What I've BEEN Reading

I know, I know.  It's been FOREVER!  I got a little bogged down by my day to day.  Not to say I haven't been reading, because I have.  I'll never stop.  I just haven't been blogging about it.  For which I apologize. 

Since June I have read:
Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (one of my favorite books ever)
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (great book)
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler (great sequel to a great book)

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor - This was a good book.  It kind of fell in line to what I had been reading by Octavia Butler, but was definitely more "out there" than Butler's work to ME.  There was a lot more magic and unexplainable mysticism, I recommend it.

Island Beneath the Sea: A Novel - This book had good reviews, but I didn't like it so much.  Some parts of the story were great, but at times I felt like it was too long & the characters started getting on my LAST nerve. All that being said, it's worth a read.  It had a lot of good information Saint Domingue and the Haitian revolution told from a first-hand perspective.

My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due - GREAT GREAT book.  Love this series.
The Living Blood by Tananarive Due - Another great sequel to a great book.
Blood Colony: A Novel: by Tananarive Due - A great SEQUEL to a SEQUEL of a great book.
I have read all three of these books at least 4 times.  WHY did I read them again?  I have NO idea.  I think it was because it had been so long since I read the 1st one, I wanted to remember what started the whole story off.  And THEN I just HAD to read the sequel, because I wanted to know what happened next (like I didn't already know), and since I had already read the first 2, why the heck not read the third?

Small Island: A Novel by Andrea Levy - I REALLY liked this book.  I plan on doing a longer post on it, but I highly recommend it.  It's the story of two couples.  One Jamaican and One English.  It delves into their lives at during the time of WWII.  I'd never read anything about the subject of Jamaican/English relations and it was very interesting.  The characters were very interesting.  It was a good story.

The Hot Box: A Novel by Zane - First of all...do NOT judge me.  I'm not a Zane fan, and this book did not make me one.  I know a lot of people LOVE her, RAVE over her books, but I was just eh.  I guess the story was ok.  But I have a problem with stupidity.  I am sure that there are people that read this story and learned something from it, but I just could NOT get over how stupid one of the characters was.  Like, SERIOUSLY...Really?  You're that stupid and you're that old? Steamy parts were ok, but I wasn't THAT moved. Maybe this shouldn't have been my first reading of her's and I'm missing something, but I'm likely to never figure it out.

Rhythms of Love: You Sang to Me\Beats of My Heart (Kimani Romance) by Beverly Jenkins/ELAINE OVERTON - this was a 52 fakeout, but I blame myself.  Oh wait...I forgot to repeat myself..do NOT judge me.  I absolutely LOVE the sappy romances by one before-mentioned Bevery Jenkins. & when I saw something new by her I immediately downloaded it.  Did YOU see Elaine Overton? EYE didn't.  *in my Bernie Mac voice* this was some BULL!  They were 2 short stories wherein people fell in love & got engaged in a 2 week time span.  Yeah...that's what I said.

A Chance at Love By Beverly Jenkins ALONE.  I'm reading this right NAH.  Ahhhhh...just what I like...a beautiful gambler woman in 1884 (her name is Loreli for goodness sakes) out on the prairie alone, making her way to Californ-I-A all by her pretty little lonesome...but what is this she sees...twin pretty lil chocolate drops just looking for a mama 'cuz their's has died and left them all alone with their exceedingly handsome, muscular AND single uncle.  And well...Loreli ain't doing nothing, and their UNCLE ain't doing nothing about getting them a mama, so why not stay a spell and be a substitute mama for these perfect lil angels?  And MAYBE in the meantime Uncle Jake will stop looking down his nose at this siren of a heathen gambler lady and take a chance on love.  *shrieks*  I LOOOOOOOVE IT!! 

