a few of my
Favorite Reads
Reality is a sound, you have to tune into it, not just keep screaming.
In a masterful melding of myth and reality, Carson echoes the diction of ancient lyric poetry to sing of the tragic love story between the red monster, Geryon, and his legendary slayer, Heracles. Envisioned with a stunning sensitivity to the limited infinity in human language, Autobiography of Red brands your mind and soul in a way no other book likely will.
“Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.”
Based on Smith’s own 1890s upbringing, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows a young girl's challenge to support herself and her brother alongside their working mother in a time when a woman's career most typically meant marriage. Betty Smith writes from a uniquely modern perspective, populating her story with a heavy cast of strong female characters who transcend as resources for women today.
To my daughter I will say, "when the men come, set yourself on fire."
No one so perfectly metabolizes corporeal description into profoundly illuminating thought quite like Warsan Shire. A legacy from her pre-Beyoncé career, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth resurrects Shire’s memory of a past inflamed by racism and sexism, and reveals the vibrant threads these wounds have woven into her present.
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.
Morrison’s 1970 debut novel (rest her soul), The Bluest Eye plunges boldly into narratives of rape, incest, and racism existing within an ideology of idolized whiteness. Far less fiction than it ought to be, this tragic coming of age story warrants an intimate urge to enact change in our present, illuminating how a history of unstopped hate seeps poison through generations.
Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?
In language beyond words, Fun Home accomplishes a profound depiction of context informing memory as Bechdel revisits her youth to understand her complex relationship with her father, the town mortician. Weighed by the newfound discovery of his closeted homosexuality, Bechdel traces through bread crumbs of their past to inspect how her own queerness and intellectual likenesses to her father failed to lead the two of them together.