My Year in Books

Ugh! I've been putting off this post hoping to finish a couple more titles, but the hours in the year are dwindling, so here it is. My favorite read this year were: Another Brooklyn, Citizen, Posada, March, and Homegoing, but really each book on this list was a worthy read. It was a good year in books. Here are annotations of the 22 books I read in 2018:

Everything, Everything by Niccola Yoon

Loved the happy surprise of a narrator who is half-Japanese, half-black. Her bubble-girl scenario makes for an interesting scenario and poses the question: is it easier to keep our girls locked away, hidden in rooms and towers than to subject them to the germs, the unknowns, the evils of the world? The writing and plot isn’t as strong as The Sun Is also a Star which blew me away from cover to cover, but I enjoyed this book and look forward to seeing how this comes to the screen (although the mom is supposed to be the Asian one).

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

This novel, about a girl growing up in the grief of losing their mother, losing the south, nearly losing her brother, searching for her father, and finding her place beside other girls, is a beautiful tribute to girl hood. She navigates adolescence, womanhood, a world teeming with sexual violence and drug abuse, friendship, religion, race, class and creative spirit. I loved spending time with these girls, and these pages do illuminate another Brooklyn.

March, Book One, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

This nonfiction graphic novel teaches us so very much about how to tell a story. Flashing between the inauguration of President Obama and the early days of John Lewis the child, the young man, and the college-student and activist. An excellent reminder of all the organizing and work that led to SNCC and the civil rights movement.

March, Book Two, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

Book two moves forward from John Lewis’s work as a student volunteer to a SNCC organizer building on the momentum of the March on Washington into the Sit-Ins in the South, and the failed March at Selma where Lewis is badly beaten.

March, Book Three, by John Lewis and Andrew Andin

Book three takes on the work for voting rights, voter registration, and the Voting Rights Act. This seems so timely as voter suppression is on the rise after the Supreme Court weakened the act in 2013. This final book captures the heroic march from Selma: exhausting, heroic, and ultimately successful. The pages that spoke to me most clearly were the ones depicting the role teachers had in bringing public support for the sit-ins. This powerful trilogy demands we ask: what are we doing for the movement?

Posada by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

These poems show us our city and our country at the southern border where lives are lost and found, sucked dry and resurrected. Bermejo’s poems cut to the bone and demand you to bear witness, to see the lives that are hidden in the desert brush. She demands we look not only at the streets where we drive, but at the cactus alongside the road and to remember the land, and the people, where we have built our country and have erected borders to keep them out. A powerful and important work.

The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward

A modern response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this collection of essays captures today’s Black writers on the experience of being Black in America. There is coming to terms with our racist past, adjusting to Blackness in America rather than in Jamaica, and the unrelenting violence Black America must live with and the rest of America must work to resolve

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

This YA novel tells the story of Starr Carter, who witnesses the murder of her childhood friend by a white cop on the streets of New York. Watching this young protagonist exist in two worlds, her Black community where her father owns a corner store, and her private school life mimics the code switching so many of our students must do when they come to school each day. I love how this young girl finds her voice in the midst of political and personal chaos.

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

A novel with shifting POV surrounding a murder similar to the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, helps illuminate the misunderstandings of eye-witnesses. These many voices of his sister, the girl who stayed with him in his final moments, and the many other survivors he left behind, reveal all that informs how we choose to see the world.  

 

Turning Japanese by Mari Naomi

This graphic novel captures a time and experience I’m very familiar with. From wanting to get in touch with her Japanese-ness with a trip to Japan, to struggling with dating men with yellow fever, I could relate with many of the author’s experiences.

Homegoing By Yaa Gyasi

A story that arches across oceans and families, telling the story of two half-sisters, their different lives and the lives of generations to come. So many of these stories will haunt me: dreams of fire, seeking freedom and losing your young son, the long-stretching curse of those who dealt in human lives, the castle and those kept beneath it, the human impact of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the incarceration of so many innocents to float an economy of privilege. A beautiful resolution in water and salt and lineage separated by so many years and lives.

Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

This book is so filled with grief and tragedy, but also triumph in the ways each member of the family struggles to survive. These kids all try to be there for Mama, for Poppy who can’t be there for them, and for one another in a world that can be so harsh, to brutal, so damaging. This book helped remind me of all that I’ve learned from this author about how to remains to your story, characters, and voice.

Citizen by Claudia Rankin

This book is a thought, a dream, a meditation on what it is to be Black in America. It looks in the eye of “narrative structure” and says, you don’t see me? Why should I honor you? The sections on Serena Williams illuminate so much of the constant burden it is to bear being the other, the unvalued, the invisible. Every slight holds that weight and these pages hold it so very well.

The Whetting Stone by Taylor Mali

This poetry chapbook blew me away. The way it handles loss and grief and mental illness is so tender and beautiful. He manages to work in light moments, although others are devastating. It is truly to voice of a survivor who will always wonder what they could have done to help prevent a lover one’s suicide.

Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamar Hill

This book is so thoroughly researched and thoroughly depressing. I don’t know that I’m the book’s audience, as someone who already acknowledges the bleak world Black Americans occupy, but this book provides so much historical perspective and statistical analysis that the arguments seem inarguable. But will it change any minds? Will anyone who sees the world from a conservative point of view read or buy any of this news that counters all of the FOX News?

This Side of Home by Renée Watson

This author went through Jeff and grew up in Portland, so I’d been wanting to read her YA books for a while. I love how she tackles the gentrification taking place in Portland and the interracial relationship her protagonist falls into. There is also a great anti-reform education rant as she tackles public school issues as well. The plot works well, keeps me turning the pages, although I wonder about how things will work out at Spelman or for her friend at Beauty School. I think that’s the sign of a good narrative. I care about her characters.

Overdue Apologies by Noriko Nakada

A close read and edit of this seemed in order before diving into the high school memoir. Yes, it’s revising, but it’s also reading, so I’m giving myself credit for my own book. I still cringe at certain scenes, but with each read I forgive myself a little more for the girl I once was. It captures what it is to be a middle school student: longing to fit-in, dreaming of the future, and living in the chaos of every moment.

Solo by Kwame Alexander

Using lyrics and a setting of privilege, unexpected news sends Blade on a journey to find himself and love. Music creates interesting rhythms in this novel in verse and a trip overseas provides interesting perspectives of first world problems.

This One Summer by Mariko Tamiko

This book recently topped the banned book week list so, of course, I had to check it out. It’s a beautifully drawn musing on a summer when her parents are fighting, her mother seems to be battling depression, and the teenagers in this coastal town struggle with adult decisions and problems.

Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris

Woah, do I see a lot of this as a public school teacher. I love how this book made me think of the skills Black girls and women have needed to survive in our culture, and how our schools devalue these skills over and over again. Girls who push back, we push out. I will never see the angry Black girl in the same way. She isn’t a problem, she is a survivor and a freedom fighter.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I think I know something about slavery, or escaping from slavery, or what it must have been like, and then I read a book like this and the humanity of the experience, the horror and the humanity, are illuminated all over again.

Begin with a Failed Body by Natalie J. Graham

These poems could only be consumed in small doses. I like to pick up poetry collections to help read more at the end of the year, but Graham’s words demand small bites. I had to savor each poem, let them settle before moving on to the next. I love how she plays with formal and informal language, and her sense of place (although I’ve never been to the South) breathes in each line.