Reading to blow you away

by Mary Fahnestock-Thomas, Hamilton

I’m sort of addicted to reading, for pleasure and escape, but also to learn at a speed that works for me. Even since before George Floyd’s death in May 2020, I’ve been making an effort to include Black writers in my “diet,” and boy is there a lot to be learned about these people and their culture that we have taken for granted for hundreds of years!

Thinking, hoping, that others are interested but may not know where to start, I want to share some of the titles that have pretty much blown me away and are readily available through the public library and also through Chapter 1, our wonderful local bookstore. Or, if you’re as into used books as I am, try Biblio.com. (I avoid Amazon and ABEBooks, because they’re not independent and have LOTS of money.)

Fiction tends to be my first choice, because although it may not contain verifiable facts, it conveys truths about human beings and life in general. Olivia E. Butler’s “Kindred” (1979) isn’t really science fiction but includes time travel and, well, blew me away. Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place” (1982) won a National Book Award and was adapted into a tv miniseries, I think by Oprah Winfrey. I’ve ordered a used copy of “The Men of Brewster Place” (1999) so as to get “both sides.” Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952) also won a National Book Award; it’s longer but beautifully written, and I am still astonished at some of its revelations.

In non-fiction I have attempted Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” (2019) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” (2015) and found them difficult to understand, but I will return to them one day. A few years ago I started with Bryan Stevenson’s memoir “Just Mercy” (2014), about questionable justice practices in the South. It is both highly readable and excruciating and was made into a movie in 2019. Right now I’m reading Clint Smith’s brand new “How the Word Is Passed” (2021), where he tells of visiting many sites in our country that do or do not recognize the significance of forced labor in their past, and “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man”, by Emmanuel Acho (2020), a former linebacker in the NFL and now an analyst for Fox Sports. Both books I find very accessible and revealingly personal.

For Christmas I gave my husband, who prefers non-fiction, a big fat book that I thought I’d never read: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration”, by Isabel Wilkerson (2010). Despite all my education I didn’t know America had a “great migration” and figured it didn’t have to do with me. Well, the book reads like fiction. It is based on hundreds and hundreds of personal interviews by the author, tracing the lives of four Black people, three men and a woman, from various parts of the South to various parts of the non-South in the 20th century. Once I opened it, I could hardly put it down.

Yesterday my dear, 31-year-old, white, computer coder son in Minnesota mentioned that one of his very favorite books in the world is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” so I’ve got a copy coming from the library to see what that’s all about.

I don’t mean to “should on you,” by the way. I’m reading because I’m trying to figure out what’s going on around me and why, for my own understanding and comfort. Join me?