Author: Erica Ezeifedi

Over the holidays, I was speaking to a friend of mine about different Black American dishes. When we got to desserts, one of my favorites that I remember eating growing up was coconut cake. Though he’s Black as well, he’s also from California and so hadn’t had the dessert often. This made me wonder if it was a thing particular to the South or just my family. What I found out was super interesting.

Firstly, it’s believed that coconuts came to the Americas with enslaved Africans who knew how to grow and harvest them. Secondly, the coconut cake recipe that I start to crave around the holidays came from a fun event Black folk had that satirized white Southern aristocracy in antebellum times. Enslaved people would hold little competitions called “cakewalks,” and whoever won got a fabulous coconut cake (these gatherings are where we get phrases like “that was a cakewalk,” etc.).

Since this is recent, here’s a little context on the significance of the New Year’s countdown if you’d like to read more on Black American holidays and celebrations.

As for Cheryl Day’s recipe, you’ll need the usual things for a cake, like baking powder, baking soda, flour, salt, butter, sugar, and vanilla, as well as cream of coconut, coconut milk, cardamom, and more. For a full list of ingredients and directions, visit this recipe page.

Sellerz-Jackson uses her vast experience as a trusted doula as well as her personal life to guide others through various labors in this new book. She looks at potentially rut-inducing moments that we all experience at some point in our lives and shows how we can be present by asking ourselves things like, “What do we need to flourish and thrive under current conditions?”

Shigeoka both explains how being deeply curious can better connect us to others and shows how to engage in the practice of Deep Curiosity. Using research and personal anecdotes, he outlines ways to heal, connect, and understand by being more curious.

Though I love listening to music — my Spotify Wrapped said I spent over 30,000 minutes in 2023 listening to music…which felt like a mild drag, but I digress — I am not very knowledgeable on the major players behind the scenes, except for Rick Rubin. He’s produced records for everyone from Sir Mix-A-Lot to Weezer to Macy Gray, and here, he shows how the creative process can be and is part of all our lives. His illustrious career spent coaxing the best work out of musical artists of varying genres has shown him not only where creativity comes from but also how it connects one to the world.

Wong mentions how the title of the book and its release came as a result of “deliberate manifestation” and “big cat energy.” In it, Wong, the founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, shares a collection of everything from essays to graphics and art commissioned by disabled Asian American artists to show what her life has been like as a disability advocate. With humor and insight, she explores pop culture, her Asian American identity, and the various consequences of ableism.

Odell gets into the thing that runs our lives once we become adults: time. And, surprise, surprise, she finds that the clock was built for profit, not necessarily to help people (capitalism strikes again, in other words). Our very concept of time is worth exploring because, even when we are meant to be caring for ourselves, we are pressed by time. I suspect that the concept of time factors into cultural differences a lot, so this is an interesting read on many levels.

Here, Ali Abdaal, who has gained a huge following on YouTube as a productivity expert, helps to reshape how we look at productivity and how to achieve it. He argues that we can be the most productive by finding joy in work and outlines ways to do it.

This New Year’s Eve champagne punch sounds (and looks!) magical. It’s also pretty easy to assemble. You’ll need triple sec, blackberry brandy, pineapple juice, Chambord, lemon lime soda, pink or Brut champagne, and garnish. You’ll want to mix some of the ingredients the day before and let them sit overnight. Then, you serve with triple sec and soda the day of.

For a full list of ingredients and instructions, visit Sugar and Soul.

Daniel de La Luna starts his tenure as a scholarship student at a prestigious East Coast college with the weight of the world on his shoulders — his family’s hopes and expectations are heavy, as are the shoes of his late uncle, whose name he shares. But his roommate Sam changes everything. In Sam, he finds a comforting friendship, but then something more. Their relationship isn’t able to fully take off just yet, though, because of Sam’s hesitation as well as a tragedy that changes Daniel’s worldview. When he returns to his ancestral home in México, he’ll finally have a chance to reconcile all that’s changed and what’s to come.

Apart from being a great book out in January, this is one I’m looking forward to for the entire year. It’s giving Rebecca meets the movie Three Thousand Years of Longing (starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, if you’re unfamiliar). It centers around Sana, who, along with her father, is one of the latest inhabitants of the once grand Akbar Manzil, an estate off the coast of South Africa. Usually, the estate is a place where people go to forget themselves, even going so far as to ignore the estate’s uncanny qualities — like bones in the garden and mysterious moving figures — but Sana becomes obsessed with the contents of a forgotten room. The room’s pictures, diary, and other artifacts tell Sana of Akbar Manzil’s original owner’s second wife, who died a hundred years ago. She compulsively dives deeper into the woman’s life, but little does she know of the djinn that watches her from the shadows.

