October 2021 Reads

Autumn, my favorite season, has arrived. For as much as I can really hate living in West Virginia, it really is almost heaven come autumn. Everywhere you look, the leaves are changing, people are pulling out their hoodies, buckwheat cake dinners are for sale at every volunteer fire department (and you should go out and support them!), and, more often than not, I have a belly full of hot apple cider and chili. Further memorializing my love for this season in this place, is the wedding of one of my very best friends at the recently restored Hotel Morgan.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

I had a hard time getting into this book. The pace at which the story moved was so variable that it often left me with a chaotic feeling after I stopped listening. I suppose that is probably intentional given the teenage yearnings so central to the book. The love story is evergreen, a swift, intense summer love affair and the residual effects of that experience on a lifetime. Some of the more erotic moments left me cringing—apologies to everyone on Lebanon Church Road who might have thought I was making a face at them in traffic when I was really just shocked with what my car was reciting back to me without emotion. This book is not going to be for everyone, and I do not think it was for me. However, I have such a hard time putting anything down once I get started.

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Clint Smith takes readers around the United States and to Senegal to understand the history and consequences of slavery in the United States with this text. The book spends a lot of time at locations in Louisiana, an area that I had known to be a slave state, but not hold the same implications as locations like Monticello in Virginia (also visited). Smith’s tour and description of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana was especially moving to me. Though I think I also found it to be very American that there would be tours of an active state penitentiary (at least the Colorado Prison Museum was merely next to an active prison) and that it would have inmate rodeos! The book also makes stops at the Slave House off of the shore of Senegal and the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, among several others. The writing is engaging, just as is his work for the Atlantic.

The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson

I read a lot of non-fiction in October and this was a lovely break from the non-fiction slog. In fact, I read most of the book on one of the last pleasant afternoons I had between teaching classes at Chatham University. I had wanted to read this book for some time as it is a work of fiction from Kentucky’s Poet Laureate and an example of Black excellence in Appalachia. The histories and voices of African Americans in Appalachia are often overshadowed by white poverty, but they are in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and etc. and their stories are equally compelling (sometimes more so, because they faced all of the challenges of the poor white folks with the added layer of race on top). Anyhow, the book follows families, especially the women of, Opulence, Kentucky. It seems like the town is somewhere southeast of Lexington, edging in on the coalfields but also not too far from the classic bluegrass. The families take various shapes and forms and each shadowed by its own mythology. Some women accept it and live with it, while others fight the mythology and attempt to leave, only left to try and reconcile their past with their dreams for the present.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America & the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester

The most interesting discovery I made in this book came early on in the text, which made the rest of the rambling wreck somewhat disappointing. That discovery? The level of scientific documentation of the Great California (or San Francisco) Earthquake of 1906 was the first time that earthquakes were considered to be from a scientific or geologic cause as opposed to God’s unhindered wrath. That was less than 120 years ago! Many individuals have grandparents (deceased) who grew up thinking that earthquakes were acts of god rather than measurable scientific events. Anyhow, that nugget comes early and before much of the book is spent diverging from the titular topic before abruptly returning to the topic at hand seemingly moments before the moment the earth shook and the resulting fires occurred. Though I also did find it interesting in the end how deaths were and were not associated with the quake and resulting fires, meaning we will never know now the true devastation wrought by this disasaster.

October 2021 Pick of the Month

I did not finish very many books this month, but the leader of them all was certainly How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. This tour across sites defining slavery in the United States is written in an engaging manner and should inspire folks to find out how and where slavery has shaped where they live and the lives they lead today. It is remarkable how much history has been erased due to white embarrassment, shame, and the knowledge that holding others in bondage has never really been OK, even when it was an acceptable practice.