[Review] A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

(Find it HERE.)

Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm meet during their freshman year of university, and luckily the friendship lasts a lifetime–through failures, successes, relationships, jobs, deaths and heartbreak. They’re a motley crew–all different races, classes and sexualities–but the main character is Jude, the shyest and most secretive of the group, tortured by an unspeakable past but determined to succeed despite it. The book is mostly about how the hideous demons of Jude’s past keep him from fully recognizing the angels of his present. (There were times when he’d do something and I’d sigh out loud and say “Oh, Jude, why?”–and then a character in the book would echo me somewhere on the next page.) He’s a tortured, fragile character who makes terrible decisions most of the time, and were he not surrounded by such believably loving friends and family he’d be very difficult to like but much easier to pity. As it is, you understand why he’s so tormented but can’t stop hoping he’ll give it all up and accept his many possibilities for happiness. He never really does, sadly.

This book is a lot, and it deserves every content warning and tear-filled review it’s received. I haven’t been so nauseated by descriptions of child abuse since I read Tampa and that says a lot. I also haven’t been so touched by portrayals of male friendship since–well, ever, really. Jude is a mess and his life is relentlessly horrifying–first outwardly, then inwardly–but his friends and the way they change and shift to accommodate every iteration of each other is lovingly rendered. Their larger social circles are just as well-realized, and one of the most startling things about this book is how it seamlessly immerses the reader into nearly 40 years of community life in New York City without ever referencing typical “New York” things or even defining the time period. You really feel like you’re living along with these people, walking day by day through their little lives in a big city.

This book deserved all of the prize nominations and accolades it received and then some. While it’s not quite the Great Gay American Novel some people have described it as, it does contain a few remarkably sensitive story elements involving the fluidity of sexuality over a lifetime, and it decenters romantic relationships as the be-all and end-all of everyone’s life–these men have an enduring group friendship that coexists with their romantic relationships healthily, which is hard to do in life and harder to depict on the page without Mary-Sue-ing the characters irrevocably. Their levels of closeness shift, they sometimes don’t talk and sometimes the relationships change in surprising ways–but their friendship forms the foundation of their lives in a way that their successful careers and romances don’t. The diversity of the characters is also admirable, in a way that seems natural for New York and America in general. Of the main foursome, only Willem is white, and he’s the child of first generation immigrants, which goes a long way towards explaining how he fits in so well with the other four. Race and sexuality are both handled effortlessly, for the most part, and without any weird performative overtones in this book. I personally appreciated that almost as much as its loving take on the importance of lifelong adult friendships. (Although I do think it’s interesting that almost nobody in this story is Asian, even though the author is.)

That said, I recognize that in the hands of a lesser writer, the main events of this book are so graphic that it would be trash-lit at best. Fortunately, Yanagihara is an excellent writer and that elevates the often sordid events described–but they can still be a bit much. (When I reached the scene that the title of the book comes from, I actually had to put it down for a few days and go read a romance novel.) It’s beautiful, it’s immersive, but it’s also deeply troubled and you should be ready for that if you choose to read it.⠀⠀

4 stars and a deep, sad sigh to A Little Life.

(Beautiful people, if you feel moved to buy this book, consider heading to my Bookshop storefront and purchasing it there. If you do, a commission will be earned because we have an affiliate relationship with them and other sites. Peace!)

Last Week In Books, Feb 7th – 14th: I’m Old and I Love You

I turned 40 last weekend, hence the delay on this post. Also, it’s Valentine’s Day! Go read some romance and love somebody up today, whether romantically, amicably or nobly.

Before we get into it, the lovely image of myself above was shot by Grace Kim and edited by Uchenna. The shirt I’m wearing, which is something I truly believe and say often, is available at Blerd.com.

This week’s list of bookish news items is short but sweet, like V-day chocolate.

  • This is hands-down the best list of diverse historical romances I’ve ever seen. Where else would you find Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe and every diaspora, gender and sexuality possible in historical romance? Well done, Aussie book reviewers. [via ABC News Australia]
  • Librarians in Bristol have lost their collective minds and are busy harassing a woman who put a Little Free Library up in her neighborhood, denouncing it as “such a middle class thing to do”. Wait until they find out about private schools. [via Metro UK]
  • The last episode of the recent television adaptation of Stephen King’s epic work The Stand aired. I liked the series at first, but found it ultimately disappointing (they really biffed the landing when it came to portraying the bad guys). This article does a good job explaining why even King’s own attempt at writing a new ending was so lame. [via Gizmodo]
  • But speaking of King, the charitable foundation he fronts with his wife Tabitha King is funding a horror anthology penned by elementary students. Pretty cool way to leave a legacy. [via LitHub]
  • Last thing, and possibly the most exciting–Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie is publishing a new book. It’s an extended take on her essay Notes On Grief, and will be available this May. [via The Guardian]

Thanks for reading as always, beautiful people. There are affiliate links in this blog and if you purchase anything from there, a commission may be earned. Enjoy your Valentine’s Day, and peace!

Last Week in Books, Jan 31-Feb 6: Let’s Bring This Back, Shall We?