Perfect Peace

Perfect Peace




I LOVED Perfect Peace by Daniel Black. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. The story is set in a small black farming town in Arkansas and begins in 1940. All the residents have known each other all their lives. Perfect, and I promise you I’m not ruining the suspense by telling this part (it’s in the description of the story on Amazon), is the 7th child born to a woman who’s already had 6 boys. Emma Jean is DYING for a lil girl… DYING. She’s had a horrible childhood at the hands of her mother and all she wants in life is to have her own daughter to show her mother how it’s supposed to be done. But she doesn’t. She has another boy. And she then decides that NOPE…she is GOING to have a DAUGHTER. And so she names her son Perfect, and she presents him as a girl to the world, and to himself. That decision is so thought-provoking, I had to stop reading for a minute to form my own hypothesis as to what the rest of the story would be like. Does what you perceive as your gender really matter that much? If you’re a boy and your mom tells you that you’re a girl and you’re raised as a girl, how does it effect your sexuality? Should it?

The center of this novel is of course Perfect (later to be Paul,) and his struggles with his mother’s decision. But there is also the story of each son, and the story of Perfect/Paul’s parents. And that part is what drew me in. The brothers are so different. They deal with their mother’s trickery differently, but they all confront it in their own way, and they’re each made to be so endearing in different ways. We follow each boy from the time that Perfect/Paul is born until the paths they choose as men. And each is admirable in their own way.

The husband and father, Gus, is a sensitive but simple man. The book opens with a ritual that he performs every year that is at first perplexing, but after reading Black's insightful description of it, I felt Gus' need for it. It's something we probably all should do.

It doesn’t help that Perfect is being raised in an impossibly small town. EVERYONE knows everyone and everyone knows Perfect was a girl who is now a boy. You can only imagine people's attitude towards him. They were envious of him as a girl but now mock him as a boy.

And of course there's Paul's struggle with what's been done to him. You feel every moment of it.

Emma Jean is also made to deal with what she's done. Her attitude at first is very indifferent, but eventually all that she's done, not just to Paul, but to her entire family, smacks her in the face.

Perfect Peace confronts sexuality, gender identity, and plain humanity head on, but in a non-conventional way. The writing was excellent. I thought about the characters long after I finished the book. This is the first book I’ve read by Black, and I’ll definitely be on the lookout for his others.

Jesus Boy by Preston L. Allen

In between reading From Cape Town with Love and Jesus Boy, I read Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. It’s so complex, and I’ve read it so many times, that I’m going to go out of order and review Jesus Boy by Preston L. Allen before I review Wild Seed.

Not to say that Jesus Boy isn’t complex, because it is, but it was so…NEW to me. And it was a complete surprise. I wasn’t expecting much. I had never heard of the book or the author before (somehow I feel like I should be ashamed of myself). I was trolling Amazon for something to read and it came up on someone’s list. I really don’t remember how I came across it. I’m just extremely glad that I did.

I really REALLY liked this book. The book started off weird. Well, maybe not weird, I don’t know if it was Elwyn’s (the main character) voice or what, it just took some getting used to. I mean, I downloaded a sample to my Kindle, and almost didn’t buy it. I think it was that, at first, I couldn’t tell if the story was being told in genuine tone or a sarcastic one. After a while, I realized the tone was whatever I wanted it to be. Again, I’m glad I finished it.

We meet the main character, Elwyn, in kindergarten where he refuses to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat due to the song’s secular nature. Elwyn was a born member of Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters. His religion is very strict. There is no drinking, smoking, cursing, wearing of pants by women, listening to secular music, NONE of that. Elywn thrives in this environment, though. His first rebellion is how he fabricates a religious experience to get his first piano. And he MUST get a piano to play like his childhood crush, Peachie. That’s his first act of deception. Other than that, he’s a model, upstanding member of his church. He spends his lunch hour witnessing to other children all through high school.

