NPR Code Switch Book Club, Summer 2019

June 22, 2019 9:14 PM

NPR's Code Switch team has a list of 14 non-fiction and 14 fiction books for summer reading, ranging from The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis and White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (forward by Michael Eric Dyson) to No-No Boy by John Okada and Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (all book links go to Goodreads).
posted by filthy light thief (8 comments total)

I just finished The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers and it is wonderful, do you feel like reading a book that does a beautiful job capturing a specific time and place? That is about a powerful women who decided she’d take care of her family and herself and pretty anyone else she could? You should read this book then.
posted by lepus at 10:25 PM on June 22, 2019 [4 favorites]

'They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us,' What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker,' and 'White Fragility' are all really good--if you're a white person who's been closely following the POC MeTa, I highly recommend the last one.
posted by box at 5:36 AM on June 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

I just finished Ayobani Adebayo's Stay with Me and it was fabulous. I had trouble putting it down. I really appreciated the structure of the novel, at every level (from sentence to story). It's definitely a book that would unfold beautifully on a second read. I actually just picked up the book to recount the first sentence here ("I must leave the city today and come to you") and now I think I'm going to read the entire thing again.
posted by sockermom at 7:01 AM on June 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

I just finished the audiobook of White Fragility — great book, kind of terrible narrator. The Outragefilter thread (plus the list of previous MeTas curated by divabat) work really well as case studies for seeing some of Diangelo’s observations in action. It also helped me ID some fragile behaviors and reactions in myself as a white MeFite, so there’s that.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:54 AM on June 23, 2019 [3 favorites]

No-No Boy is a great book that I recommend every chance I get. Please buy the University of Washington Press edition, which pays royalties to Okada’s family, instead of the new Penguin Press edition, which had no family involvement. Relevant Seattle Times article here.
posted by skycrashesdown at 8:06 AM on June 23, 2019 [6 favorites]

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker is very good but also weird and enlightening for me to read because of the way that Damon Young and I have lived in very close proximity for the last thirty years but inhabited very different worlds in those spaces. Pittsburgh is a very small town and he and I have, for example, hung out in the same coffee shops for years and workout in the same YMCA but his experiences here and mine were totally different and I've definitely looked at the city a little differently since reading it.

He's also just a really writer.
posted by octothorpe at 9:09 AM on June 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Surprised not to see _I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness_ by Austin Channing Brown on the list.

I just bought _White Fragility_ and bumped it to the top of my reading queue.
posted by hanov3r at 9:43 AM on June 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I bought and read What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker on the basis of octothorpe's comment. I had a similar experience -- my college apartment was technically Highland Park, but two blocks from East Liberty where Damon's was. I worked at a UHaul right next to Frankstown road. I know a lot of these neighborhoods from the time periods in the book.

I also had a very different experience of those places. I'm sitting with some discomfort after reading it. It was an excellent book.
posted by bfranklin at 5:26 PM on June 25, 2019 [2 favorites]