5 Good Books
The Prophets / Girl, Woman, Other / We Ride Upon Sticks and more
We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry (2020)
A losing (and not all that lovable) high school field hockey team in Danvers, Massachusetts (conveniently next door to Salem), seeks the help of dark magic to get back on track. As they rack up wins on the field, they find themselves compelled to continue feeding the beast they believe responsible for their victories with pranks, petty theft, and bodily autonomy.
Come for the 80s nostalgia and stay for the self-discovery of a team full of unique individuals dedicated to the cause of helping each other.
Apartment by Teddy Wayne (2020)
Apartment offers a taut look at male relationships and loneliness through the lens of class, politics, and education. Our two main characters converge at their MFA program at NYU. One is a talented outsider from the midwest paying his way through school and one is from a more comfortable northeastern family. As the plot builds and the characters get closer, we wonder who’s really helping whom with their gifts and attention and how sustainable a friendship that’s not based on mutual expectation can be.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019)
You might remember this making news as the first Co-Booker Prize Winner back in 2019 (she split with Margaret Atwoods’ The Testaments despite the prize’s bylaws explicitly forbidding this type of result). It’s every bit as good as half the prize committee thought!
If you like Zadie Smith’s tangled webs, you’ll enjoy this modern, sprawling, multi-generational look at 12 Black British women in and around London. Evaristo effortlessly drops us into today’s multicultural Britain while simultaneously dredging its colonial past for perspective.
The Wild Iris by Louise Glück (1992)
If nothing else, do yourself a favor and read the breathtaking title poem. It’s no wonder the Nobel Prize committee saw fit to award her 2020’s prize in literature. Though at times repetitive over the course of the book, the themes of the natural world and its dependence on the flow of the seasons along with a running dialogue between creator and creation make this collection an accessible body of work for any level of poetry reader.
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. (2020)
In a conversation with Kiese Laymon (via Greenlight Bookstore), Robert Jones, Jr. said that he decided to put everything on the table from the outset of his debut novel so that the reader can “decide whether you’re going to witness or whether you’re going to turn away.”
By everything he means the love story of Samuel and Isaiah, two young black men enslaved in Mississippi. And by love story I mean a masterclass in the nonverbal communication it would take to live the truth of your feelings in such a place at such a time.
Rather than reimagining the time with the supernatural elements that drive The Underground Railroad or The Water Dancer, Jones layers acts of love and resistance on top of the history to share stories that surely existed but have gone untold until now.
Let me know if you read anything in January that I should add to my reading list!