Happy Black History Month! Let’s take a quick look back at some of the most interesting diverse books news from last week.

  • OG Black speculative fiction writer Gerald L Coleman has put together the dopest, most definitive list of Black science fiction and fantasy I’ve EVER seen. Please check it out.[ Gerald L Coleman]
  • This video of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie very politely handing this French news reporter her own racist ass is a bit old, but still enormously enjoyable.[YouTube]
  • Traveling from Nigeria to South Korea by way of…Poland(?), we have a novel about the lady divers of Jeju Island. While I imagine it’s akin to Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women, it’s a bit unique in that the writer is writing and publishing the book in her native Polish, with hopes for an English translation later this year. [The Korea Times]

For regular book news updates, follow us on Facebook. For quickie book reviews and pretty, pretty pictures, check out our Instagram. Finally, to get your shop on, check out our Bookshop storefront here. (This site has affiliate relationships with other sites, and any clicks and purchases you make may result in a commission being paid.) Peace!

[HEAR ME OUT] I Am What Is And What Could Be: A Quick Thought On Why I Write What I Write and Read What I Read

The following post is an edited version of a rant on the Equal Opportunity Facebook. Follow it for lots of bookish news updates and rants.

“Fourteen years ago, during my first year of college, I sat in a creative writing class and listened as my teacher, an elderly man, told another student not to use black characters in his stories unless those characters’ blackness was somehow essential to the plots. The presence of blacks, my teacher felt, changed the focus of a story, drew attention from the intended subject.”

Octavia Butler, The Lost Races of Science Fiction, 1980

These words, penned in 1980 by La Grande Dame Octavia Butler hit me in a really personal place for a lot of reasons. When I first began to write and submit speculative fiction back in 1995 or so…well, first of all, it wasn’t that good. No delusions of grandeur here, and ya girl is still struggling on the quality front. But it was also based on the world as I knew it and saw it, and I lived in a multicultural neighborhood, went to even more multicultural schools, and lived in an area where I heard AAVE, Spanish, Amharic, Korean, Russian and the occasional bit of Tigrinya every morning on the way to the bus stop. So, I wrote stories about diverse people from rich cultures coexisting in space, fighting dragons, and generally living their fantastic otherworldly lives outside of mainstream struggle narratives and. the feedback I got was always things like–“this would be better if you wrote about normal people”, “Why have you described character X as ‘pretty’ on page 4, but also ‘Black’ on page 7?” and my personal favorite, “Race doesn’t matter in the future. Why do you have to make your characters different races? We will all be one race, so there’s no need to use ethnic names or strange cultural terms.”

If I recall correctly, the strange cultural term was “pepper sauce”.

My first novel, which has never been published and will probably never see the light of day because it’s aged very poorly, was about a punk-loving Black woman in her twenties and her alcoholic Japanese-American boyfriend committing petty crimes and con jobs in East Denver and accidentally getting in too deep. When I began to shop it around to agents and publishers, the consistent feedback that I got was “This is an interesting social commentary, but these characters and relationships aren’t very realistic and therefore, we won’t be able to sell it.” It was suggested that perhaps the boyfriend be rewritten as a Crip or Blood. It was suggested that all the characters be rewritten as white, with perhaps the lone white character changed to “mixed-race” as a concession. It was also suggested that the idea of a weird alternative Black girl protagonist who lived in the ‘hood in what was not an “urban” novel would not be relatable for any audience. At the time, I was a weird Black woman with an Afro and black lipstick in my 20’s who lived in East Denver and had a Asian-Latino boyfriend. (For legal reasons, we did not commit any crimes and alcoholic is…a harsh word.) At the time, alternative and unbelievable struggle love between skinny pockmarked unlikable white people set to rock music was a hot, artsy trend in media–but make the lovers “ethnic” and add a beat to the music and suddenly it’s unrealistic.

I still get the same nonsense now, in slightly woker yet less self-aware permutations. Disappointingly, a lot of it comes from people of color who have internalized certain colonial constructions of the world. Someone read a chapter of one of my current projects and immediately came back to me with the criticism ,”Why is the villain Black? Be careful about making only the villain Black.” When I pointed out that in this fantasy world, no-one is “white” (it’s a savannah world of dark-skinned people and the heroine references her own dark brown skin on the first page) I was told that I should now be careful about writing stories that have too many Black characters because they don’t sell well if you’re a new writer. When I asked did she think people are really “Black” in the American sense in a fantasy world in which there is no Europe, no Africa, no Americas and a whole lotta sunshine and cocoa butter I was told I was missing the point.