Until Elywn gets to be about 16, his is the only voice we see in the book. Everything is told from his perspective. Also at this time, the tone of the book changes from the religious one that kind of threw me off in the beginning, to a more wordly one.  Which also coincides with Elywn doing a very worldly thing. Then, we go back in time, to hear the voice of Elwyn’s grandfather and grandmother. And then we hear from Peachie, now also an adult. The story follows Elwyn all the way through college. I feel like I can’t tell the story of everyone else without telling key points of the story, and I want everyone to be as surprised as I was.
Jesus Boy tells completely the destruction of Elwyn’s naiveté. How the experiences in his life, the things he sees and come to learn shape the man he becomes. So many times while I was reading this, I said to myself “’this movie is CRAZY”, and then I remembered I was reading a book, not watching a movie. Everyone’s story (there are many) is told so completely, but so succinctly that it makes you feel like you know everyone intimately. I loved it. It reminded me a little bit of Lost. I’m not a HUGE fan of Lost, but I am of everyone’s back story on Lost. About the lives they lived before they got stranded on that island. That was my favorite part of the series.

Which made me think about what and how the things that have happened in MY life that shape the woman I’ve become. Books that make me think about me and who I am and why I believe what I believe are my favorite. I think that’s what books are for. Great stories started my interest in reading, but books that spur introspection are why I absolutely LOVE to read.

I highly recommend Jesus Boy by Preston Allen. I have to see what else he’s written. My next review will be of Wild Seed.  One of my all-time favorite books by one of my all-time favorite authors.  Have a great week everyone.

From Cape Town with Love

I really liked this book. There was love, action and adventure. I laughed, I cried, I woulda threw my book across the room if the warranty on my Kindle wasn’t up. It was a great read.

I read too fast. It’s one of the things I don’t like about myself. I hurry to read a book because I want to get to the end & then get mad when it’s over. I got this on a Wednesday and was finished by Saturday. It was a fast read.

From Cape Town with Love is the third book in the Tennyson Hardwick series. The first was Casanegra, the second, In the Night of the Heat, and now From Cape Town with Love. All are written by the husband and wife writing team of Tananarive Due and Stephen Barnes (how cool is THAT), with the addition of Blair Underwood. I don’t know where Underwood fits in the team. I saw him on Wendy Williams the other day & he said something about him adding the acting/theatrical perspective to the book. I didn’t hear the whole thing (I was still half asleep), but I can see his influence in the pages.

I don’t think it’s NECESSARY to have read the other books before reading this one, but From Cape Town refers to things that have happened in Tennyson’s past, and they’re definitely worth reading.

SO…We catch up with Ten after his last gig which is detailed in the Night of the Heat. He still has his responsibilities with this teen ward, he’s in a whatever-you-wanna-call-it relationship, his father is still his trusty sidekick, even though he’s still limited physically by age and the stroke he hasn’t fully recovered from (I just LOVE Ten’s father), and he's still trying to make it as an actor.

On a jaunt to Cape Town, South Africa to try to reunite with his girlfriend, Tennyson gets hired by one of the most popular actresses in the movie industry, Sofia Maitlan.  She wants him to act as a body guard to help her on a trip to an orphanage in Cape Town where she’s going to meet with the daughter she's in the process of adopting. She and Tennyson take a liking to one another, but don’t explore their relationship any further than that of bodyguard/client. He’s struck by the orphanage and the child, Nandi, chosen by Sofia, and instantly forms a bond with her. He also takes a liking to another orphan he nicknames Oliver. You don’t know how much I wanted Tennyson to take Oliver home with him. But it didn’t happen. But I really wanted it to. I woulda helped babysit, drop him off at school, kept him a weekend a month. Alla that. But it didn’t happen.

Ten returns home where he receives a strange message from an anonymous emailer. Through clues, he soon links the message to an old high school friend, who’s just as mysterious in person as she was in the email. They begin a crazy sexual relationship, which to me, started off weird. Maybe it’s because I’ve never met a man on a rooftop handcuffed to a lounger. But that’s just me.

Moving right along, Sofia Maitlan contacts Tennyson again, this time ecstatic to celebrate her daughter Nandi’s first birthday, and she wants Ten to help again as a body guard at the party. Throughout the story, Sofia’s helped Ten get some contacts in the movie industry, so he feels somewhat obligated, and part of him really likes Sofia and Nandi, so he agrees.  AND EVERYTHING GOES WRONG. Somebody snatches the poor baby, and the rest of the story pretty much tells about the kidnapping and the efforts to retrieve Nandi.