Here is a fictional portrait of a trailblazer who I don’t see much written about. Hattie McDaniel was a prolific actress and the first Black person to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind. Which is where some of her heartache started. The role was controversial and barred her from both white and Black gatherings because white people only saw her as The Help, while Black people thought her Oscar-winning role was demeaning. Even so, she still fought for a place for Black actors in Hollywood, and leaned on friends like Clark Gable and Dorothy Dandridge when she had to. This tells McDaniel’s story, covering everything from the Oscars to the war to her marriages.

From the author of Such a Fun Age comes a skewering of academia and privilege. At the University of Arkansas in 2017, Millie Cousins is working as a senior resident assistant when visiting professor Agatha Paul offers her an odd but easy chance to earn some money. Agatha wants Millie to let her listen in on conversations had by a group of privileged women who are living in a dorm meant for scholarship recipients. What follows is an often humorous narrative filled with the aptest of social observations.

As Southern and pecan pie-loving as I am, I’m surprised I’ve never had a pecan pie cheesecake. Which may be just as well because it sounds like it might be habit-forming for me.

You’ll need the usual cheesecake things, like cream cheese, sugar, butter, eggs, sour cream, and graham cracker crust, as well as butter, brown sugar, heavy cream, bourbon, vanilla extract, and more for the pecan portion.

For a full list of ingredients, visit Natalie’s site or watch the Instagram post.

Book Clubs: Audacious, Jenna Bush

This National Book Award finalist comes from the author of Friday Black, and tells the bloody story of Loretta Thurwar and “Hurricane Staxxx,” two women who are friends, lovers, and popular Chain-Gang All-Stars. As All-Stars, they’ve fought against other prisoners in lethal battles to win shortened sentences through a highly contested program that’s run through the controversial Criminal Action Penal Entertainment organization in a (not so) alternative United States. Loretta nears the day she’ll finally be free, but the burden of all she’s done — and still has to do — weighs heavily on her in this damning look at America’s prison industrial complex and culture of violence.

Book Clubs: Audacious,Vibe Check

Desmond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist and author of Evicted, and with his latest, he asks why the U.S. is the richest country on earth with more poverty than any other democratic nation. Through research and original reporting, Desmond shows how the financially secure leech off the poor, securing their own comfort through the sacrifice of those in lower socioeconomic classes. He also gives ways for us to change — by becoming poverty abolitionists, we can make it so that everyone has the chance to have their basic necessities met.

Book Clubs: Sapph-Lit and the Audacious Book Club

Lamya, like so many people who have marginalized identities, grew up feeling on the outside of everything. When, as a young teen, she develops a crush on a female teacher, she at first tries to hide it. But then, as she reads the Quran, she finds familiarity — the characters she reads about don’t seem to fit within the heteronormative boundaries that have been making her feel ill at ease. As she grows up, eventually moving to New York City in early adulthood, her faith, along with her sense of self as a queer Muslim woman, grows. I’ve never read the Quran, but I love reading about different interpretations of religious texts.

Book Clubs: NYPL and WNYC

After having risked so much for her children — including illegally entering them into a wealthy public school — Diane Aziz’s last act as a parent is to drive her son Walter to college at UC Berkeley. Then, she falls into a deep depression and enters into a state hospital. Diane’s best friend tries to keep things together for her other children, but it’s tough going — Walter may not be able to continue with school because of finances, his sister Lina risks it all in order to keep up with her wealthy classmates, and Donny, the little brother, is slowly drifting into a life of drugs and listless days at the beach.

Book Clubs: Oprah

The bestselling author of Cutting for Stone pens a family saga spanning more than 70 years. The story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi — which essentially translates to “Big Momma” — twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways do that her and her would-be family live in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

Book Clubs: Marie Claire, Reese, and Audacious

I’m sure y’all have been seeing this one everywhere. It’s definitely one of the It Books of the year, which I love for several reasons. One being its unflinching look at race within the publishing industry. When June Hayward’s peer Athena Liu dies in an accident, she impulsively takes the literary star’s unfinished manuscript as her own. As the book catapults her into literary relevance — a marked difference from her previous status — her image as a writer becomes more and more racially ambiguous. But Athena isn’t so easily forgotten, and June — now Juniper Song — sees the dead woman’s shadow wherever she goes.