**PRIMAL SCREAM**

I’ve always written the kind of people that I know, love, and feel most familiar with into the unrealistic situations that my messy imagination creates. That doesn’t mean I omit, dislike, or exclude white people. It simply means that white people are not the only ones who exist in the world of What Could Be, and I refuse to pretend so. Writers like Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin have broken through that barrier for all of us, but even they had to begin their careers with slavery narratives and stabby white feudalism. It’s frustrating. While it’s improving every day, it’s still a struggle out here. (My latest criticism–“This sounds like…Africa? Or like, fantasy Africa? But you’re not African, you’re just Black. You can’t write anything about Africa. Have you thought about setting this in like, the civil war? Maybe they’re all slaves? But wait, you can’t have someone be Black and disabled and a slave in a novel, it’s just too sad.”🤬)

It’s not lost on me that down here in the hack seats where I hang out and write on the weekends, the only pieces of work I’ve managed to publish are about being a Black woman in direct struggle, even though that is not what most of my unpublished writing is about. I guess all of this is a large part of why I run this blog. Diversity is a normal part of the human condition. Human interaction, cultural interaction, linguistic interaction, are all a vital, fascinating, enriching part of human history and life. I’m not interested in glorifying racist platforms or people by constantly calling them out and giving them attention because I have better things to do than fight with unimportant people. I do want to recognize the artists who are writing and creating within the diversity of what is, to me, the regular world. I also want a place where those of us who are “diverse” can express our love for traditional literary canons (there’s no shame in good books, wherever they originate), find ourselves in what we already love, and find newer books to expand and reinforce our ideas of What Is and What Could Be. There is so much more to the literary world than we are taught in school or exposed to in mainstream pop culture.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Go read Dame Butler’s original words at the link below. They’re 40 years old, but were still true yesterday.

In 1980: Octavia Butler Asked, Why Is Science Fiction So White?First published in Transmission Magazine, the afrofuturist author’s essay “The Lost Races of Science Fiction” resonates more than ever in today’s conversations around race and representation.

(As always, beautiful people, this blog has affiliate relationships with sites like Bookshop and any clicks/purchases made from here will result in a commission being paid.)

[REVIEW] Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

(Find it HERE.)

Some books show you the lives of other people. Some books show you yourself. Some books do both. Song of Solomon has always been the last for me, although it’s always been hard to put my finger on exactly why. ⠀

This is a deceptively dense novel, packed with story and detail, and this review is going to remain pretty light on them. There’s so much going on between these pages that I really can’t do a play-by-play or summary review justice. Instead, I’m just going to skim across why this book has so much importance for me, personally.
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It’s been over twenty years and a half-dozen rereads since I first met the inhabitants of Not Doctor and Darling streets and then followed the very unfortunately named Milkman Dead on a self-absorbed quest through his secretive family tree and his own personhood. There are sections of the book that continuously live in my head rent-free- Milkman’s first encounter with his lover (and cousin, ick) Hagar is one. But there are other bits that I rediscover every time–the ending, which I won’t spoil even a drop of, always surprises me. I never remember what’s coming until it happens, and even then I’m always surprised, sad, and thrilled by it, in that order. ⠀
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In a lot of ways this is very familiar territory for Morrison–a look into the inner lives of Black Americans in the middle part of the twentieth century, warts and all, rendered in beautifully figurative prose. But in other ways it’s really different. The main character is a man, masculinity is a major theme, and the book deals with the supernatural more than any other Morrison work except perhaps Beloved. While Milkman, his coldly resentful father Macon, and his best friend Guitar (who looks like LaKeith Stanfield in my mind) take up most of the narrative space, for me the book has always revolved around the two trinities of women related to Milkman. His mother and sisters form one; his aunt and cousins the other. For me, the former represent the pain of a life lived solely in the servile orbit of male approval and sponsorship; the latter, the loneliness of a life where men are liked well enough but not socially or economically centered. When the polarities reverse, the results are unpredictably tragic, and it made me much sadder on this read than I remember from previous ones. Since my first reading of this at 16, it’s the women in Milkman’s world that I’ve always learned from and identified with, in a variety of ways. ⠀⠀
This is top-tier Morrison for me. Characters that live and breathe, a riveting, emotional plot, stunning symbolism, shocking honesty, and beautiful prose.⠀
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5 stars and a pair of wings to Song of Solomon

(Beautiful people! Thank you, as always, for reading. This book has had such a profound effect on me over the years I hope you’ll consider picking it up at your local library or purchasing it from HERE. If you want to see a list of Toni Morrison’s work, click HERE. Reminder: this blog does have affiliate relationships with sites like Bookshop and if you purchase anything from a link you click on this site, a commission may be paid. Peace!)

[BOOKLIST] Not Every Interracial Romance Has A White Person In It: A Mini Booklist of Black Woman/Asian Man Love Stories

One of the things I like about writing this blog is that I often get requests via Facebook and Instagram to prove that books about certain people exist and have an audience. To be honest, I enjoy the challenge. Fantasy novels about young Black boys? Have some Okorafor, Reynolds and Mbalia. Summer beach reads about plus-size women in love? Well lookie here! Romance novels where the main couple consist of an East Asian man and a Black woman?

