Category: Read This Book

Michael W. Twitty is a food writer, independent scholar, culinary historian, and historical interpreter. The Cooking Gene is culinary history, cultural history, and Twitty’s personal genealogical discoveries all woven together. His U.S. geographical focus is what he refers to as the Old South, which is what he calls, “the former slaveholding states and the history and culture they collectively birthed from the days of contact through civil rights.” Twitty traces what many Americans know as southern food back to its roots through the enslaved people who developed it and back to parts of Africa as well. He brings us along with him, through stories and chats with other food historians, through his work as a cook for civil war reenactments, personal stories, and information from his deep research.

Most every page of this book taught me something I never knew or had never even considered. There were no timers in the kitchens that the enslaved cooked in, so sometimes the songs they would sing were used as timers for the cooking. How the racist trope associating watermelon with Black Americans is even more depraved than I had known, as watermelon was actually a life-saver to perpetually dehydrated enslaved people working in the fields.

Twitty shares his personal experience with genealogy as a Black person in America. It is far from simple. While the internet makes it so much easier to access things like historical records, when it comes to enslaved people and descendants, detailed notes weren’t necessarily kept. Families were broken up and sold off. Slavers didn’t necessarily keep records of where people were abducted from.

Twitty does such a fantastic and often difficult job of tying the past to our present. His writing humanizes enslaved people in ways that they often aren’t, such as how many enslaved people were sent to France for culinary school and to be taught pastry-making. These were skilled workers. If they were paid, they would have been considered professionals, even experts in their field.

This book is a brilliant study on how food, racism, power, and justice are linked.

Chances are that if you follow any book related social media you heard about The Lady from the Black Lagoon when it was published back in 2019. Mallory O’Meara’s biography of monster creator and artist Milicent Patrick shines a light on a forgotten figure in Hollywood history, and is also part memoir and part scathing critique of the ways in which men have done their best to oppress talented women in art and film industries for decades.

The star monster of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the much beloved Gill Man, was the last of Universal Studios classic monsters to make his on-screen debut. These days, his appearance is iconic but the woman responsible for his creation is largely unknown. Or she was, until Mallory O’Meara began researching what would become The Lady from the Black Lagoon. And the more O’Meara shares with her readers about Patrick’s life – as one of the first female animators at Disney and a creator in an industry that was, and a genre that still is, largely dominated by men – the more you realize what an incredible life she led.

And O’Meara’s recounting of her research journey is as fascinating as it is entertaining. Her footnotes frequently had me laughing out loud, which is what you want from footnotes if you can possibly get it. So whether you’re a horror fan, a fan of old Hollywood History, a devotee of amazing women, or all three, The Lady from the Black Lagoon should definitely be on your TBR!

Content warnings: frequent use of the word “fuck,” advocating for violence, discussions of sexual assault, violence against women, genital mutilation, and lots of misogyny.

This book is incredibly intense as is clear from the first line, “I wrote this book with enough rage to fuel a rocket.” The author did not come to play nor coddle. She has zero tolerance for the patriarchy, including the women who uphold it who she refers to as “the foot soldiers of the patriarchy.”

Mona Eltahawy is known for starting the hashtags #MosqueMeToo and #IBeatMyAssaulter. She is also known for making a bunch of folks in Australia clutch their pearls, when, on Australian national television she asked, “How many rapists do we have to kill to get men to stop raping?” If you are the kind of person who thinks that violence is never the answer, then this book is maybe not for you.

As titled, this manifesto goes through the seven necessary sins that we must embrace to destroy the patriarchy. Not fight nor combat but destroy. Mona Eltahawy wants our feminist tagline to be “fucking fear me!” The sins are Anger, Attention, Profanity, Ambition, Power, Violence, and Lust. After the introduction, she goes through each sin and tells us how each is integral to our tearing it all down and moving forward.

This is not nice, neat, clean feminism. It’s also not centered on Americans, as so much tends to be. It is a global view of feminism focusing on all women. There is so much going on in countries outside of the U.S. with regards to feminism and the fight for human rights that I learned about in this book.

This is another book that I read annually and encourage everyone to give a try.

Malik and Karina stand on two separate sides of the same world, on the brink of a religious festival that comes only once every 50 years. For Malik, Solstasia means a new beginning not just of an era but of a new life in Ziran for himself and his two sisters, Nadia and Leila. Their home has been devastated by war, and what is left of their family cling to survival in a refugee camp, relying on the money that he and Leila will send back. But when Nadia accidentally makes a bargain with a dangerous dark spirit, Malik is forced to strike a deal as well: kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran. His sister’s life for that of the princess.

