Books

Nonfiction November: Maid

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Nonfiction bloggers and Booktubers are encouraging readers this month to challenge themselves to read at least one nonfiction book.

If you follow this blog, you already know this is not a hard task for me to do.  However, if you find it hard to find nonfiction books you would enjoy, I would highly recommend first checking anything you have watched on Netflix or Hulu lately.

There are a lot of popular movie adaptations of books, including Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will To Survive by Stephanie Land.  This memoir is about the author’s experience of being a single mother struggling against domestic abuse and poverty.  I was really struck by the book because most people including the judicial system only think of physical violence when discussing domestic abuse and not necessarily the mental and emotional violence involved.  I also appreciated the focus on what it is like to be working poor in America. I highly recommend it and watch the Netflix program.

You can look through my most recent blog posts to see other book recommendations.  Here are some other recommended nonfiction reads of the top of my head:
Island People: The Caribbean and the World by Josh Jelly-Schapiro
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Color of Water by James McBride
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendel
How The Word Is Passed by Clint Smith
Tweeting Truth To Power by Cyrus McQueen

Book Review: The Personal Librarian

The Personal Librarian is based on the true story of Belle da Costa Green, a fair-skinned Black woman who passed for white during the early 1900s and became the personal librarian to financier J.P. Morgan.

It’s a pretty wild story!

It’s a really great read.  I don’t care for fiction that much, but I did like this book!

The story also reminded me of The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe, which was also about a passing Black woman who worked for the Boston Public Library.

Here is an interview with the authors.

Why I Love My Kindle

You may have noticed that I have been reading and reviewing a lot more books lately.  Since the pandemic began, I have become more familiar with my Kindle, which has created a better reading experience for me.

If you don’t have a Kindle yet, check out this video!

 

Support BIPOC Preorders

As part of the ongoing conversation about improving equity in the publishing industry, I worked with Rozzie Bound to create a virtual shelf featuring upcoming books by authors of color that you can preorder now.  By preordering, you help drive up sales and possible placement on bestseller lists and help make publishers pay attention to and better support and uplift authors of color and their readership.  The shelf currently lists some notable books coming out this Summer and Fall and will be updated regularly.  Some notable upcoming books include Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle (Aug 31), Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (Sep 14), Angela Davis’s reissued Autobiography (Oct 19), and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project (Nov 16).  Preorder these and other books here.