The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

I was inspired to begin to seek out James Baldwin's writing after seeing I Am Not Your Negro.

The Fire Next Time is made up of two letters, one of which is to his nephew and namesake James but really both are to all people, black and white, written on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Baldwin writes from his personal observations and experiences growing up in Harlem and his words are often sharp and biting, but they need to be as he is calling on people to see the root of racism and rip it out once and for all.

The Fire Next Time is as relevant and needed today in 2017 as it was when it was first published in 1963 during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. Until we can stop listing the names of young Black men and women killed for the color of their skin Baldwin will have something to teach us; his words instructions and warnings rather than a window into a bygone era.

One stark example he gives (remember now that this wasn't so far in the past for him when written in 1963) is how Black military members were treated during WWII. He says that German prisoners were treated with human dignity by their American captors than Black GIs were treated by their fellow men in uniform. It was for many at the time an eye opening revelation, it was proof of how little had changed since people stopped owning other people. And yet at the same time though American Black men were freer in Europe than they were at home in the United States.

Baldwin writes that it isn't wickedness in people that allows this demoralizing of part of the population based solely on skin color but it is spinelessness. The unwillingness of those who don't harbor the delusion that Black men and women are less than White men and women need to but more often than not don't speak out and intervene, work towards change. He gives an example of a time he and a couple of other Black men in their upper 30's he was traveling with ordered a drink at the bar in O'Hare and were refused service because they looked too young. The exchange was loud enough for those around them to hear. The manager made the excuse for his bartender that he was new and had not yet learned to tell by looking between a Black "boy" in his 20's and a Black "boy" nearing 40. Not one person in the bar spoke up for them.

I say to you, without knowing the color of your skin because it is irrelevant to my saying this, you should get your hands on a copy of this and more of Baldwin's writing. It needs to be read.

(Finished July 30, 2017)

If you love to read I highly suggest that if you are not already a member you join the Book of the Month Club.

Final Girls by Riley Sager

I belong to the Book of the Month Club, which if you aren't a member already you really should join, just CLICK HERE, and this was one of the July selections. I was torn between two, this one and The Windfall by Diksha Basu which I will read soon and review when I am done.

I had been reading a bit of heavy stuff and non-fiction political stuff so went for a thriller to cleanse my mental palette with a little blood and mystery. I was not disappointed. Final Girls was one of those try to figure it out thrillers that begins to lay clues, some real, some red herrings, others so subtle they are missed until the reveal and then the aha moment happens. 

Final Girls is the term given in this story to young women who are the only survivors of a mass killing and there are three involved here. Separated by years and circumstances but bound by tragedies only they walked away from are Lisa, Samantha, and Quincy. Lisa embraces her final girl role and becomes a child psychologist, Samantha goes off the grid to avoid the spotlight, and Quincy, well she is just fine and normal thank you very much. That is until Lisa dies and Samantha shows up at Quincy's home.

Then her world begins to rock and spin and fall apart. The mystery of what it is Quincy can't remember from the night of the massacre she survived begins to unravel. Who did it? I didn't see the reveal coming, well at first I thought I did then I dismissed my guess because it seemed to far fetched, but it wasn't, though I was way of on the details. I began to believe it was someone else and I really thought I had it figured out and fully abandoned by first suspect....but nope.

And that is all I can say about that...except to add that you should read Final Girls, it is a tensely told wild ride of a thriller.

(Finished July 29, 2017)  

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

I was amazed and unnerved by this book. Having grown up in an abusive family it was difficult to read Jeannette's story. But she tells it with such open honesty and yet in such a matter of fact way that it makes for a must read. Must read because her strength and survival is amazing and inspiring. I am not sure how she had the strength to keep her parents in her life even in the limited way she did once she moved away from living with them but she does and it is nothing short of amazing on her part. I think what makes this story beautiful is the way she writes about it and how much you can feel how torn she is by her love for the parents who did not really take care of her the way a child needs to be cared for. Even with all the different parenting styles out there, I think we can all agree that children being fed and safe should be a parental priority. Reading about how Walls and her siblings often went hungry and at times she resorted to foraging in the garbage for food is heartbreaking.

But in the end I would say there is something uplifting about The Glass Castle because it is an example of the resilience of the human spirit and coming out whole on the others side of an extremely adverse situation and a broken place.

The stark and matter of fact writing is at once jarring and beautiful. It isn't that she isn't emotional, she just seems to write in an it is what is voice and her anger and hurt is there but it isn't drippy and overwrought, though no one would have been able to blame her if it had been.

The abused child in me wanted to scream and yell and beg her to run or fight back or at least not be so calm. The adult mother in the much better place that I am today felt appreciation for the strength and courage of the Jeannette and the other Walls children.

(Finished July 27, 2017)

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin, Raoul Peck (Editor)

If you have not watched the film I Am Not Your Negro you must!!!

This is I guess what I would call a companion to the film. The opening pages are about why and how and some of the challenges of putting together the film using the written and spoken words of James Baldwin. The remainder is a transcript of sorts. It is bits of Baldwin's writing and his words from interviews and speaking engagements.

His words are as powerful on the page as they are on the screen and the film and this thin volume are a one-two punch to the gut that everyone needs. Probably more than once.



Two quotes that stick with me and that I felt the need to share:
"I'm saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find or what you find will do to you."