But when Malik joins the Solstasia champions in a bid to get closer to the princess, he doesn’t realize that he’s involved himself in another deadly game, this one of Karina’s making. Her mother, the Sultana, is dead; a closely guarded secret being kept from the thousands who flocked to Ziran for the celebrations. Karina has until the moment that secret gets out to stop it from being true. She will do whatever it takes to enact the ancient ritual that will bring her mother back from the dead, including marry the champion who wins the Solstasia competition as a means of acquiring the rarest component for the spell: the still-beating heart of a king.

Inspired by West African folklore, A Song of Wraiths and Ruin sings with color, music, and magic. And while there were some aspects the did feel underdeveloped at times, that didn’t at all detract from what ended up being an engaging, suspenseful battle of wills between the two protagonists caught up in magical forces far greater than themselves.

Content warnings for discussion of graphic catcalling and sexual harassment, anti-fatness from microaggressions to outright active aggression, discussion of eating disorders and disordered eating, death related to anti-fatness, and use of the word obese (used sparingly and mostly in quotes).

Yes I’m going to use the word “fat” as a descriptor because “fat” is not a bad word. The main focus of this book is on fat justice for very fat people, that is, there are many people who don’t even get basic needs met because they are fat. This happens in so many ways, such as the pay gap between fat and straight size people, lack of public safety due to anti-fat violence, and denial to public spaces.

Anti-fatness is the last “socially acceptable” (sarcasm) way to hate people. Most people are frowned upon for being racist or homophobic but anti-fatness runs rampant and unchecked. This book is not about “wellness” aka repackaged diet culture. It is not about body positivity and loving the body we’re in. It is not even really about body neutrality or fat acceptance or body sovereignty. This book is about fat justice. About including the fattest among us in our social justice movements and about making sure fat people have access to basic things like clothing and equal pay and travel accommodations.

The citations alone are worth the price of admission. I love a well-resourced book, especially to hand over to people who automatically think that being fat is the same as being unhealthy. The author goes in-depth into things like how BMI is a garbage indicator of health (fun fact, it wasn’t even created as such in the first place!), and how there is no solid data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. In fact, some conditions associated with being fat may actually be long-term effects of dieting.

If you’re not outraged before you read this book, then you may find flames shooting from your ears by the end of it. I love a book that changes how I see the world and this is absolutely one of those books.

So during lockdown I played a lot of Dragon Age: Inquisition. I mean a LOT. And if you’ve ever marathoned any kind of media, a book series, a show, a movie series, a video game – and I know most of you probably have – you know you get into a kind of headspace where all you crave is more of the same kind of content.

Then along came Hall of Smoke, which was everything I could possibly have asked for in a fantasy book at that exact moment. It hit me right in the DA:I sweet spot with it’s massive, mythic feel, it’s vivid landscapes, and it’s warrior heroine stuck right in the middle of a divine war. But what is divinity, really? Who gets to be considered divine? Are divine entities simply brought into being, as they might have us believe, and always divine – or are divine beings made? Do they rise to divinity? And is divinity bestowed upon them? Or is it a prize for a victor to seize?

These are the questions at the heart of Hall of Smoke as Hessa, an Eangi – a battle priestess of the Goddess of War – whose whole town and temple are slaughtered and whose Goddess has forsaken her, struggles to find justice for her people and redemption for herself in a world torn apart by war and fear. When the gods fight amongst themselves, mortals are inevitably trampled underfoot – and something far older, and long asleep, threatens to wake and throw all that Hessa thinks she knows about the gods, the nature of divinity, and herself, into chaos.

There is so much to love about this book, and since we still have something like 9 months until the sequel comes out next January I highly encourage you all to read Hall of Smoke and come join me in the book version of hiatus hell!

Content warning for suicide, which includes a graphic description, and drug use.

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy is the 19th & 21st Surgeon General of the United States. While he was serving as the 19th Surgeon General, he found that there was a common thread among the “major” public health issues like addiction, violence, anxiety, and depression. This common thread is loneliness.

This book is a deep dive into loneliness as something that everyone experiences at some point and also loneliness as a major public health issue. He also talks extensively about the shame that can happen around loneliness, how it’s something that people don’t talk much about, that we often feel like it’s our own fault if we experience it, or that we alone are the only ones who deal with loneliness. This book was written pre-pandemic and I imagine that some of this has shifted, but not necessarily enough.

