How to begin? I have wanted to read books by Octavia Butler for years and somehow never picked one up until now. Wild Seed wasn’t’ an easy read, although the language is beautiful, the characters are compelling and change over time (in many ways!), and the plot is complex and interesting. The story takes place over several hundred years and the characters mostly live day-to-day having children, falling sick, getting married, eating food – with powerful ancient beings living day-to-day next to more “ordinary” psychic […]
A Different Life in America
A friend of mine introduced me to Ta-Nehisi Coates with The Beautiful Struggle, a book I found both moving and eye-opening. When I started seeing Between the World and Me (2015) on bookshelves, I knew I’d be reading it. The Beautiful Struggle was a memoir of Coates’s life, growing up in the violent streets of Baltimore with a dictatorial father.Between the World and Me covers some of the same ground but in a very different way. This book is an existentialist (according to the NY Times) letter to […]
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”
Another book I have put off reviewing, but let’s dive in. As part of the Read Harder Challenge one of the tasks is reading a book by someone of the opposite sex. I have already read over 40 books written by men this year (which is surprisingly less than half, but I think my romance authors are what tips the scales) and I had kind of decided to wait to claim a book for this particular task until something stood out from the rest. This […]