Book Clubs: Amor en Páginas

This sapphic 19th-century romance follows Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, who is living it up one last summer in Paris with her two best friends before she becomes trapped in a future loveless marriage. It’s during this time in Paris that she meets the business-savvy Duchess of Sundridge, Cora Kempf Bristol, who tries to tempt her to sell a piece of land she said she’d never part with. But Manuela agrees to sell on the condition that the duchess spend the summer with her. What follows are nights of reawakened passions and days full of art admiration. Cora is the happiest she’s ever been, but is she happy enough to cause one of the biggest scandals in Paris is the question.

Book Clubs: Today Book Club

Memoirs and other writings by poets are some of my favorite books to read, and in How to Say Babylon, Sinclair lends her poet’s voice to the story of her upbringing. In it, she recounts life as a child reared by a militant Rastafarian father, who projected his oppressive patriarchal views on the women and girls in his household. In an effort to avoid Western influences, her and her sisters’ clothing is restricted, as is the scope of their education and who they can socialize with. But through her mother, Sinclair, and her sisters learned through books and poetry, which helped her to develop her own singular voice.

Book Clubs: Marie Claire

The horrors of capitalism are on full display in Ripe. Cassie has gotten her dream job at a Silicon Valley startup but is also seriously regretting it. The people she works with are toxic, entitled, and downright criminal — and once her bosses start requiring she engage in illegal activity, too, the black hole that’s always been with her, that gets stronger through her depression and anxiety, feels closer than ever.

Book Clubs: Good Morning America, Eclectix

Here, the author of the award-winning Miracle Creek writes a mystery that asks some interesting questions. When the father and son of a biracial Korean and white family don’t come home on time from a walk, the rest of the family doesn’t immediately call the police. But when Mia’s 20-year-old brother, Eugene, comes through the door bloody and without their father, they know that something’s wrong. Eugene is a witness to what happened but is unable to speak. As time passes and the window for finding their father alive shrinks, we learn of the intricacies of the Parksons’ lives, including the secrets that may be connected to the father’s disappearance.

Book Clubs: Subtle Asian Book Club

(Content warning)

This award-winning novel takes place in the summer of 1949, a year after 700,000 Palestinians were displaced. A young Palestinian woman is captured by Israeli soldiers, assaulted, and buried in the sand. Years later, a woman becomes transfixed on this piece of history — this “minor detail” that has been forgotten by everyone else.

It’s all in the title. I think this must be one of the most efficient ways of combining two of the most common ingredients in comfort food (potatoes + cheese).

You’ll need: boiled potatoes, cornflour, mozzarella cheese, salt and pepper.

Assembling them is pretty easy; just combine everything together and form into small balls, then cook in the air fryer for 12 minutes at 180°. Serve with marinara or some other sauce (I could even see chipotle mayo, maybe).

Here’s the video!

This is the third in the Spice Isle Bakery Mystery series, and while an older version of myself would feel compelled to always start at the beginning, the current iteration of me is very fine with dropping in wherever with cozy mysteries. You can start with Against the Current, in which the main character, Lyndsay Murray, opens the Caribbean Spice Isle Bakery with her family but has to find out who killed a rival baker. Or, you can go ahead with the latest, Coconut Drop Dead, where she works as one of the vendors for the Caribbean American Heritage Festival but has to take a step back from the festivities in order to figure out who killed an up-and-coming reggae singer.

Becca Freeman is one of the hosts of the Bad on Paper podcast and has given us what sounds to be a sweet, holiday-themed story of found family. Every Christmas since college, Hannah and Finn have spent the holiday together. With Hannah’s parents having died and Finn’s disowning him once he came out, the two became each other’s solace. As the years carried on, they added Priya and Theo to their group, and the four were happy for a time. But now Finn’s moving to L.A., maybe even without telling Theo how he feels about him, and Hannah is scared that her self-made family is shattering. As the four of them continue to grow into themselves, they’ll have to figure out how to grow into the relationship they have with each other.

The official blurb of this book calls it “a cozy Holmesian murder mystery and sapphic romance, set on Jupiter,” which I feel hits all the right buttons for a particular subset of people (me, I’m people). Investigator Mossa follows a missing man’s trail to Valdegeld, a place on Jupiter where a human colony’s university is located. A university where Pleiti, Mossa’s ex-girlfriend, works as a researcher. Once Pleiti joins Mossa’s investigation, the two set out on a convoluted path that involves the future of living on Earth…as well as their future together.

