2024 Reading List
All discussions held in person at our Anacostia store
1231 Marion Barry Ave SE, Washington, DC 20020
January 2024 Book Selection: Erasure by Percival Everett
Discussion: Friday, February 2, 2024 at 6:00 PM
Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback.
Thelonious Monk Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been critically acclaimed. He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies–his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is–under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh–and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.
February 2024 Book Selection: Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves by Art T. Burton
Discussion: Friday, March 1, 2024 at 6:00 PM
In The Story of Oklahoma, Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves appears as the “most feared U.S. marshal in the Indian country.” That Reeves was also an African American who had spent his early life enslaved in Arkansas and Texas made his accomplishments all the more remarkable. Black Gun, Silver Starsifts through fact and legend to discover the truth about one of the most outstanding peace officers in late nineteenth-century America–and perhaps the greatest lawman of the Wild West era.
Bucking the odds (“I’m sorry, we didn’t keep Black people’s history,” a clerk at one of Oklahoma’s local historical societies answered one query), Art T. Burton traces Reeves from his days of slavery to his Civil War soldiering to his career as a deputy U.S. marshal out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, when he worked under “Hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker. Fluent in Creek and other regional Native languages, physically powerful, skilled with firearms, and a master of disguise, Reeves was exceptionally adept at apprehending fugitives and outlaws and his exploits were legendary in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
In this new edition Burton traces Reeves’s presence in the national media of his day as well as his growing modern presence in popular media such as television, movies, comics, and video games.
March 2024 Book Selection: The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara
Discussion: Friday, April 5, 2024 at 6:00 PM
A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this hard-nosed, wise, funny novel (Los Angeles Times).
Set in a fictional city in the American South, the novel also inhabits the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion” (The New York Times Book Review).
Though they all united in their search for the healing properties of salt, some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring. From the men who live off welfare women to the mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, the novel brilliantly explores the narcissistic aspect of despair and the tremendous responsibility that comes with physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.
April 2024 Book Selection: The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power by Courtney B. Vance & Dr. Robin L. Smith
Discussion: Friday, May 3, 2024 at 6:00 PM
A moving combination of memoir, psychology, and practical tools, this book offers Black men guidance and support for reclaiming mental well-being and finding whole, full-hearted living.
Early in his career, actor Courtney B. Vance lost his father to suicide. Recently, he lost his godson to the same fate. Still, as mental health discourse hits the mainstream, it leaves the most vulnerable out of the conversation: Black men.
In America, we teach that strength means holding back tears and shaming your own feelings. In the Black community, these pressures are especially poignant. Poor mental health outcomes– including diagnoses of depression and anxiety, reliance on prescription drugs, and suicide– have skyrocketed in the past decade. Institutionalized racism, microagressions, and stress caused by socioeconomic factors have led Black individuals to face worse mental health outcomes than any other demographic.
In this book, Courtney B. Vance seeks to change this trajectory. Along with professional expertise from famed psychologist Dr. Robin Smith (popularly known as “Dr. Robin”), Courtney B. Vance explores issues of grief, relationships, identity, and race through the telling of his own most formative experiences. Together, Courtney and Dr. Robin provide a guide for Black men navigating life’s ups and downs, reclaiming mental well-being, and examining broken pieces to find whole, full-hearted living. Self-care is an act of revolution. It’s time to revolutionize mental health in the Black community.
May 2024 Book Selection: Imagine Freedom: Transforming Pain into Political and Spiritual Power by Rahiel Tesfamariam
Discussion: Friday, June 7, 2024 at 6:00 PM
A social activist, journalist, public theologian, and international speaker who has become a powerful and brilliant voice of her generation offers a bold path to liberation and healing for people of African descent struggling in the shadows of the American Dream.
The United States is at a critical juncture in its history. Not since the 1960s has the nation been so racially divided. White supremacy remains America’s Achilles’ heel–a moral failure that haunts us and holds us back from being the great nation we profess. For centuries, people of African descent have endured unimaginable hatred and discrimination which has manifested in pain and trauma passed from generation to generation. To break free from this historical cycle of suffering and be truly free at last, Black and brown people must reimagine ourselves, our communities, this country, and our relationship to Africa.
Weaving storytelling, socioeconomic analysis, and cultural criticism with the spiritual and political threads of liberation theology and Pan Africanism, Imagine Freedom empowers us to begin the difficult but necessary work of decolonizing our minds and overcoming the lies we have been told about ourselves for centuries. Sobering and inspiring, filled with despair and hope, Rahiel Tesfamariam dares us to see the world through a larger historical and global lens– to understand how our quests for freedom and healing are intrinsically connected to our past, present, and future. By widening our vision, we discover new ways of imagining self, community, nation, and world, and most importantly, a new way to achieve the freedom that has been too long denied.
June 2024 Book Selection: Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin
Discussion: Friday, July 5, 2024 at 6:00 PM
Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.
Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable–but all emerged from the human imagination.
The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.
July 2024 Book Selection: Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi
Discussion: Friday, August 2, 2024 at 6:00 PM
Featuring gorgeous spray-painted and stenciled edges, dazzling metallic foil designs on the jacket and case, and an exclusive endpaper map that reveals new unexplored territories, Tomi Adeyemi’s #1 New York Times-bestselling Legacy of Orïsha series comes to an earth-shaking conclusion.
New allies rise.
The Blood Moon nears.
Zélie faces her final enemy.
The king who hunts her heart.
When Zelie seized the royal palace that fateful night, she thought her battles had come to an end. The monarchy had finally fallen. The maji had risen again. Zélie never expected to find herself locked in a cage and trapped on a foreign ship. Now warriors with iron skulls traffic her and her people across the seas, far from their homeland.
Then everything changes when Zélie meets King Baldyr, her true captor, the ruler of the Skulls, and the man who has ravaged entire civilizations to find her. Baldyr’s quest to harness Zélie’s strength sends Zélie, Amari, and Tzain searching for allies in unknown lands.
But as Baldyr closes in, catastrophe charges Orïsha’s shores. It will take everything Zélie has to face her final enemy and save her people before the Skulls annihilate them for good.
Want to catch up before book 3? Check out the first book in the Legacy of Orïsha series that started it all Children of Blood & Bone (PB) & the sequel Children of Virtue & Vengence (PB).
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