I like action, I really do, but sometimes, I get confused. Sometimes I find it hard to follow, like one minute somebody’s fighting someone in the house on the edge of a cliff & the next thing I know they’re thrashing around on the water. & I missed the part of how they got from the cliff to the water. & I’m going back tryna figure out HOW THEY GOT FROM THE CLIFF TO THE WATER?!  I HAVE to know. Drives me nuts. But I didn’t have that problem in Cape Town, there aren’t too many characters (although there are a lot), and there’s just enough action that’s easy to follow. & THERE’S A TWIST!! There’s a twist that I ENTIRELY wasn’t expecting because you just have NO CLUE that should even BE a twist. Or maybe I’m just unsuspecting and trusting. And that’s probably part of it, but I talked to my brother (my fellow reader) & he wasn’t expecting it either.

I highly recommend Cape Town, and the other 2 Tennyson Hardwick books. Cape Town has been my favorite so far. I hope they keep up their tradition of doing a book a year.

Sidenote: Tananarive Due is one of my favorite authors. I love ALL of her books. Most are part of the Living Blood series (the first book in the series is My Soul to Keep, but I like saying Living Blood better), and every book in the series is a must read. Whether you like the whole vampire thing or not. She was writing about vampires long before they built shows around them on the CW. But they’re not just about vampires, they’re about love and life and there aren’t enough superlatives to describe how great a writer she is.  The Good House (a book not in the Living Blood series), is one of my all time favorite books.  Scares the crap out of me every time I read it, but I HAVE to read it every now and again.  DEFINITELY check her out if you haven’t.

CONFESSION!

After I read a book that really, REALLY makes me think, I feel the need to decompress.  My mind is going a million different directions at once & I need to calm it down.  Glorious was a book I needed to calm down from.  Before I would usually read a book for the 2nd, 3rd or 20th time.  Since I've gotten my Kindle though, a new book is at my fingertips, so I've taken to reading "lighter fare" in my in-between time.  AND my favorite "in-between" author is Beverly Jenkins.  Her books are perfect to cleanse my reading palate.  They are romance books set any where from the 1800's until now and EVERY. SINGLE time I go to look for one, I find one of her's that I haven't read. 

They are not your typical "romance" novels though.  Well, really, they are (I just said they weren't at first to make myself feel better).  In the end, the girl always gets her man & the man always gets his girl, he has to fight to win her love & she's a virgin & perfect and innocent.  OR if she's NOT a virgin, she's never "felt the fire that burns in her love temple such as the one she feels with Blake".  But they are SO DARN CUTE.  The stories I mean, they're cute as hell.  They're not depressing and most are set in black towns in the mid-west right after/during slavery and they have SO many interesting historical facts about how black people survived and information on the all-African-American towns that existed then that makes them very interesting, and they are well written. & people fall in love & junk & it's sweet.  Which I guess makes them not-so typical, so maybe I'm not a liar.

A LOT of her books are available on the Kindle too, which adds to her draw for me. I just 2 minutes ago finished Something Like Love by her & was COMPLETELY pissed off at myself for tearing up. 

I'm gearing up to read From Capetown with Love.  I've read the other two books in this series by Tananrive Due, Blair Underwood & Steven Barnes.  They're pretty good.  This book actually has a video trailer on Youtube.  Check it out: From Cape Town with Love.  It's part of some thing I haven't looked at to understand fully, called a vook.  They have a website to look at the whole idea of the thing (which you know I had to do, but honestly I STILL don't get it): http://www.vook.com/

I'll let you know what I think of the book though.  Have a great day!

Now I'm all mad again.

I finished Glorious by Bernice McFadden. For the second time. It was so good though, I probably would have read it again back to back anyway.


The story starts in 1910 and spans into the ‘60’s. I LOVE historical fiction. Those are my favorite stories. I also love novels written by black authors in the 19th and early 20th century. You learn so much about so many different things. The way people, especially black people, survived, lived and loved then fascinates me. And the story Easter Bartlett and her life was definitely fascinating.

