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Showing posts from January, 2018

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

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T he Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot  Díaz Interesting is about the best I can come up with right now to describe this book. Did I enjoy it? Yeah it was an enjoyable read. Would I recommend it? Probably not. Would I read something else by this author? Yes, in a heartbeat. I wasn't very interested in the main character but I kept reading because I really enjoyed the writing and I also really enjoyed the story behind the character, his family, their history and the Dominican Republic. Oscar and I just didn't hit it off. I could have been besties with his sister though. Let me explain. Oscar is a loser who wants to get laid. He is a great writer but a disaster of a person. He is odd, not very social and throughout the book our narrator blames the fukú, a curse on the family. We don't really hear from Oscar himself but from the people around him who describe him and his habits in detail. But in explaining him, our narrators describe the history of his fami

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education by Mychal Denzel Smith

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Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education by Mychal Denzel Smith                 I decided to make a “must read” list for myself in July of 2017. These were all of the books that had been sitting on my shelf for a considerable amount of time, that I knew I needed to push myself to read regardless of how I would handle the content. This year has been a tough one for me so far and I found myself shying away from some of the books that I really wanted to read but didn’t think I could handle emotionally. Invisible Man, Got the Whole Word Watching was one of those books. This was a book that I had heard quite a bit about and was given quite a bit of praise. I bought it but I waited. Then I made that damn list and was dead set on finishing every book on it. I started Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching and had to pull myself off the couch and get ready to go to work. If I could have called off that day to finish reading it, I would have. I

So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

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So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo                 I loved this book. I finished it in a day simply devouring Oluo’s word. I can relate to so much of what Oluo was sharing and in so many ways it was validating but also depressing. I feel better knowing that I’m not the only person experiencing these microaggressions, working through these issues and surviving day to day but at the same time having these similar lived experiences makes me very well aware of how far we have to come in the U.S. when it comes to dealing with race, racism and equality.                 So You Want To Talk About Race is a really well written, comprehensive look at the issue of race and how race relates to inequality, success, poverty, education and much more. When I took a look at the contents of the book I was blown away because I could recognize immediately that these topics were geared towards having a thorough conversation about race and not just placating people who want to feel like

When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

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When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele                 We live in a world where we need to tell people that Black Lives Matter. It’s not meant to say other lives don’t matter, we simply need to address that Black lives do in fact matter and their deaths, murders and killings should be addressed, their lives should be whole and they shouldn’t be forced to live in fear. This book isn’t a discussion on whether you should believe or even appreciate that stance. This book is about the life of one of the women who started the Black Lives Matter movement. This book is split into two parts. The first reveals Patrisse’s upbringing in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. She describes how she witnessed her brothers being approached by the police for doing nothing more than playing outside. She details her experiences going to different schools outside of her community in affluent neighborhoods during both middle school and h

The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey

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The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey Melanie's life is really simple. She wakes up, waits for the soldiers to strap her to her wheelchair and then she is wheeled to class. She loves learning and her favorite teacher is Ms. Justineau. On Sundays she gets to eat and take a bath. Her routine never changes. She lives on base, safe from the hungries lurking outside the walls. But she has never been outside only knowing what she's been told. She has no idea who her parents are or if she has ever had parents. She has no idea how different she is from the teachers, the soldiers or the doctor conducting experiments on base. She has no idea that she isn't a child at all, but a hungry too. So this was definitely a blame-it-on-Litsy read. Litsy, if you've never heard of it, is a social media app that is best described as goodreads and bookstagram having a baby. I love it and have been using it for over a year now. Everyone was talking about this book at some point. I