Books

Think before you speak. Read before you think. – Fran Lebowitz

Books By Black Women Everyone Should Read (in my opinion)

  1. Angie Thomas- The Hate You Give
  2. Phoebe Robinson- You Can’t Touch My Hair And Other Things I Still Have To Explain
  3. Terry McMillan – Waiting to Exhale
  4. Nonviolent Bulawayo – We Need New Names
  5. Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye
  6. Issa Rae- Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl
  7. Tiffany Haddish – The Last Black Unicorn
  8. Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  9. Francesca Ramsey – Well, That Escalated Quickly
  10. Octavia E Butler -The Parable of the Sower
  11. Jesmyn Ward – Sing, Unburied, Sing
  12. Toni Tipton-Martin – The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
  13. Gloria Naylor – Mama Day
  14. Imani Perry – South to America

Read more here and here.

Juicy–a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity–is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.

My book club just finished Clear by Carys Davies. It was not what I expected, and that’s a good thing. I enjoyed the book. It kept me reading late at night. The characters – there are 3 main characters – are well drawn and behave in surprising ways. Worth your time.

From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life’s biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.

In The Book of Alchemy, Suleika explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.

A companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy is broken into themes ranging from new beginnings to love, loss, and rebuilding. Whether you’re a lifelong journaler or new to the practice, this book gives you the tools, direction, and encouragement to engage with discomfort, ask questions, peel back the layers, dream daringly, uncover your truest self—and in doing so, to learn to hold the unbearably brutal and astonishingly beautiful facts of life in the same palm. (Amazon.com)

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. (Amazon.com)

Buy your books from an independent (or less dependent) bookseller. Here are leads to a few bookstores that ship, are good for a road trip, or are brick-and-mortar:

We’ve seen thought become criminalized in dystopian fiction like:

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
  • Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (2-book series)

Here are some good books and blogs for recipes for one or two:

  • The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook by America’s Test Kitchen
  • Taste of Home’s Dinner Ideas for Two
  • One Dish Kitchen (blog)
  • Healthy Cookbook for Two: 175 Simple, Delicious Recipes to Enjoy Cooking for Two by Michelle Anderson
  • Good Housekeeping Dishes For Two: 125 Easy Small-Batch Recipes for Weeknight Meals & Special Celebrations
  • The Essential Air Fryer Cookbook for Two: Perfectly Portioned Recipes for Healthier Fried Favorites by Gina Kleinworth
  • Table for Two (blog)
  • Fix-It and Forget-It Cooking for Two: 150 Small-Batch Slow Cooker Recipes by Hope Comerford and Bonnie Matthews
  • The Heart Healthy Cookbook for Two: 125 Perfectly Portioned Low Sodium, Low Fat Recipes by Jennifer Koslo and Sarah Samaan
  • Baking for Two: 200+ Small-Batch Recipes, from Lazy Bakes to Layer Cakes by America’s Test Kitchen
  • Our Favorite Recipes for One or Two by Gooseberry Patch
  • 101 Cooking for Two (blog)
  • All-Time Best Dinners for Two by America’s Test Kitchen 
  • Cornbread Recipe For One or Two by Lynda Self
  • Chocolate Cobbler by Christina Lane
  • The Ultimate Cooking for One Cookbook: 175 Super Easy Recipes Made Just for You by Joanie Zisk
  • 10 small-batch recipes perfect for two from King Arthur Baking
  • Cooking for Two from The Spruce Eats

Picture Books for Children (and adults)

No Place for This In My Cookbook Collection

I was looking at cookbooks and came across Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices: A Cookbook edited by Katherine Alford, a former vice president at Food Network, and Kathy Gunst of NPR’s Here and Now, This collection of recipes and stories was published in 2020, and I vaguely remembered some controversy about it. Ah-ha. Blogger and baker Tangerine Jones published an essay on Medium titled “The Privilege of Rage,” outlining how she coined the phrase “rage baking” back in 2015, and watched as Alford and Gunst’s book was published to great acclaim as her work went unacknowledged (taken from Jaya Saxena writing for Eater.com). Saxena continues, “It’s not hard to find instances of black people, specifically black women, being erased from their own work. One has to simply look at all the work activist Tarana Burke has had to do to remind the world she coined the phrase #MeToo. Or the erasure of black trans women from an art exhibit about HIV/AIDS. Or how Mark Bittman was called out for ripping off the name and design of a feminist magazine, Salty, for his Medium publication, which has since been rebranded to Heated. Jones never claims to have invented the phrase “rage baking,” but her post taps into this history.”