Well…

Uh…

HA! I bet you thought I was going to write a diatribe about how hard it is to find Asian men and Black women in love on the page, but the truth is–it’s not that hard. (It took me longer to find an appropriate stock photo for this blog than it did to think of titles for this list.) Quiet as it’s kept, it’s also not all that much of a novelty in reality anymore, either. I’m not going to pretend we are overrun with Asian man/Black woman love stories in the wild, I’m just saying that art imitates life, and there are plenty of real life examples being worked into fictional narratives. I think we’re all so trained to think in a Black/white binary that we ignore the fact that reality contains plenty of interracial couples in which neither person is white. (The very first date I ever went on was with a Japanese-American guy. He bought me ice cream and we saw, of all things, the movie Rush Hour. It was awkward, but everything is when you’re seventeen, as Janis Ian famously sang. Our film choice didn’t help.)

My point is, while Asian men and Black women historically don’t get a lot of love in Western media and there are way too many articles about how those are the two groups of people in the US most likely to draw stereotyping and ire when it comes to desirability–we’re still out here being loved and desired. Sometimes, we’re out here loving each other, believe it or not. As with all other facets of the human experience, somebody wrote books about it, and here they are. Four out of the five are romances, and one is an honorary mention for reasons I’ll explain later.

I want to take a moment and make it clear that even though as a Black lady living in Asia I hear and see a lot of creepy race-baiting and fetishizing nonsense in the real world, that’s not what this is. Someone dared me to find books on a theme that they though was absurd and uncommon, and I took them up on it . I’ve intentionally avoided books with marketing tags like AMBW and bland stereotypes in their descriptions. In short–the books in this list are good. This blog is not an invitation to make comments on racialized physical attributes, stereotype, use slurs, send me BTS fan art(unless it’s really, really good) or otherwise be a pain in the ass. Don’t do it. I’ll cry, and then I’ll block you. If you’re thinking about it, try Jesus and then go read one of these books instead.

So, on to the list. As always, I’m not an expert in literature, love, East Asian men, or even Black women. I’m just a lady who likes books, splashing my very general opinions out there along with a couple billion other folks. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I do personally recommend all of these books. Let’s start with…

My Way To You, by Lyndell Williams

This story about a Black American woman and a Korean American man(who is implied to actually be mixed Eurasian but it’s never really made clear) is probably the steamiest entry on the list so of course it comes first.(rimshot) Our hero and heroine have great careers, great families, great bodies and fantastic chemistry. It’s textbook wish fulfillment fantasy, which is what I love about romance novels. What I didn’t love was the handling of race in the story–while it was quite realistic, the story leans very heavily on misogynoiristic and/or anti-Asian characters and misunderstandings in the third act and becomes a bit depressing given its fluffy beginnings. That said, it gets points for having the conflicts between the couple be much more about their individual personalities and communication styles than the external pressures of racism. The book has a very happy ending, but be aware it goes to some unusually dark places for a romance novel. If you want to see a 3 chapter preview made available on the author’s site, click HERE.

The Sun Is Also A Star, by Nicola Yoon

“Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.”

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually finished reading this. I picked it up as a light YA romance/palate cleanser in between heavier reads and wasn’t expecting it to be quite so…evocative. It’s the story of a Jamaican girl and a Korean boy in New York City who have a star-crossed meet-cute and whirlwind romance. But it’s also so much more. There’s a lot here about fate and love and the tricky business of being human. The third or fourth time this book whopped me upside the head with something unexpectedly deep I put it down to save for later when my heart could take it. That said–this is another book that gets kudos for rightfully treating race as an external, socially constructed factor that never negates the inner lives of its characters or their love story, even while the plot demonstrates at times how warped and unjust other’s perceptions can be. It’s much more thoughtful than the marketing gives it credit for and I’ll definitely get back to it when I have a spare hour to cry over imaginary people. Find it HERE.

The A.I. Who Loved Me, by Alyssa Cole

I’ve mentioned several times how much I appreciate it when interracial romance novels focus on couples whose main relationship conflict is not about race. Unfortunately, that is not the case for Trinity and Li Wei in this book–in a way, their conflicts are all about race. But it’s not because he’s Chinese–it’s because he’s a Chinese robot. (Or biosynthetic human, actually, but po-tay-to, po-tah-to.) This is a weird one–a feather light story with equally light characters but really heavy, well-organized sci-fi worldbuilding that I honestly wanted to see more of than the couple. It’s a fluffy beach read but a very fun and unique one. Find it HERE.

Let’s Talk About Love, Claire Kann

This YA romance featuring a Black American college student and her Japanese-American beau has a few distinguishing features. First of all, the main character is asexual. I did not know asexual romance novels were a thing but Alice, the pretty lady pictured on the cover, is a biromantic asexual and trying to figure out life and relationships with new beau Takumi. The second unique thing is that this is the only novel in this list where race doesn’t come up at all, really. (Culture does, but culture isn’t race, of course.) Alice and Takumi live in a very multicultural neighborhood in California and have a very diverse circle of friends and family so while race is a reality–they never really talk about it. They talk about their respective cultures loads though, as well as what it means to be ace in a relationship with an allosexual, or even in a relationship, period. I like the normalcy of this approach a lot. I’ve been in my share of interracial relationships and let me tell you, race gets talked about but not nearly as much as oh my days did you just do something annoying AGAIN? WHY? What even is this relationship right now???? This book gives you plenty of that and very little OMG you’re a different race can you eat normal food and impress my mom? Find it HERE.

