My Reading Month: July
Hello everyone,
For those of you new to this blog, welcome to my monthly reading update! Every month, I highlight some of my favorite reads – this can vary from an exceptionally good audio-book to something else that caught my fancy.
I didn’t read a ton this month – I have been incredibly busy, and it has been really hot. There is something about high temperatures that just saps my interest in reading anything at all. However, I did manage to make it through some exceptionally great books this month, and I am excited to share them with you!
Epic Fiction: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
This is the first book in a trilogy, and it is wonderful, although it ends on such a cliffhanger I keep finding myself wondering if I ever finished it! I read it years ago before the trilogy was completed, and I wanted to read it again before reading the next two books, so that I was refreshed.
Sea of Poppies is the beginning of a story about a variety of people who come together in Calcutta aboard a ship named the Ibis. From a light skinned black man from Baltimore names Zachary to the Indian widow of an opium addict who escapes being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre, the journey of these characters weave together into an absolutely beautiful story of heartbreak, love and pain.
This is one of those true epic stories, and I loved it years ago and loved it again this time – while there are a lot of characters, Ghosh does an admirable job of letting us into each of their worlds, and I felt like I knew them all really well, which is rare.
I will say that while this story is incredible, it does end in the middle of the action and leave the reader literally wondering where the next pages are. If I remember correctly, it picks up in a different place in the second book, so if that is going to be frustrating, be warned!
Great Non-Fiction:
Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence
When I talk about the great books I read this month, I need to talk about all three of these great non fiction books! They have very little in common, but they were all eye opening, and I felt like I learned a TON this month
1.) Stamped From the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
If you are looking to understand racism in the United States from an historical perspective, and racism related to the black community in particular, this is going to be your book.
This is academic. This is not a call to action along the lines of So You Want To Talk About Race or Me and White Supremacy, or even an exploration of contemporary racism and privilege like Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, The Fire This Time or White Fragility. If you are only going to read one of the anti-racist books being recommended right now, I don’t know that this is it. Not that it isn’t great, but if you only want to read one book, please read something that helps you find ways to take action.
However, if you want to dig into WHY certain biases and structures exist in the way that they do and to understand the ways we have reinforced those structures over hundreds of years, this will give you what you want and more. It looks at the entire history of racist thought and action in the United States and draws some really fascinating connections. No one escapes critique in this book, but everyone comes out more nuanced and better for the examination.
Not to mention, I added numerous books to my TBR list because he talks about so many writers and their works that I kept noting other things I wanted to read next.
2.) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
In terms of non-fiction, I don’t know that I have ever read a history written in such a personal way, and I still don’t know if I love it. What I did love was Vowell’s obvious passion and geeky love of the Puritans, and it was interesting to see the same people (hello Cotton Mather) referenced in both this and Stamped.
This is what can only be described as an ode to the Puritans in early Massachusetts and it somehow manages to be both in awe of them and see their (enormous) faults at the same time. I was utterly fascinated and horrified by what I learned, and it felt like a story I needed to know as an American too.
3.) City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence
City of Thorns tells the story of a number of people who live in Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, which as you probably are NOT aware, is located in Kenya and houses an unknown number of refugees fleeing Somalia.
Life in this camp is horrifying, and what is even more horrifying is the way that the UN and Kenyan bureaucratic struggles have completely failed this entire community of people.
I also think the author did a pretty remarkable job of looking at his own role in these people’s lives, and unlike many of these books, he spends some time at the end of this book acknowledging his blind spots, and talking about the steps he took to better the lives of the people he profiled, which so few writers take the time to do.
Reading a book like this, which took place entirely in the last 7 or so years, was a surreal experience because it is about a place and a conflict that gets little to no coverage in the international media. Multiple countries go to war, hundreds and thousands of people can be displaced, die of infectious diseases and multiple people can be abducted, and because it is happening in a small corner of the world where no one is paying attention, we literally hear nothing about it. That is to say, this book may not be the best writing of it’s kind, but the story doesn’t really exist anywhere else, so you should read it.
To illustrate my point, the last article available online talking about Covid in Dadaab what written on July 14th, and that was the first for almost a month. For what is worth, it sounds like they have managed to contain it by LOCKING DOWN THE ENTIRE CAMP when the rainy season is bringing multiple other infectious diseases through, food resources are scare and work is scarcer. We could barely handle a lock-down, and at least we had resources like unemployment and internet in our homes.
That is all for this month’s update – I likely won’t have another post for a couple weeks, but I will be back soon! Until then, keep reading, and enjoy!
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