Category: Read This Book

As a food lover who lives in the South, I’m always looking for more books that sit at the intersection of cuisine and culture. Founding Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance John T. Edge gives us all of that and more with his wonderful book The Potlikker Papers. Edge writes about how the South’s culture is reflected in cuisine. He takes us on a tour of the American South, along the way to describe the key places and why they have become landmarks for Southern Cuisine.

Edge is part of the new South, a growing cultural movement that aspires to make a better South, much in the vein of The Bitter Southerner’s famous campaign. The Potlikker Papers writes about Southern cuisine from this more progressive perspective, giving us the history of Southern food, both the good and the bad.

Edge gives a very broad overview of Southern food, describing the various communities that helped create modern Southern cuisine and illustrating how it will continue to evolve over the coming decades. Most importantly, he notes vital contributions of Black chefs throughout the years. He describes how Southern cuisine would not exist if not for these incredible taste makers who are in many ways the cornerstones of Southern cooking.

I especially love the audiobook, which Edge performs himself. There’s just something perfect about listening to Edge’s incredible accent as he describes mouth-watering dishes. I think it’s also important to note that The Potlikker is just an overview, one tile in the mosaic of Southern food. Books like, High on the Hog and The Cooking Gene are key texts about the contribution of African Americans to Southern Cuisine. And chefs like Edna Lewis have done incredible work on bringing Southern Appalachian foodways to the forefront of Southern Cuisine. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. 🙂

In the introduction, the author dissects white supremacy and details some of the ways in which it works according to design. White supremacy is not a broken system. The system is absolutely working as intended. In discussing the title and the thesis of the book, Oluo makes it incredibly clear (because there are always people who are going to play ignorant) that no, she is not arguing that every white man is mediocre or that any race or gender is predisposed to mediocrity; however, our society focuses on preserving white male power regardless of skill or talent. She calls us all in to examine the complacency throughout society that maintains this system.

This book explores and interrogates things that have been normalized in the U.S. like some men’s obsession with cowboys and westerns or the obsession with American football. I learned a staggering amount of history from this book. The chapter on cowboys and Buffalo Bill in particular left me speechless. I know I am not the only one who has a father, uncle, in-law, or grandfather who romanticizes cowboys and westerns. This chapter hit really close to home and has shed some light on many things that I thought I was familiar with.

Oluo writes about the centering of white men in social justice movements including but not limited to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. She talks about the assault on higher education and how as soon as people of color were allowed to attend universities, suddenly sentiments around higher education took a dive.

This book is so extraordinarily good and necessary. It is a phenomenal read and it’s definitely one you will want to read as a book club pick or at least get a copy for a spouse or friend so that you can discuss it because believe me, there is a lot to talk about and contemplate after digesting this hard-to-swallow book.

Frankie is a bored teenager in 1996 when she meets Zeke, who is spending the summer in her tiny Southern town because his parents’ marriage has hit a rough patch. Frankie and Zeke have an instant connection that’s only a little romantic but a lot to do with the fact that they’re both aspiring artists who want to create something memorable. Hours holed up in Frankie’s room leads to a collaboration that unexpectedly takes their town by storm, leading to a cultural phenomenon that will go down in history as the Coalfield Panic. Twenty years later, Frankie is a semi-famous author who receives a phone call from a reporter who thinks she might have found a link between Frankie and the panic…sending Frankie on a journey of reckoning through the past.

I really loved how this book unfolded, and how I immediately was drawn to Frankie. She is a misfit 16 year old who wants so much more out of life than what she’s got, and feels pretty trapped by circumstance. Her yearning to create something memorable and amazing comes to fruition in a wholly unexpected way, and both she and Zeke have to reckon with very different reactions to the panic and fascination that their creation brings about. I thought that Wilson did such a great job of exploring exactly how a small Southern town in the ’90s might react if a strange poster with a bizarre message started appearing everywhere, and it was really fun to see a mystery begin from the inside. Interspersed between the chapters set in the ’90s are chapters from Frankie’s adult life, where she reckons with the fact that she created a social phenomenon but no one knows about it, not even her family. This was such a weird, big-hearted novel about art and aspiration, and dealing with the consequences of your actions, and it packs a big emotional punch.

Back in grad school, I remember spending every possible moment pouring over texts, constantly mulling over ideas of why and how we read. Since then, I’ve been kept busy by a gazillion different things and haven’t had time to think much about ideas around reading. So when I saw Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, I had to pick it up and take advantage of the opportunity.

In her introduction, Castillo says, “When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read the world now.” In the rest of the collection, Castillo examines books, film, art exhibitions, and more. To her, “reading” means thinking critically about the art and media we consume.