Books on my Reading Table January 2025

  • The Frozen River – Ariel Lawhon
  • At the Scene of the Crime – Dana Stabenow
  • When Southern Women Cook – Toni Tipton-Martin & America’s Test Kitchen
  • Death on the Tiber – Lindsey Davis
  • A Death in Cornwall – Daniel Silva
  • The Last One – Rachel Howzell Hall
  • Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute – Talia Hibbert
  • The Grey Wolf – Louise Penny

Best New Cookbooks on My Shelf

  • Sweet Tooth: 100 Desserts to Save Room For (A Baking Book) by Sarah Fennell
  • Our South: Black Food Through My Lens by Ashleigh Shanti
  • The King Arthur Baking Company Big Book of Bread: 125+ Recipes for Every Baker (A Cookbook)
  • My Egypt: Cooking from My Roots (A Cookbook) by Michael Mina
  • An African American Cookbook: Exploring Black History and Culture Through Traditional Foods by Phoebe Bailey
  • The American Beach Cookbook by Marsha Dean Phelts
  • The Cake Bible, 35th Anniversary Edition by Rose Levy Beranbaum& Woody Wolston (I have the original, and it is fabulous)

Banned Books Week 2024


A few good newsletters to subscribe to:

End of Summer 2024 Reading List

  • bel canto by Ann Patchett
  • Truth Be Told by Patricia Raybon
  • Everyone Who Is Gone Here: The United States, Central America, And The Making Of A Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin
  • People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry
  • The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley
  • The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
  • Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen
  • Thank You Please Come Again: How Gas Stations Feed & Fuel the American South by Kate Medley

THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN is the documentation of Kate Medley’s many road trips across the South, photographing our service stations, convenience stores, and quick stops. Along the way, Kate pulls over for tamales, fried fish, and banh mi, but her images uncover the people and landmarks that supply far more than food and gas.

Raw and real. Honest and powerful. Funny, at times. Darrin Bell brings us into his world through his evocative words and drawings. The Talk – every parent of a black child should know what it is – is the skeleton on which Bell hangs his work. He chronicles his evolution from being a naive 6-year-old to being the father of a 6-year-old. The idea that he couldn’t have a more realistic water pistol because police wouldn’t see him as a little boy but as something else; an adult thug, a criminal, someone to be stopped, harassed, even assaulted resonated with me. I remember Bobbi Wilson, the 9-year-old who was spraying lanternflies and had the police called on her. Her white neighbor who called the police said, “There’s a little Black woman walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees on Elizabeth and Florence,” Lawshe told the dispatcher, according to October 2022 audio obtained by outlets. “I don’t know what the hell she’s doing. Scares me, though.” She was 9. Nine. I am buying copies for my younger friends and grands.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives. (Amazon.com)

“This quote falls in line with the major themes Phillips explores throughout the novel: the human cost of war, trauma, PTSD, mental health, and healing.” writes Darren Orf.

A Great Disorder is a bold, urgent work that helps us make sense of today’s culture wars through a brilliant reconsideration of America’s foundational myths and their use in contemporary politics. Famous for his trilogy on the Myth of the Frontier, Richard Slotkin identifies five myths, born of different eras, that have shaped our conception of what it means to be American: the myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War (which he breaks into two opposing camps, Emancipation, and the Lost Cause), and the Good War, embodied by the multiethnic platoon fighting for freedom. He argues that while Trump and his MAGA followers have played up a frontier-inspired hostility to the federal government and rallied around Confederate symbols to champion a racially exclusive definition of American nationality, Blue America, taking its cue from the protest movements of the 1960s, envisions a limitlessly pluralistic country in which the federal government is the ultimate enforcer of rights and opportunities. American history―and the foundations of our democracy―have become a battleground. It is not clear at this time which vision will prevail. (Amazon.com)

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. (amazon.com)

At a time when the very foundations of democracy seem under threat, the lessons of the past offer a roadmap for navigating a moment of political crisis. In Democracy Awakening, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, revealing how the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” can be traced back through the earliest days of the republic. She examines the historical forces that have led to the current political climate, showing how modern conservatism has preyed upon a disaffected population, weaponizing language and promoting false history to consolidate power. Richardson wrangles a chaotic news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to and what possible paths lie ahead. Her command of history and trademark plainspoken prose allow her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Nixon to the January 6 insurrection, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus, and the birth of “movement conservatism.”  (amazon.com) Worth every minute of reading time.

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