When I look back at all the disappointments, annoyances, and struggles of 2020, I have to recognize it worked wonders for my bookshelf. All the chaos and social distance made for an outstanding reading year. I decided to do a 2020 Year-end Reading Round-Up to inspire your reading in the new year.
This year, I read about 16 books. That’s a little low for bookstagramers and book bloggers but blows my previous years out of the water. I picked up my first book right around St. Patrick’s day when I realized how few Irish authors I’ve read. Then the country shut down. Then racial, civil turmoil hit a boiling point and chased me to write into the literary embrace of James Baldwin. My favorite writers of the year are Brit Bennet, Elizabeth Acevedo, and James Baldwin, who wrote their tails off and gave us something phenomenal to stick with us.
With no further ado, here’s my GloBelle Affairs recommended reading List for 2020.
Dubliners
This is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my roommate was reading the same book in Spanish. All the stories take place around Dublin and have a kind of melancholy, hopelessness to them. Joyce wrote the book leading up to the 1919 War of Independence. Two years after Joyce wrote the collection of stories, the Irish launched an uprising against British Rule. The stories reflect the Irish nationalism and limitations Irish people felt their lives had at the time.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
This1988 novel provided the burst of optimism I needed after reading the Dubliners. It’s not particularly a work of literature with a magical use of words and literary devices. It is, however, more encouraging and light-hearted. Santiago wants more for his life than watching sheep and starts having dreams telling him to go to Egypt.
Everything starts pointing him toward Egypt, so he just does it. He sells his flock (aka all his wealth and security) and leaves Spain for Egypt. Like an alchemist, the journey, like all travel, is transformative. The book encourages everyone to just do it. Seek your calling. I needed to hear this story in 2020—a world’s bestseller.
The Fire Next Time
The thoughts that flow through James Baldwin’s mind are incredible to witness. This book gives us so many discussion-provoking gems that you can sit at a coffee shop with your most intellectual friends to debate or discuss. Most notable is the opening essay, a letter to his nephew, in which he discusses survival in America. In the letter, he summarizes the bottom-line of survival in America, “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”
So long as you don’t adopt the white perspective, you can survive. Maintain the “Double-Consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois coins. He also urges survival, “And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children’s children.”
Baldwin also describes what it is like to be a black military service member in America on page 53, which still remains relevant in 2020. He discusses religion – both Islam and Christianity – which replicates some of the same conversations that Frederick Douglas in the 19th century and what Americans are still talking about in the 2020s.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
I started reading this to find quotes to challenge this new P.R. attempt to cast or re-brand the character, Uncle Tom, as a hero and the term “Uncle Tom” as a compliment. He wasn’t, and it isn’t. When I read this book, what ended up happening was being reminded how little things had changed in America since Beecher Stowe published the epic in 1852. I found myself nodding and thinking, “I’ve experienced this. Oh, this is just like the passage from James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time written a century and a decade later. I’ve seen this happen, and I’ve heard Kentuckians have this exact, ironic conversation concerning their faith in God and the lives of black people in 2020.” It’s still relevant. Get the audiobook if reading 500 pages is too overwhelming.
The Fire This Time
In 1963, James Baldwin wrote, “God gave Noah the Rainbow sign, no more water – fire next time.” Baldwin hinted at a sign of promise for America in 1963, but he warned about the fire that would come to America if the nation did not take heed. In 2020, America is in the fire this time. Inspired by James Baldwin, The Fire This Time was released in 2017 as a collection of essays and poems from multiple black perspectives.
In one essay, Garnette Cadogan discusses the differences between walking while black in Kingston, New Orleans, and New York City and the double consciousness black people must employ while living in America. In his native Kingston, walking as a form of therapy to clear his mind, get exercise, and sunshine. But when he moves to America, walking…with his skin color… walking becomes fraught with dangers. “I recognized that the way I would treat dangerous people when I was growing up in Jamaica was the way people began treating me,” he says. It is a reminder of how simple, everyday actions like walking are shaped by a white person’s perception of one’s blackness. Exercise should not be a death risk, but, as we all know, in 2020, it is. And it’s relatable. All the essays are relatable.
All About Love
One of my favorite media gurus is a YouTube channel called For Harriett, and the creator, Kim, had a “Read More Bell Hooks” campaign. So, amid the chaos that was the Summer of 2020, I picked up her “All about Love Book.” Bell Hooks is an African-American Stanford Alum who hails from Western Kentucky and is a leading voice in Black feminist thought. Since we share some of the same identities, I was already interested in what she has to say.
Hooks starts by discussing how everyone thinks they know love. Based on the teachings of love in our American society, most of us have no idea. We have a lot of unlearning to do. The book’s motivation was that America moved so far from love that it may never find it again. American society just doesn’t model the best definition of love. America’s foundation is characterized by violence, hate, and lack of respect. Each generation continued to hand down those teachings. Love is an action, never a feeling. It is not centered on romance and sexual attraction. Love starts on a strong foundation of respect. Key quotes that I found best captures the author’s thesis:
“An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as (we) were taught to believe that we were loved.”
