Book Recs from Semester One
I’ve officially turned in all my files for my first semester of grad school! After posting a picture of 18 of the books that I read this semester, I’m recommending my favorites.
One of my deep beliefs regarding reading is that you have to hit books at the right time. The same book will speak to you in profoundly different ways at different times. You have to be ready for it, open to what it has to say, and asking the kind of questions that it responds to—or at least the same kind of questions that the book is asking.
That being said, a few brief generalizations about the books that stood out to me this semester:
**Please note: this post contains links to buy these books through Bookshop.org — a great way to buy book that funnels proceeds back to independent bookstores (and not Jeff Bezos!)
> Kiese Laymon: I read his revised collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and his memoir, Heavy. They’re both stunning literary works that speak so tenderly of and to the Black South. I’d recommend How to Slowly Kill as a beautiful and fraught series of encounters with the United States of America in the time of coronavirus and beyond.
Because Laymon has such a refined sense of lyricism, I joke that I’m only reading books he approves of, from this point forward. Jokes aside, these are the book I have for which he’s provided back cover blurbs:
The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom (okay, inside flap blurb, still counts)
I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, & the Backbeat of Black Life, by B. Brian Foster
Chocolate Cities: the Black Map of American Life, by Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, by Deesha Philyaw*
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, by Jess Row*
Incidentally, many of those books were among my other favorites from my semester book list. As a self-proclaimed sociology nerd, I Don’t Like the Blues was a beautiful and insightful book about Black southern ideologies about cultural tourism and racial separation. It’s more lovely than that description makes it sound, I promise.
The Yellow House was hands-down one of my favorite books of the semester. The way Sarah M. Broom tells her winding narrative of growing up in East New Orleans, through Katrina and on the professional path that takes her all the way to Burundi and then back to Louisiana, is stunning. Her sentences are jaw-dropping. Her tale is tender and heart-rending. I also read it during the Winter Storm here in Texas, which reading about Katrina during our own natural event that became a disaster through poor policy was particularly jarring. If any of you pick it up—and I hope you do—I hope you get to read it during less intense circumstances.
Memorial, by Bryan Washington, is my last pick for this list. Bryan Washington is Houston’s literary darling at present, a writer in his thirties whose short story collection, Lot, debuted to instant acclaim. Memorial is, again, tender—I like books with a lot of heart, okay?!—and it’s also…real. Satisfying but somewhat unresolved. Moreover, it’s set (at least partially) in Houston, and Washington wields a lot of Houston references as short-hand for scene-setting. As a resident, I loved that in this book. He writes Houston the way Houston happens to you: without explanation.
Okay, one more: Lives Other Than My Own, by Emmanuel Carrère. Sleeper hit. This memoir was translated from French, and it’s a dazzling tale of love and survival: what it really means to be alive to one’s own life.
If you end up reading any of these, please reach out and let me know! I’d love to sit with a mug of tea in hand—in person or over the digital airwaves—and talk about it. Let’s talk about books together.
*Not yet read