Castillo also discusses how the world reads her as the daughter of Filipinx immigrants from a working class background. She argues that reading is political, that we bring our understanding of the world to our interpretations of literature, film, and other media. She pushes for readers to think beyond the buzzwords — like “diverse,” “inclusive,” and “positive representation”— to change how we view where literature comes from as a whole.

But Castillo doesn’t just discuss her ideas around reading; she puts them into practice. In the essay, “Reading Teaches Us Empathy and Other Fictions,” Castillo examines Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s Across, asking why Handke believes that his work is apolitical and should just be appreciated for what it is. In “Main Character Syndrome,” Castillo discusses the work of Joan Didion, pushing against the idea that a settler colonial writer can be “the” voice of California.

Castillo does not hold back her critiques of literary darlings. Instead, she boldly calls for all literature — including treasures of the modern literary world — to be viewed from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. We can appreciate Austen AND acknowledge that her family benefitted monetarily from the slave trade at the time.

While this newsletter will never do this collection of essays justice, I hope you will take the leap and pick up this book. But be forewarned, it’s not for the faint of heart. Prepare to be challenged.

If you are reading this newsletter I know I am preaching to the choir when talking about the importance of storytelling and the profound connections that can be born from a well-crafted tale. The folks at The Moth know this very, very well. The Moth is a storytelling experience that has live shows, The Moth radio hour, a podcast, and workshops. This book gathers the core of The Moth’s storytelling wisdom and knowledge and makes it available to all of us and as both a writer and a person who loves a good story, I cannot stress how invaluable this is.

This was a phenomenal read as it was not only theory and practical advice on craft but heavy doses of examples in the forms of stories that have been told at events put on by The Moth. The stories and snippets of stories shared in this book will make you laugh, cry, hope, cringe, break your heart wide open, and more. The lessons in this book are for everyone because we all, in some way, have to be storytellers at some point whether we are writers, work in marketing, have a job interview, have a speech to give, have a toast to make, have a presentation due, and myriad of other things we do that people may not think of as storytelling but they very much are.

This is a book I listened to on audiobook and I also own a hardcover copy so that I could highlight particular parts that I have returned to again and again. It is both a great read and a great gift and I cannot recommend it enough.

In the small town of Springville, GA, things are done the way they’ve always been done…including hosting separate proms rather than integrate them. Maddy Washington is a loner in Springville, and she tries to fly under the radar, but when an unexpected rainstorm reveals that she’s been passing as white her entire life, the school is in an uproar. And when the bullying hits the Internet, it’s time to change their image. Cue: the school’s first integrated prom. The white teen in charge of it even gets the idea to have her boyfriend, who is Black, invite Maddy as his date to show the world they’re not as racist as everyone thinks. But Maddy has been told what to do her entire life, and when prom night starts to go wrong, she finally comes into her own terrifying power.

This book is an obvious homage to Stephen King’s Carrie and there are a lot of parallels between the story, characters, and events, but whether you’re a King fan or unfamiliar with King’s classic, this book really does stand on its own. The characters are compelling, and Jackson does a really great job at encapsulating the mental gymnastics many go through to justify upholding the past, while also showing how many characters have learned to adapt in order to survive in Springville. It takes some truly unexpected twists and turns, with some gratifying moments and some horrifying ones, and it left me wondering how on earth everything would be resolved. It’s not a book for the faint of heart, but it is a fascinating look at small town tensions and what happens when everything reaches a boiling point. Unlike White Smoke, this book doesn’t have a lot of sustained suspense or scary moments, but it has an incredible amount of tension that has you hurdling to an explosive ending!

When I finished “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” the title story and last one in the collection, I had to take a moment to process Jamil Jan Kochai’s stunning method of storytelling. Like every good short story collection, each story stands on its own, but they also all work together to give readers broader themes and ideas. 

The first story, “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” features a teenaged Afghan American boy mesmerized by a video game where the primary goal is to run successful missions in Afghanistan, shooting Soviet soldiers along the way. Another story, “Bakhtawara and Miriam” features women caught in the time of life of love and marriage, having to make the tough choices of who to marry and where that choice will take them. In “Occupational Hazards,” we follow a man who immigrates from Afghanistan to America, whose story is told through the different job descriptions from the various occupations he’s had over the decades.

All of these stories, and the rest in the collection, center Afghan and Afghan American protagonists whose lives have been deeply impacted by the war in Afghanistan. Whether it’s living through the violence of war themselves or being raised by someone who was, each character’s trajectory in life has been impacted by America’s War on Terror.