“When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights – that we respect and uphold their rights.”
“As one man bragged about the aggressive beatings he had received from his mother, sharing that ‘they had been good for him,’ I interrupted and suggested that he might not be the misogynist woman-hater he is today had he not been so brutally beaten by a woman as a child.”
ABUSE is NOT LOVE!!
I think this is a must-read for people who want to learn to love their children, partners, friends, and humankind, in general, better. The book is also beneficial in helping audiences recognize the often blurry difference between love or abuse. That way audiences can put up healthy boundaries.
Clap When You Land
This was my favorite book of 2020. Elizabeth Acevedo knocked Louisa May Alcott off her throne and became my favorite author after this book. By page 12, I was ugly crying. I continued crying until the very end when I was still crying but cheering on women’s strength when they unit.
In November of 2001, there was a plane crash that most Americans vaguely remember. Some 200 people from the sky and five on the ground, headed to the Dominican Republic died. Once investigators confirmed that it wasn’t another terrorist attack like the one in September, it faded out of memory. But American Airlines flight 587 rocked the New York Dominican community. Everyone within the New York DR community knew someone personally affected by this tragedy. The author, a poet by trade and part of that community, imagined this story and wrote this prose- in-verse fiction about what could have been. Oh, and there are mentions of LGBTQ experiences. People like knowing that ahead of time for whatever reason. It’s not a big part of the book.
This book had beautiful depictions of Caribbean culture, New York Dominican culture, African- Diaspora culture, delicious food, class strife, themes of secrets, forgiveness, family, belonging, and using chess as the symbolism of life and family. I look forward to this story being picked up and turned into a movie. It was so good!
I heard Acevedo perform her poem, “Hair” years ago. I didn’t realize she was the same author I’d fallen in love with until I did some post-novel author exploration. Based on our shared relationship to hair politics and her uncanny way to express it, I already loved Elizabeth Azevedo’s expression before I picked up her novel. To learn more about why Ms. Acevedo appears twice on this Year-End Reading Round-up, check out her talk at Summit on Inequality and Opportunity.
Lead from The Outside Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change
Stacy Abrams distinguished herself as the Belle the 2020 election. She turned Georgia Blue and predicted that Georgia was a swing state several years ago. After the election, I realized that I had never read a single leadership book by a black woman. This is astounding considering all of the formal military leadership education I’ve had. All the leaderships by white men were informative but never took racism or sexism into consideration as obstacles to navigate. Even white women’s leadership books (i.e., Lean In) were tone-deaf to the idea that not all people would get the same results doing the prescribed methods based on how they look. Ms. Abrams addresses those obstacles and how to use them as pathways rather than stumbling blocks. This is a book I’ll continue to reference. I read this for Non-fiction November and think
The Vanishing Half
My Junior League’s book club featured this book to read and discuss in Decemeber. After slavery, this mullato guy built a society for beige-colored mullatos on his daddy’s plantation. For generations, no one married or procreated with dark-skinned people. The story tells the divergent lives of twin sisters. They vanish from town. One passes into white society and lives a privileged life. The other twin returns to the hometown with a very dark child. This child is so dark no one in the beige village has ever seen such a person, and her presence creates a spectacle.
With all else being the same, the proximity to whiteness that the twins chose during Jim crow is used to represent privilege, inter-generational trauma, and intersectional identities. The dynamics of the LGBTQ community layered with bi-racial identities come into play as well as, yet again, the double consciousness between how a person identifies oneself and how that person is identified by society.
The author knows how to weave magic out of words. I found myself captivated all the way through. . Her use of literary devices to set scenes is phenomenal. This is one of the best reads of the year and sets a gold bar for writing. This was a fascinating read that will make a great movie.
To Build a Better World
After the election and discussions of American Democracy being threatened by the media spin doctor and fear-mongers, I decided to buy this book. That’s when I realized how non-diverse the leadership and International Affairs section of my personal library was. I also wanted more academic substance to determine if American democracy was at peril. I didn’t get that out of this book by leading scholar-diplomats, Condeleeza Rice and Philip Zelikow. The pair focuses their framework centering Germany and the Soviet Union during the Cold War with a lot of historical analysis but minimal modern reflection (the book was initially published in Sept 2019). It speaks of our divided world in the late 1980s but not much on how divided international politics are now. Overall, it’s a good read, just not what I was hunting for at the moment. It’s graduate-level, international affairs required reading worthy.