Foodie romances are a special kind of soothing, and this one takes place during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Dylan Tang wants to win the festival’s mooncake-making competition for teen chefs for a couple of reasons: 1) to honor the memory of his mother, 2) to publicize his aunt’s struggling Chinese restaurant and hopefully get more business. But the focus he needs to commit to winning keeps getting interrupted by the charming and wealthy Theo, who ends up asking Dylan to pretend to be his date for a Hamptons wedding. Suddenly, Dylan finds himself in a sparkling world of privilege, and maybe even falling for Theo for realsies…

This Regency-era mystery follows the spicy Beatrice Steele, who would rather read about true crime cases in the newspaper than focus on her needlework. So it makes sense that when eligible bachelor Edmund Croaksworth (lol) drops dead during the autumnal ball, it’s Beatrice who steps up to stop anyone else from being murdered while a storm rages outside.

Along this same vein is a series of YA cozy mysteries by my podcast co-host Tirzah Price, the first of which is Pride and Premeditation.

It’s soup season! Well, for me, every season is soup season, but I know that normal people prefer theirs when the temperature drops. This one stood out to me because it looks easy, sounds like it would be a comforting addition to any book club meeting, and I’ve been tearing up Trader Joe’s frozen Asian-inspired food lately, so I know in my spirit these wontons hit.

You’ll need: Trader Joe’s chicken cilantro wontons, shrimp (or tofu), bamboo shoots, garlic, broth, mushrooms, bok choy, and a few other items. For a full list with instructions, check out Maxine’s Instagram.

Two girls in Nigeria are at the precipice of great change. Treasure and her mother struggled after her father died, having to beg for scraps in the marketplace just to get by. Then, a man promises to solve her problems. But his feet are hovering above the ground, and salvation through him comes at a terrible price. Then there’s Ozoemena, whose father said that the itch at the middle of her back is part of a great honor. It means she will become a Leopard capable of defending her land and people, something that girls were never before able to do. But all she wants is to fit in at her new boarding school. As the two girls travel on these new trajectories, they become wilder and soon ask the question of what girls must do to make it in the world.

Habib looks at what it means to find joy in traveling in the wake of climate change, capitalism, and the long-lasting effects of colonialism. She considers travel from a colonialist mindset — referencing everything from passports to flowers — and the history of travel while grappling with who is afforded the luxury.

Glass continues the nerd love, following The Love Con. But here, instead of a cosplayer, we have an influential gamer. Samara’s video pointing out the popular game Legendsfall’s shortcomings surrounding representation goes viral, and suddenly, its creator company, Artemis Games, is under fire. Since the company’s CEO, Aron Galanis, has been trying to make Artemis Games’ products more accessible, the bad publicity stings, which is why he decides to hire the person who made the viral video. Samara and Aron start off working together as enemies, but then later as something else…question is, what will going public with what they have going on do considering everything that’s happened?

This book is essentially a messy historical coming-of-age novel with lyrical writing. So, naturally, I’m here for it. It follows Delphine, a biracial writer just coming into herself, who leaves Paris following a tragedy. The journey she embarks on is self-discovery, but with a twist: she’s on the hunt for her missing father who she believes to be literary icon Ernest Hemingway. Tracking down the elusive Hemingway takes her everywhere — from Harlem to Havana — but the scariest part of the journey may be what it would mean if everything she imagined about her father (and, therefore, herself) was wrong.

This is a book that covers something I hadn’t directly thought about but that I feel may have been a nebulous thought lurking in the back of my mind. It asks why, given the enormity that is the philanthropic industry, does nothing seem to change? Billionaires stay rich, and the struggling poor don’t seem to be receiving the millions (billions?) in aid. Schiller looks at the history of philanthropy — from the philosophy of St. Augustine to LeBron James’ work — and argues that philanthropy shouldn’t be focused on everyday survival for the people it sets out to help. Instead, public institutions should cover things like food and shelter when needed, and philanthropy’s main goal should be to help make people feel more fulfilled. I haven’t read this one yet, so I don’t know how she fully fleshes out her ideas, but I’m looking forward to getting into it.

From the author of Trespasses comes a new collection of stories that looks largely at heterosexual relationship dynamics in Ireland — especially as they relate to class. A woman has an affair with a man who resents her “posh” ways, another woman contends with her husband’s revenge, and a man realizes that maybe his wife isn’t the best mother. The writing is melodic and damning but still has glimmers of hope.