Kochai’s stories also carry a sense of the surreal or absurd. In “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” a student teacher turns into a monkey, and his mother takes him back to Afghanistan to pray to a saint so he might be turned back into a man. Characters make seemingly ridiculous decisions only to have even more absurd outcomes. But all of these events push the characters to new limits and move the stories forward.

It’s difficult to not become entranced by these tales, each more gripping than the last — I ended up reading them all in one sitting! So if you’re looking for  a must-read short story collection of 2022, this is it.

At the beginning, Shori wakes up in darkness and in terrible pain, both from injury it seems and from extreme hunger. She doesn’t know why she is injured and badly scarred, why she is in so much pain, nor why she is waking up just laying on the ground. She doesn’t even know who she is. She eventually regains some strength and is able to go out to hunt. She comes upon an area of burned down houses and buildings which she doesn’t recognize but she felt pulled there somehow.

She realizes right away that during the day, when the sun was out, the light is painful and she needs to hide in darkness and rest. She hunts and sleeps for a few days until she gets restless. There is a paved road nearby so she walks down it. She vaguely remembers the idea of vehicles. She still has no memories and she gets picked up by a driver named Wright. Now, what Wright sees is a Black adolescent girl covered in blood and dirt walking down the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in the rain. She is suffering from severe amnesia. Wright offers to take her home, or at least to the hospital since she looks like she was a badly injured child.

We learn, however, she is not a child. At least, not a human child. She is a 53 year old vampire. As we learn bits and pieces of Shori’s history, things get creepier and creepier. She bites Wright to get him under her control and makes him take her to his home. He is now loyal to her and joins her on her search to find out who she is and what happened to her family.

This book is both subtle and overt in its creep-factor. I was uneasy the entire time I was reading this book. Sometimes it was the sex. Sometimes it was the racism. Sometimes it was something else entirely. Content warnings for violence, adults having sex with a vampire in an adolescent body, and racism. Yep, racist vampires.

Sue loves drawing and comics, and wishes she could be spending her summer break on a camping trip with her friends instead of traveling to Honduras to visit her family with her parents and two sisters. Once in Honduras, she learns of a shocking betrayal: Despite telling her mom she doesn’t want a quinceañera, Mom secretly already sent out the invites and the event is happening. Sue begrudgingly agrees to it…in exchange for her mom letting her go camping when they get home. But Sue soon finds herself in over her head with the planning, and none of the ultra-feminine traditions really resonate. How is she supposed to survive all this party planning when none of it is her style?

I really enjoyed Sue’s story, and I could definitely relate to her feelings of feeling excluded or not listened to when she discovered that her mother had gone ahead with the party planning against her wishes. The author does a great job setting Sue up to be a really sympathetic reader to characters — you start out thinking, How dare her mom do that! But Fajardo slowly peels back the layers of the story and family dynamic so that readers see how important this tradition is to her extended family, and how it is especially important to her mom because they live so far away from Honduras. And Sue, with her special relationship with her abuela, also really wants to make them happy, even if she’s not the kind of girl who gets excited about a big party. While it’s not a case of magically changing her mind, Sue does understand the value of tradition and family connection, while also lending your own flair to these traditions. It’s a sweet and funny story about family, and learning to find your place in family tradition.

Candice Carty-Williams, the author of Queenie, is back with her second novel, People Person. Cyril Pennington’s greatest love is his gold jeep, which might explain why he’s never been able to settle down. At the opening of the novel, we meet Cryril’s five children, and their four mothers, as he picks up each of them for a drive about the neighborhood. After Cyril drops them all off at home again, they aren’t all in the same place again for almost a decade.

Years later, Dimple Pennington, the sensitive middle sibling, finds herself in a tough spot. She seems to have accidentally killed her on-again-off-again boyfriend. Frantically, she calls her older sister, and before long all of her brothers and sisters show up to help get rid of the body. What’s worse: she’s been trying to make it as an online influencer for years, and her entire following (small though it may be) know far too much about her relationship with her boyfriend already. 

This family drama is delightfully over the top in all of the best ways. Hilarity ensues as Dimple continues to find herself in trouble, unable to keep herself from saying the exact wrong thing. This novel also has a lot of heart. Cyril immigrated to the UK as a young man, setting out to make a new life for himself. After a death in his family, the five Pennington siblings find themselves surrounded by their dad’s family, people they barely know.

And if you’re an audiobook fan, People Person is phenomenal on audio. Danielle Vitalis’ performance is perfect. While I was listening, I couldn’t stop laughing. The dialogue in particular shines throughout the whole novel, and Vitalis narrates each character in a way that makes each of them stand out.