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

(Finished July 23, 2017)

The Sweetness of Forgetting by Kristin Harmel

The bargain book table at Barnes and Noble is a place I have stumbled across hidden gems many times. This was one. I had never heard of the author but the cover and title caught my eye so I picked it up and read the back cover. It sounded like a story I would enjoy and with a 2 for $8 special I grabbed it. The last time I stumbled across a book this way was Brooklyn which was also a hit with me.


The Sweetness of Forgetting is a romance, a family drama, a Holocaust story, and a redemption story. Told in the present as Hope and her daughter Annie deal with the pain of Hope's divorce and watching Hope's grandmother Rose slip further away from them as her Alzheimer's progresses and from Rose's point of view in flashbacks as the present slips away and the past is coming back to Rose. Along the way Hope learns what it means to love, who her family is, how to help her daughter, and what it is she wants to do with her life. And none of it is what she thought it would be.

Hope runs the bakery Rose started 60 years ago in Cape Cod but the economy has caused her to be in a bind with the bank and she is close to losing it. In the midst of this, Rose in a moment of startling clarity, sends Hope on a mission to Paris to find out what became of a list of people without telling Hope who they are. What Hope finds is so much more than she imagined. The heartbreak of the rounding up of French Jews and what was happening to Jewish people in the camps is something Hope learns about through the people she meets trying to find out who the list of people are to Rose. And Hope finds so much more, she finds family, love, hope, and faith.

A sweet and sad story, well written as it crosses from what could have been a Harlequin type romance  into really so much more. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

(Finished July 9, 2017)  

In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

This book took me a few hours to read. I would have been done sooner but days of little sleep caught up and I needed a short rest from the words on the page for my very tired eyes.
This book has both the English and Italian inside. On the right hand pages is the English translation, not done by Jhumpa by the way and she explains why in the book. On the left hand pages are her words in Italian.

As in her novels, here Jhumpa writes about identity, finding ones self, alienation, and belonging.

At a certain point in her life she realized she didn't belong to any place, she called herself and exile. She didn't feel like she fit in with India, the home country of her parents, and the language spoken by them, Bengali. Her physical appearance kept her at arms distance from the country she grew up in, America. And the same physicality made her an outsider in Italy. She writes about how much better her Italian is than her husband's but that she is always treated as if she shouldn't be speaking it. It was an emotional thing to go through. Yet writing in, reading in, and speaking Italian was what she set out to do. And so she and her family moved for a time to Italy.

This book is born of that and what it really ends up being is a love letter to words, to language, to seeing yourself in the words. Words have power, I truly believe that and try to be mindful go how I wield that power. Jhumpa I think from having read this and her fiction works as well, she seems to agree and understand that. I was moved by her openness and sharing. And she just writes so darn beautifully.


My dear, dear friend Beth, who introduced me to Jhumpa Lahiri's writing, handed me Interpreter of Maladies and said to me, I never wanted to eat words until I read this book. I was hooked. And today when I told Beth about this book she said "I have never fallen in love with someone I didn't know" until Jhumpa. I agree. It is hard not to love Jhumpa!!!

This is a quote from the book and really captures the feelings and ideas within:

"What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable."


(Finished July 8, 2017)

Her other works:
The Namesake
Unaccustomed Earth
interpreter of maladies
The Lowland

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

Love comes in many different ways. Friends, family, lovers, and even to and from our pets. All of these loves are explored in The Japanese Lover.

Alma lives at Lark House. A home for the elderly in San Fransisco where Irina works. The older woman sees something in the younger and a bond begins to form, and it changes things for them both. As she reveals her story to her grandson Seth and to Irina Alma faces the shame of choices she made in her youth that cost her dearly and continue to do so.

As their love and bond grow Irina learns from Alma what true love means and looks like. And she learns to open up and share her story in order to begin to heal from it.

I enjoyed this story. I will say that I would have loved it more if I had read it before A Man Called Ove instead of directly after it because Ove was so wonderful a read and tough act to follow. It really is a wonderful tale of the price we pay when we make choices and they way these choices continue to play out in our lives long after. It is also about, as I said, the many ways we love.

I was moved by Irina and Seth in the present as they were learning about Ichi and Alma in the past. Alma and her many ways of loving and the depths she loves are beautiful, even as she thinks herself to be not a very nice person and is aware of her flaws, unflinchingly aware.

Not the perfect book but an enjoyable read filled with love and heart.

(Finished July 8, 2017)

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

The Buy 2 Get 1 Free table at Barnes & Noble will be by downfall. It is for me like putting an ice cream shoppe next to a weight loss center...temptation too hard to resist.

That is where I picked up A Man Called Ove. And it was love from the first sentence. I will now be seeking out more of Backman's writing, the style is just so darn readable. It is snarky, and funny, and heartwarming, and heartbreaking. It is easy to get lost in the pages and feel like you have truly entered the lives of the people in the tale.

And then there is the story itself. Ove shouldn't be someone you like but you will love him. The way the story unfolded reminded me of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, in that the story of the main character's past, how they got where they are now, unfolds as part of the present story and is told in little bits through out, slowly and wonderfully revealing important details and shedding understanding on who this character really is. I really enjoy this method of story telling.

The story of Ove and his neighbors will break your heart at time, it will make you angry, it will make you laugh, and you will miss them when you close the book for the last time. Theirs is a story of love and loss, of redemption and healing, of life with all its bumps and bruises. Ove learns the value of hard work and honesty at an early age and who he is as shaped by his childhood colors how he lives as an adult, but love can make that softer, but so can loss and those who come to fill our voids. He learns from the people he least expects or wants to learn from that living is hard but worth it.

(Finished July 2, 2017)