In celebration of Pride Month and Juneteenth, we asked our team for their reading recommendations.
Below, our first recommender Listener Poet Yvette Perry offers thoughtful reviews and provides links to purchase each of these books through the African American Literature Book Club.
June 2021 photo & reviews by
Listener Poet Yvette Perry
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
by Deesha Philyaw
Fiction / Short Story Collection
This short story collection has earned Philyaw a basketful of awards – and with good reason. It isn’t often that I feel so keenly that I am eavesdropping into real people’s private lives and conversations when reading a book, but that was definitely the case with The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
The full humanity that Philyaw allows her characters to display is rare in books featuring Black women. Every story in the collection is amazing, but my personal favorite is probably “When Eddie Levert Comes.” I’ve probably read that story more than 10 times. Maybe the 11th time I’ll be able to make it through to the end without tears in my eyes.
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
Fiction / Novel
I read pretty much everything Whitehead writes and so knew I’d read this one, too. Even so, when it came out in 2019 I wasn’t so sure I would be able to get into this one. I had just come off of several months of reading quite a bit of serious non-fiction and wasn’t sure I wanted to read something that took its inspiration from a true story.
But the book was worth taking a chance, drawing me into the story and breaking my heart. With all of the attention to our current situation with mass incarceration as well as ongoing revelations about abuses in facilities like the one depicted in this book, it is a timely read.
How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
by Saeed Jones
Memoir
I read this book early on during what has become my recent fascination with and insatiable appetite for memoirs--a genre which, for various reasons, I had pretty much avoided until the last couple of years. But, oh-em-gee! This book changed my mind about memoirs!
Jones is a poet and his prose reads very much like the most delicious poetry: every word is intentional, every phrasing designed both for compactly conveying meaning and making music.
The History of White People
by Nell Irvin Painter
Non-Fiction
Reading this book is providing me with a much different starting point for furthering my understanding of race and race relations than what I usually read on the subject. Instead of starting with historical institutions like the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Black Civil Rights Movement, the book explores the concept of whiteness and whiteness as an ideal.
Painter says in her introduction that she intentionally chose to write this expansive historical text using this strategy “because race is an idea, not a fact, and its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual.”
There is so much meat in this book – I have a feeling it will be one of those books I’ll be pulling off of my shelf to read one passage or another for the rest of my life.
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