Honorable mention…

Dawn, by Octavia Butler

This is emphatically not a romance novel, and it has the odd distinction of being the only novel by Octavia Butler(whom I love much more than James Baldwin and only slightly less than Maya Angelou) that I don’t really like. I consider myself a connoisseur of the far out but this one manages to be too freaky for even me. Lilith Oyapo spends most of the book assimilating into the world of aliens who have literally abducted her for breeding purposes. However, she does have a brief, plot-critical romance with another abductee, a Hong Kong-born Canadian named Joseph. I include this book here because there is a lot going on in Dawn and the two following books. The world has ended and Lilith and Joseph are a sort of de facto Adam and Eve. Other writers published in the late 80s would probably have tried to make their relationship another oddity among oddities, but Butler makes the couple a point of familiarity. Their relationship is easily the most normal thing in the first book and forms an important touchstone for readers to base their understanding of the world Butler created for the Xenogenesis trilogy. Their race is an issue, but that face only throws the ridiculousness of racism and xenophobia into harsh lighting, exposing the regressivity and anti-humanity of prejudiced, supremacist thinking in a way that only Octavia Butler could manage. Find it HERE.

(Beautiful people! Thanks for reading! There are affiliate links galore in this post, so I need to tell you that this blog has relationships with sites like Bookshop and if you click and purchase anything from a link you find here, a commission may be paid. If you want to see all of the books in this blog in one place plus more in the same theme, click HERE. Peace!)

[REVIEW]Jews, Confucians and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism, by Lawrence E Harrison

(I can’t imagine why you’d want to, but find this HERE)

(This is a slightly-edited form of a review originally posted in 2014 on Goodreads. Were I to write this now, it would be better organized, but even more scathing.)

It’s taken me a long time to write a review of this, because I’m trying to be classy these days and I wanted to come up with something to say about this book and author that doesn’t begin with “So this dumb muthaf—- right here….”

I limped along for months trying to finish this book, scanning the last hundred pages in those odd moments when I got tired of watching paint dry or y’know, reading actual good books.

I finally powered through it, though. For science. And because apparently I don’t like myself as much as I thought.

This is a terrible book.

Jews, Confucians and Protestants: Cultural Capital and the End of Multiculturalism is a terrible book.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let me explain why. The author, Lawrence E Harrison, describes himself as a Jewish chauvinist and a proud product of assimilation into America the Great and…being white. To that point, the last chapter seems to consist primarily of the author recounting experiences of being invited to join or consult with major cultural organizations based on his reputation as a “scholar of cultural relativism” and USAID worker, and then being fired as soon as the people in charge of these organizations discovered what his actual opinions were. This, of course, is the fault of those organizations for not being visionary enough, not looking at the facts, and believing that their own cultural values may contribute to their success.

In actuality, the author, who passed away in 2015, was just a garden variety intellectual racist and not a particularly clever one at that. He reels off statistics (with a special fondness for OECD scores, oddly broken down into racial as well as national categories, which creates an odd implication of causality between race and culture) and elevates Jewish, white European/American Protestant and East Asian “Confucian” cultures to paragon status. According to him these are the pinnacle of human societies with very few internal problems or challenges. (2021 note: I live in Korea now, where if you sneeze on a Tuesday thirty-four people will pop up and inform you that “Korea is a Confucian society.” To say that Confucianism lends an extra measure of advancement to a society is…rather laughable, from my current vantage point.) He exhibits very little understanding of interactions between cultures outside of financial transactions and mimicry and therefore gives no reasons, aside from a mysterious innate cultural inferiority and false sense of victimization and racial correlation, for why Nigerian Protestants are not as “successful” in his view as white ones.(2021 spoiler alert: Nigerian Protestants in America are actually more successful than white ones!) He doesn’t explain why a mostly Hindu and Muslim India is as (financially) successful as a Confucian China. There’s no reasonable explanation for how this book, a steaming pile of pseudo-intellectual racist tripe, manages to be used as a textbook in cultural studies classes in universities that still largely pretend that history begins and ends with the Boston Tea Party and somebody’s Irish great grandmother.

He cherry-picks rather curious examples to back up his assertions. The only successes that matter to him are those that are unchallenging to a 1950s Protestant American white/white-appearing/white-aspirational stereotype, ignoring the successes of Irish Catholics, Latinx groups, Black Americans(who he derides in an entire chapter dedicated to our “sense of victimology” because clearly a history of systematic racism is imaginary–honestly, f*ck this dude)–basically, if you aren’t Jewish, East Asian, or white, your culture’s successes count for nothing. If they do, it’s because at some point Jews, Confucians or European Protestants ran the culture at some point. All of this is done with no discussion of any negative cultural issues that may exist in “high value” cultures or positive factors within “low value” cultures. There’s no realistic viewpoint of culture as the self-expression of a people here. The sole value of a culture, in Harrison’s eyes, is only as a tool to make money and get higher test scores. What is this, Mad Men? How did this backwards worldview get published?