Together isn’t entirely gloomy. It has some beautiful, uplifting stories about people who recognize loneliness for what it is and have organized to combat it in their own lives and their own communities, sometimes creating programs that reach further out to other parts of the county. There is also an exploration of loneliness in various cultures which is fascinating and it resonated deeply. Dr. Murthy also discusses isolation, childhood loneliness, and the effects of loneliness and isolation on children. Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Murthy offers ways to combat loneliness, which has been especially hard to do during this pandemic.

This book has altered the way I look at the world and at my relationships and community and for that alone, I highly recommend it.

S.T. Gibson had me sold on A Dowry of Blood from the moment that she announced she was working on a queer, polyamorous novel about Dracula’s brides. Dracula has been one of my favorite horror classics ever since I was a kid, so I’m always on board for adaptations, and Gibson has a style – Gothic lyricism embedded with religious imagery and abundant feeling – that proved a perfect foil for her subject. In Stoker’s original novel the Brides are but a footnote, seducing Jonathan in one chapter, foreshadowing the fate of poor Lucy Westenra, then eventually being beheaded by Van Helsing. With so little textual information to work with, Gibson has all the range in the world to tell a truly compelling novel of obsession, possession, fear, and love, and she really makes the most of it.

A Dowry of Blood is told from the perspective of Constanta, the first of three brides whom Dracula creates to be his companions over the course of the novel, and is written as a farewell letter to the man she loved and hated in equal measure. At its heart that is what the book is about, really: love, hate, and the ugly place in between where the two get blurred together. Dracula is in turns breathtakingly charming and painstakingly cruel. He collects lovers, his Brides, the way that others collect jewels, for their beauty, their fire, and sometimes even for their flaws. Through Constanta’s eyes we see both his cold emotional abuse and the tenderness he uses to reinforce it, we share in her fear and her devotion. And we cheer for her, Magdalena, and Alexi, when they finally decide that they have had enough.

I don’t know that I can do justice to the beauty of this novel in the short time I have to share it with you. All I can say is that if you love lush, poetic, gorgeous books, you don’t want to miss A Dowry of Blood.

Content warnings for racism, primarily anti-Asian racism, lychings, rape, violence against women including murder.

This book is phenomenal and some of the best creative nonfiction I have ever read. It is simultaneously the embrace of a shared experience, a kick in the face, and a punch in the heart. Cathy Park Hong explores her immediate, singular experiences as a daughter of Korean immigrants in some parts of the book, while interrogating the wide range of experiences of Asian Americans and Asians in America. We are not a monolith, yet so often treated as such. Our oppressions range from shared to pointedly personal. The author writes about the external oppressions, the hate, and the racism in both American history and American present as well as in academia and media. She also writes about the unique ways that we as Asians sometimes interact with other Asians who are not our same ethnicity.

The places Hong brings us as readers are unexpected but deeply relevant. She goes into detail about the United Airlines Express Flight 3411, when a Vietnamese American passenger, David Dao Duy Anh was violently removed from the plane when he did not give up his seat. Many of us saw the two-minute viral video, but Hong tells us so much about the story I hadn’t realized. It is absolutely heartbreaking. Another section is dedicated to the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was brutally raped and murdered. The case had little coverage, and though her work has been shown in many places, Hong was curious as to why no one would talk about her death. The chapter about the ways that language is used to both racially oppress and racially glorify is alone worth the price of admission.

This book has fundamentally changed the way I think, especially the way I think about what I see in the media. It’s an absolutely fantastic read.

Surprising no one who is familiar with Jemisin’s talent and unmatched worldbuilding, The Fifth Season, book one of The Broken Earth series, was a Hugo Award winner in 2016. And I am the idiot who has let it languish in her TBR for three years, which I regret almost as much as the fact that I did not purchase the sequels and now no bookstore in a 20 mile radius has seen fit to stock them. Catastrophe!

Rather like the catastrophe that opens The Fifth Season, plunging the continent on which the novel is set into a fiery, ash-strewn apocalypse known to the locals as “The Season”. But while the devastation that follows the cataclysm underpins the present day portions of the plot, the novel is actually told over three separate but related timelines. There is Damaya, a young girl who has been exposed as an orogene – one who can control the seismic activity of the ground around her – and in an instant becomes both hated and feared. Syenite, a powerful orogene who has been sent on a mission that goes terribly wrong, exposing the dark underbelly of the world she thought she knew. And Essun, a women who has experienced more loss and grief than I have words to quantify, who sets out into a world torn asunder and set afire to find her daughter.