The Books They Keep Coming

I went back to work this week, so I am now splitting my days between the office and home. That has cut into my reading time, but, never mind, I'm ranging far and wide.

Here are the latest titles that have moved from library to home and back again:
29. Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Hairston is an African-American science fiction/fantasy author; this is a reread of a novel my son Sam gave me when he heard Hairston speak at PSU several years ago)
30. Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing, edited by Stephanie Stokes Oliver (excerpts from African-American and other Black writers' works running chronologically from Frederick Douglass to Barrack Obama, this one blew me away. W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, James Baldwin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: the list goes on and on. One of the most emotional excerpts was from Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, where he recounts the immediate impact of the end of the Civil War in former slaves of all ages finally having the opportunity to obtain an education: "...it was a whole race trying to go to school." I read that and started crying from the sheer weight of that moment. Poet Nikki Giovanni says it best in in the Foreword: "Black Lives Matter. Black Ink reminds us of why.")
31. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History by Danzy Senna. (I got introduced to Senna through Black Ink; this is her memoir of making sense of her tangled biracial history)
32. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (translated from the Swedish, this is a fun novel that several of the oncology nurses and staff were reading late last fall)
33. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat (another Black Ink introduction, this work is half memoir of the death of Danticat's mother from ovarian cancer and half an examination of how writers, especially women writers, write about death in fiction and in memoir)

Last week Warren's son David was over to share a meal. At some point in the evening the picture book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel came up. David was a little hazy on whether he remembered that book, so Warren found a reading of it on YouTube and we all watched and listened. Warren said "add that to your list." "But I didn't read it," I responded. We had a brief debate about whether it should go on the list, and I finally told Warren I'd list it with an asterisk and no number. So:
*Mike Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton (a childhood classic: what more can I say?)