This book is disgusting, sneakily hateful, outdated and peculiarly misanthropic at times, but because it’s prettied up with carefully selected facts and statistics and is not overtly anti-minority–just overtly anti-non-assimilating minority–it’s taken seriously as a text on serious cultural solutions in the modern age. In doing so, it perpetuates some pretty foul stereotypes–Latinos and Blacks are lazy and stupid, Asians are a global “model minority” (even though last I checked, there are more Asians in the world than anyone else so how does that even work?) and white people, no matter where they’re from, are inherently hard-working with superior values. Long, anecdotal lists of successful people are trotted out for each “high value culture”, ignoring the fact that such a list can be made for ANY culture, poking a neat hole in one of his most common arguments.

What’s missing from this book is any appreciation of humanity. Culture is a human thing, a means of connection and creativity, not a tool for soulless financial success or a problem to be fixed. Adopting one culture does not always mean rejecting another and history and systems of oppression and economic equality matter a LOT in the way that cultures have developed and continue to develop. Also, there are more ways to be successful than passing tests and working in fields rampant with nepotism and cronyism, then pretending that you got there by pure ability.

I could type another ten pages about this, but I won’t. I’ll simply say, DON’T READ THIS BOOK. The ideas within aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. 

One star and one particular finger up to Jews, Confucians, and Protestants.

(Don’t buy this book, beautiful people. Buy something else, and read it with great enjoyment and appreciate for culture outside of a petty obsession with money and power. If you happen to buy a book from a link you click on this site, there are affiliate relationships and a commission might be earned. Thanks for visiting, beautiful people!)

[HEAR ME OUT] Less Announcing, Less Buying, More Enjoyment: My Reading Plans for 2021

It’s pretty simple, really. Last year, I read $611.23 worth of books.

That’s a lot of money. Then again, it doesn’t seem so when you realize that I read 122 books last year. That’s roughly 5 dollars per book, so–not so bad. When you add in the fact that libraries have been closed due to COVID, $600 worth of books is really not a lot.

Especially when I tell you that I spent roughly $1500 on books last year.

Sure, some were given as gifts, some were bought with a generous books allowance from the day job I had at the very beginning of 2020, and some were books bought for students when I left the aforementioned early-2020 day job. But most of that $1500 is sitting in piles around my house or on my Kindle, unread.

This is a problem. A very good problem, but a problem, nonetheless.

There’s also a habit I developed last year, partly out of curiosity, partly convenience, and partly because I’m too lazy to properly plan for my Bookstagram. That habit was to use the American Heritage Months to theme my reading for diversity. I figured that way I would hit all the bases, and in a lot of ways, I did.

In February, I read Black American authors for Black History Month.

For March, women for Women’s History Month.

In May, I was busy reading books by Asian authors for Asian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

June, of course, was LGBTQIA+ authors for Pride Month.

Latinx/Hispanic Heritage Month straddled September and October.

November was dedicated to the work of Indigenous authors.

October should’ve been dedicated to the work of authors with disabilities but I didn’t realize that until halfway through the month, when I was beginning to get a bit tired of isolating myself in periodic cultural puddles and annoyed with myself for deciding to do it, too.

You see, I forgot two critical things about myself when diving into Heritage Month reading all through 2020. One is that I really thrive on diversity, evenly sprinkled throughout my life. My friends, my literature, my music, my food–I am not a fan of tokenism or tokening, no matter how unintentional and well meant it might be. Bring me all the good things, all at the same time, because they are good, not because I’m trying to prove some sort of diversity-training point. Like I said in my Indigenous Heritage Month recap:

Look, I’m the Equal Opportunity Reader, not the Performative Ethnic Consumerism Reader. I like mixing things up and drawing comparisons between art in different communities side by side, not isolating myself in pools of one culture at a time. It was a good idea at first but ultimately, all I did was give myself continual cases of the literary DT’s. While I was reading solely Black writers in February, I found myself longing for books by Arab writers. While I was reading Latinx writers, I was wondering about books by Asians. While reading Indigenous writers, I started missing Black voices. Meanwhile my favorite writer babies, my multiethnic, multicultural, category defying literati were being sorely neglected. I managed to assuage a lot of this by choosing books that intersected multiple communities as often as I could, but to be honest by the time I got to my Latinx Heritage Month recap I felt like a tacky hacktivist cheeseball. I read books from multicultural communities anyway naturally, without needing to announce them in theme park chunks. So while there were definitely good things about curating my reading patterns so intentionally [in 2020] next year I’m going to do things a little differently, a little more intuitively, and a little more naturally. Watch this space.

