I’m an enthusiastic member of the New York Public Library. I often say that to be a good writer you need to be a good reader. So, what are you reading, this summer? I always take a book recommendation. Now’s your chance!
These are my five picks for the next month…
Abi Dare is a UK-based writer from Lagos, Nigeria. Her book The Girl With The Louding Voice is about a 14-year-old girl in Lagos. It’s the story of her struggle for the right to choose her future. Last week I went to a conference for IGNITE, the young women’s political organization. I was struck by how often women in congress said their parents had told them being ambitious was a bad idea. We need to get better at telling young women that they have a right to expect more, and that they shouldn’t listen to people who tell them otherwise. As a young man a thing I learned in school was to ignore your more idiotic teachers. One embraced the good ones and developed a healthy sense of entitlement to live life on one’s own terms. It was a boys’ school, and I realize now, the thing I learned was no accident.
Laila Lalami is a professor of creative writing in Los Angeles. Her book The Moor’s Account is the imagined memoir of the first Black explorer of America. The Pulitzer board nominated it for an award. I’m interested in it because the book explores the protagonist’s power. He begins the book as a servant to a Spanish explorer who dies. Then he explores some power of his own. I’ve been working on some anti-racist copy for an organization in Baltimore recently. In that context, the notion that one can “empower” another person is colonialist. People always have power. Other people create systems to oppress it. The dynamics there, I think, will make for interesting exploration.
Another book by Ms. Lalami, The Other Americans, is about a Moroccan immigrant’s death. I started my “summer reading” with it. I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s set in California around a restaurant. There’s a sheriff’s deputy. A lot of the characters in the book have had their ambitions thwarted in some way, often through bad luck. It makes one reflect on how many second chances there are in life for some, and how few there are for others. I’ve been working with an organization called United Stateless for some time. It does fantastic work on a little-known issue—the legal limbo you find yourself in when no country will claim you as a citizen. Many of the dynamics of identity and immigration are in the book. There’s also a good love story, which is unfolding alongside the mystery over the death. As an immigrant to the United States, it often strikes me how few people see me as one. Because “immigrant” is a racially coded word here. But I find a lot to identify with in stories about immigration and striving.
Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast is about a paranoid inventor who moves to Honduras. Taking his family to start a Utopian society in the jungle, his obsessions take a dark turn. My parents always had a bunch of Theroux novels on their shelves but I’ve yet to read him. Still, I do enjoy books about madness. Particularly when they’re set in the jungle.
The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway’s first novel. It’s about two rich people journeying from 1920s Paris to the bullrings of Spain. For some reason I’ve not read it, yet. But the “moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions” sound super. I often hold Hemingway up as the master of the concise sentence. This is a safe escapist fallback.
I also have a confession to make. I picked my books based on feeding a list of the 50 books I’ve most enjoyed into Bing, Microsoft’s A.I. search engine. “Make me some reading recommendations based on this list of my favorite books,” I said. And it turned out, it did a pretty good job, I thought. Score (another) one for the robots. 🤖