Democracy
by Condoleezza Rice- Optimistic stance that authoritarian regimes are not more potent than the natural human desire for freedom. She touches on historical examples of fights for democratic principles across the globe. Using her experience as a diplomat and the 66th Sec State, she references the democratic struggles of Russia, Columbia, Kenya, Ukraine, and countries in South West Asia, as well as her experiences growing up in Birmingham during Jim Crow. She even discusses potential outcomes of competing interests and ideas of freedom clash. One can argue that the structures of democracy and the “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” that cause democracies to crumble have been shaken since Rice published this text. I wonder if she maintains her position that considering democracy threatened is alarmist and premature. This text should be part of the Global Affairs/ National Security Studies cannon.
The Poet X
After reading Elizabeth Acevedo’s Clap When You Land, I became obsessed and had to read everything I could by the author. This book comes off as auto-biographical and coming of age. It’s about an Afro-Latino spoken-word poet from Harlem. Some of the themes are sexuality, religion, adjusting to developing bodies. The stories through poems discuss the challenges little girls transforming into womanhood have while navigating this gross society we’ve built for them and the well-intended, poorly executed ways parents call themselves protecting these children. As I said, I stan for Elizabeth Acevedo, so I loved this work.
Key Quotes: “I am the baby fat that settled into D-cups and swinging hips so that the boys who called me a whale in middle school now ask me to send them pictures of myself in a thong.”
“Just because your father’s present, doesn’t mean he isn’t absent.”
“When your body takes up more room than your voice, you are always the target of well-aimed rumors.”
Check Elizabeth’s phenomenal spoken word poem, “Rat Ode” that she dedicated to a professor who told her rats were not noble enough for a poem.
The Black Kids
This Young Adult fiction by Christina Hammonds Reed captures the 1992 Rodney King Riots in L.A. through the eyes of a wealthy black girl named Ashley. As in so many of the books I’ve read this year, this book explores themes of identity and double consciousness. Ashley realizes her community no longer sees her as “one of the girls,” but as “one of the black kids.” That comes with a whole host of implications. No matter the best attempts made by black parents to protect their children from the inescapable trauma that stems from systemic racism, eventually, some event is bound to happen to knock the rose-colored glasses off. There’s a lot I can relate to in this book. It even has a character with my sister’s name – something I’ve never seen in literature considered classics in academia.
“We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don’t you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don’t you ever just want to be human?”
The moment a black person in America gets categorized or documented as flawed is the moment abuse and even death becomes justified. And that expectation of perfection is the level of pressure and anxiety black Americans live with daily. That’s what the young protagonist realizes in this book.
A Promised Land
The most anticipated release of the year (and pretty pricy) President Obama’s memoir takes 600 pages to cover his presidency up to Bin Laden’s Execution. I have not completed this work. But it needs to be on your bookshelf. I must brag, I got mine for $23 at T.J. Max. I think there was a fold in the book jacket that made it unfit to sell full price. I have to brag on that deal because it’s selling for $30+ at other major retailers.
Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul
Written by Princeton professor, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., is the harsh critique of American Democracy I was somewhat hoping for, but knowing otherwise, when I read the perspectives of Condoleezza Rice. The main idea of the book centers around the “value gap” that is so interwoven in our ‘democratic’ system, as well as the ‘racial habits’ that America does to sustain this gap. It discusses the state-sanctioned terror on Black Americans while providing systemic, unearned value to white Americans. It suggests Black Americans aren’t actually experiencing democracy – at least not in the same way white Americans are. The value gap informs all decisions and actions, including academic major, schools, career-fields, the concept of justice, housing, and policy. The author pinpoints the black political classes as “accomplices in the demise of black America. To the author, it’s the same ol’ democracy, just in black.
I think the professor’s intended primary audience is the politically educated, black academic class. The average reader would need some pre-requisites on history taught from the black perspective, which doesn’t gloss over or whitewash historical events before grasping some concepts or buying off on them. The book takes for granted readers have a baseline understanding.
Mexican Gothic
Not my typical genre. It’s mystery, horror, and suspense set in 1950s Mexico. I can’t say I connected or identified with it in the same way I did other books. I have a lot of questions about most of the creative choices the author made. Mostly, during a time of pandemic and thwarted travel, I just didn’t get enough of a sense of place and setting that I was craving. But the cover is stunning, and I get to fit in with all the book nerdy cool kids ’cause this was the most anticipated book drops of the year and on all the influencer’s nightstands. Perhaps it will make a better movie. I just wasn’t moved. Maybe I’ll try to reread it. Idk.
I think what made me love this reading list was that I found so much of me reflected in the pages. My 2020 reading experience spoke to my experiences in a way that Dickens and Hemmingway never could. That’s why I found them all so engrossing. I haven’t really found the words to describe the novelty of seeing myself written in novels for the first time. Perhaps that word doesn’t exist in English yet.
Alright! That’s all I have. That’s my Year-End Reading Round-up. What books would you recommend? Let me know in the comments or on my Insta (@globelleaffairs) so I can start my 2021 based on your recommendations.