The other thing I forgot about myself is how much I hate performative internet activism and the accidental appearance of it. The full reasons why are in a soapbox I’ll have to stand on another time (probably when my platform has grown a bit more and I feel the need to self-sabotage by being a bit too free with my opinions and drive some folks away), but while I didn’t intend my unannounced, low-reach Heritage Month reading project to be performative, it felt a bit like it. When writing retrospectives, I found myself explaining why reading diverse books is a good idea when what I’m trying to do is demonstrate the obvious reason–because they’re good. It’s not rocket science and if you’re the sort of person who has to have it explained to you that human beings who are not like you are still, in fact, normal people who are capable of making art even if it’s not about you, I’m frankly not sure you’re my audience. The internet is a weird and wonderful place these days, and everyone and their guilty suburban aunt is an anti-racist educator of sorts. That’s not my wheelhouse–at least, not my intended one. I’m living normal diversity and continual un-colonization, or at least attempting to.(There’s a reason I don’t say decolonization. That’s another soapbox. ) I don’t need to explain it, and there are plenty of others who perhaps agree. It’s not that the ongoing works of antiracism and decolonization are not vital–they are, if a bit unfortunately coined. It’s just that I want to begin the work of looking past that, to what’s next and the foundations that have been demonstratively laid for it over many years of resistance to oppression and marginalization.

In other words, I’m not here to explain being a BIPOC or our books to nervous soul-searching white people or the people of color who want to be close to them. Y’all are welcome, of course, I’m just saying that this party ain’t about you. I’ll pour you a drink but you’re just going to have to pay attention and get in the groove on your own. I’m exploring the world of literature and all the diversity within on my own terms, from a happy Black woman’s perspective, and I don’t really feel as though that is something that needs a lot of announcing because it’s normal and that is where all this antiracist, decolonial work is leading us, right?

So what has this got to do with my reading habits in 2021?

Basically, no more themed months. I’ll probably still do a round-up post from time to time, and I still think that Heritage Months are worth every last drop of celebration that they host and then some. I just see no reason not to read Asians in February, Latinx in June, or Black folks all year round. I want to diversify my reading a little less choppily and clunkily in 2021, which means reading a lot of whatever I want, whenever I want to and seeing where the chips fall. I found out about a lot of fantastic new authors last year by reading the way I did and I appreciate it. This year I’ll be reading those writers interspersed throughout the year, and being a bit more true to my worldview in the process. I don’t have a plan except to read good books and lots of them, and hopefully that’s your plan, too.

I also took a hard look at my book budget and the world of Bookstagram and book blogging and decided that it’s time for a bit of personal reckoning with the suggested materialism in those spaces. So many pictures of beautiful hardcover book jackets, so many celebrations of pub days and new book tours, so much display of new books to buy, buy, buy, now, now, now. I love it. We all do. But I found myself chasing new releases and popular books last year, which is something I have never done in my life. In some ways, it was good. It’s fun to be one of the cool kids for a change, read what’s on the cutting edge and kiki with the internet homies about it. But is it really $1500, mostly unread, gathering dust and megapixels as we speak cool? Na—

Yes. Yes it is. Of course it is. I have a problem, and that problem is books.

I’m not going to stop buying books. I said it was time for a reckoning, not an execution. But I am going to take a suggestion from the pages of Bookstagram buddy Queer African Reads and read 4 books I already own for every one that I buy. Heaven knows that should keep me more than occupied, and put an extra grand in my 2021 savings account, to boot. Wish me luck, and self-control. Those one-click e-book deals are fierce and hunt me down on insomniac weeknights with a vengeance.

In a way, this frees me up. I already own a lot of really good books, and this is permission to read them all and enjoy them without the pressure to show and sell and explain why everyone should be reading Arab time travel or Black regency romance or Chinese space exploration novels. You just should, ’cause they’re interesting. At least I do. On that note, I think there’s a lot of pressure to have a niche, a commodifiable, easily identifiable brand in the online bookish community, and I think my niche is very much not having a niche. I like spinning around in the stacks finding other creative kindred spirits who wrote what they wanted, rather than just what was expected or imprinted. I don’t say this in a lofty or disrespectful way at all, but I like the fringes and the less-defined spaces of the literary world and life in general. Why not bring that to my blog, and stop trying to fit the diversity of my reading life into the expected commercialized pigeonholes? If it gets more followers and whatnot, great. If it doesn’t, also great. I still get to read great books and talk to folk about it, at the end of the day.

So–less buying. Less announcing why it’s good to read books by diverse people, even if you are “diverse” yourself, even if you are learning about diversity, even if you are trying to right wrongs or understand more or whatever it is that you are trying to do by commodifying diversity rather than embodying it. No more complicity with the commodifying of diversity, or at least not intentionally so. Lots of reading, lots of good books, lots of natural diversity and reading to learn to appreciate and empathize, not to perform. Seems pretty simple. Anyone interested in joining in?

[REVIEW] Vox, by Christina Dalcher

(Find it HERE.)

