So screw the Pulitzer Prizes because they don’t release the nominees until the winner is announced, but August/September/October is my favorite part of the year because the Booker Prize and National Book Award release their longlists and we get a new Nobel Prize winner. So I haven’t liked the change toward American books on the Booker Prize because I like to expand what books I am watching, but so it goes. Of the ten books on the National Book Longlist, I have already reviewed two […]
We Are Losing Them
My life growing up was, in many ways, very different from the people who populate my adult life. I find myself looking around often and saying “but why don’t you understand _____________?” I grew up in a very diverse area and my experiences and knowledge reflect that diversity. But it’s fair to say that my expanded viewpoint is only expanded to a certain extent because I still view life from a place of white, middle class privilege. But the high school that I attended started […]
There Are No Monsters Here
“From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths. The first was my brother, Joshua…” Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped is beautiful and heartbreaking in a way that only stories about family and home can be. This book made me weep in the prologue. I want to be clear: this was no mere tearing up. Sobs were heard. Ward’s words don’t require a book-long, slow build-up to a crescendo of emotion and tragedy. The tragedy […]