Osage land, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were briefly the wealthiest per-capita population on earth. Every opportunist around was looking for ways to swindle that money away from them, including the cold-blooded murders covered in the book. I’m not surprised that book-burners have been targeting this one.
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