Maybe today isn’t a good day to write about a dystopian novel in which hyper-conservative, racist, sexist ideals permeate the US, resulting in the election of a wannabe despot who encourages horribly oppressive policies necessitating an organized movement of diverse people working together to legitimately reclaim the country despite his last ditch efforts to destroy everything by literally engineering and weaponizing ignorance…⠀
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But then again…😈 ⠀
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Vox is a dystopian novel in which, as a result of the above-described, women have been denied the right to words–written and spoken. Frankly, it’s a lot like The Handmaid’s Tale, only more contemporary and less religious–there’s even a scene in which a character is reading that book, so the homage is intentional. Once women are removed from public life and limited to 100 words a day under pain of harsh consequences, a former neurobiologist gets the opportunity to infiltrate the administration and restore the gender balance, with the help of her husband and her former research team.⠀

Despite the interesting premise and my love of social justice fiction–I’m really not here for this book. Jean, our main character, is remarkably privileged, remarkably brilliant and so, so dully complicit with the world this book tries to criticize. It doesn’t help that the one Black character speaks in an alien dialect from Planet Stereotype, the one Asian character’s entire personality is “smart”, “tough”, and “tiny”, the one lesbian is Jean’s torch-carrying roommate and when all is said and done, Jean is saved by the men she sleeps with, not her own brains or initiative. I think the aesop of this book is supposed to be “Women, stand up for your rights!”. The actual aesop is “Middle class white women, stay silent until it’s almost too late and then women of color, sexy immigrants, and the white men who pay your bills will save your ass anyway!” ⠀
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Sound familiar? ⠀
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(Also, what is it with white women in dystopia and hard labor as punishment? It seems as though in every book like this, insurrection is punished by being sent off to a labor camp where our heroine must suffer the indignity of growing vegetables. I’m not underplaying the seriousness of hard labor camps and the suffering they cause. It’s just that in these books, the labor is so nebulous and mundane. Never mind that in the real world, women are subject to hideous physical punishment, disfigurement, assault, and even death. How dare a body have to cook and clean, right? That’s oppression!)

Maybe it’s the times, maybe it’s just that this book was not written for me. For what it’s worth, the prose is good, it just doesn’t say much.⠀


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1 star and a copy of Women, Race and Class to Vox. Bleh.

(Perhaps you can’t tell, but I didn’t love this book, fellow readers. Please look HERE for a collection of speculative fiction–fantasy, dystopia and science fiction–written by women that I found much more equitable and enjoyable. If you want to read Vox, I’d suggest finding it at your local library if they have curbside service–find one HERE. As always, I need to remind you that this blog has affiliate relationships and any clicks and purchases will result in a commission being earned–but reviews and posts are not bought and are entirely my own opinion(in case this review didn’t make that clear). Peace, beautiful people, and thank you for reading!)

[HEAR ME OUT] Eric Jerome Dickey, in Memoriam

It was a shock to wake up this morning and discover that best-selling author Eric Jerome Dickey has passed away at the relatively young age of 59. I read a lot of Dickey in my 20s, and the news really rocked me–he was a Black cultural institution of sorts, and his work had a huge impact on me, personally.

I did my bachelor’s degree at a tiny school in a little town in a county where I was one of perhaps 3 Black women. To say that the experience could be lonely and alienating at times is an understatement, so I spent a lot of time alone, deepening my jazz habit. forging long-distance friendships on Nappturality, writing terrible plays, and doing just about everything else but studying. Occasionally I would get bored and wander across town to the little county library and trawl the stacks, looking for something fun to read in between assignments. As you can imagine, there was a lot of Nora Roberts, Annie Proulx, and every page Mary Higgins Clark had ever breathed in the general direction of. But one day, I stumbled upon a bright yellow book with colorful illustrations of beautiful, stylish Black women on the cover. I was so pleasantly surprised that I checked it out immediately without even scanning the blurb and spent all weekend reading it.

That book was Eric Jerome Dickey’s Sister, Sister. (Weirdly, that library also had Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl. Not bad for a little country library.) It wasn’t the first book I’d read about romance and regular life set in Black culture, and it wouldn’t be the last. But it was probably the first thing I’d read by a Black man that specifically embraced Black women in a contemporary setting. At the time I was reading a lot of race plays for my studies–lots of Amiri Baraka, George C Wolfe and Ed Bullins–all great thinkers with unsavory takes on Black women. Dickey provided a nice counterbalance, a shot of romance and drama from a Black male perspective that I really needed. Here was a Black man who really seemed to love Black women, and wrote about us lovingly and wryly. Black women in EJD novels had all sorts of jobs, lives, personalities and lovers–but they were women, first and foremost, living their own lives and living them well (or at least, they usually were by the last page of each novel). The books were a balm to mid-twenties me, hungry for representation and trying hard to define myself in a world with ridiculous opinions about who I was supposed to be. They also taught me empathy for women who were like myself and unlike myself. Between Lovers helped me unlearn homophobia. Milk In My Coffee taught me that light-skinned Black women faced color prejudices too. Friends and Lovers helped me understand how friendship could be just as, if not more important than romance. And Cheaters didn’t teach me anything that I recall, but it sure was a lot of fun.

I think the last novel I read by Dickey was The Other Woman, which was released back in 2003, but I remained a devoted fan of his, if not as devoted a reader. For years he was one of my go-to authors for Black joy and love in literature, and his untimely passing makes me sad and sorry. He gave something vital to the world of books, and while we have his work as a legacy, the world will miss whatever he would have come up with next.

Rest in power, Eric Jerome Dickey.

(This is a memorial post, fellow readers, so no affiliate links are included. However, be aware that if you click to any other post, there may be affiliate links involved.)