Glorious follows Easter Bartlett’s life from a young woman when something tragic happens to her family, into the golden years of her life. The thread that runs throughout her entire life (and story) is that she is a born writer. She has a talent for it and she spends her life writing. It’s a great thread & the way her love for writing is weaved into the story really draws you in.

As I later found out, the preface of the book shapes the whole premise of the story. It’s such a tragic thing that happens, it changes Easter’s life and the lives of those in her family forever.

Easter ends up dealing with that tragedy by leaving everything she’s ever known. Her first stop is to live with a relative, where she witnesses a HORRIBLE incidence of racial violence. The description of it made me skip over parts of it in my second read. It is truly gruesome. That incident spurs her to leave yet again and she runs into a travelling circus of sorts. There she meets another main character that remains throughout the rest of the book. Rain is an ADULT attraction at the circus, and Easter becomes beyond infatuated with her. Easter becomes Rain’s maid and stays with the circus for a while. The story that is told during this time is entertaining and you begin to see just how much Easter loves to write. But again, something happens to Easter that makes her leave that life and move on to the next phase. This book is broken into very distinct periods. Each one is marked by Easter’s physical movement to an entirely different place with entirely different people with her living an entirely different life at each place.

Easter is next a teacher, where she has a very Notes on a Scandal experience, she leaves there and ends up in Harlem at the very beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. In the book, she actually helps begin the Renaissance. This period was the longest part of the book and my favorite. The description of this period of her life is great. The telling of the story of how the Renaissance began is very interesting and the fictionalized insertion of the REAL LIFE key players in the Renaissance that were TRULY there made me feel like I was there. I loved it. Easter has married by then & her husband is very into the Marcus Garvey movement. There is excellent detail in that part of the story. Because she adopts the point of view of Easter’s husband (to my memory, the first time the story is told from someone else’s perspective), it seemed a little forced, but it was appropriate I guess. Around the same time, someone reappears in Easter’s life that she never thought she’d see again. The end of this time of Easter’s life ends abruptly & I WAS ON PINS AND NEEDLES. The way that part of the story ENDS?! I had to put it down for a minute to collect myself because I. Was. MAD! MAD I say! I’m mad right now typing this. Now that I think of it, I was mad each time she had to move on. Folks were doing Easter DEAD. WRONG.

The story ends right where it started. Easter has to face herself and her life and her choices. The beginning of the ending got me mad AGAIN, but the true end kind of smoothes it out. I felt better. I’m all riled up now remembering, but Easter had peace, and I know she’d want me to have peace too.

I HIGHLY recommend this book. It was great. Bernice McFadden is great.

FAIL!

After using my Kindle for almost 2 years now, I just had my first reading catastrophe.

When you click on a book for the first time in the Kindle, it takes you to the first page of the book.  Sometimes it skips the foreward, the pages in the beginning that mention the publisher & acknowledgements and takes you to the first chapter.  When I started Glorious, it started on the first page of the first chapter.  I thought the book started off weird, but who am I to question how a book starts?  Also when I read the reviews on Amazon (I always read the reviews on Amazon.  Actually reading reviews on Amazon is one of my favorite past times, you should try it sometime.  Pick the most ridiculous item you can find & read its reviews.  HILARIOUS, especially the comments on said reviews),  I saw them mentioning an incident and characters I had no knowledge of.  I thought I missed something & went scouring through the book. I finally realized that my Kindle skipped the ENTIRE prologue, which was very important to the whole premise of the book.  Imagine my surprise when I clicked on "Go to Beginning", pressed previous page & there actually WAS a previous page.  My conclusion:  I HAVE to read it again.  And so I'm doing that, because I don't feel right.  Easter Bartlett deserves that, if nothing else.

I just picked up Bernice McFadden's lastest, Glorious.  She's another one of my favorite authors.  I loved Sugar Sugar: A Novel.  It's one of my favorite books, ever.  Sugar, from what I know, was her first book.  I'll let you know what I think of Glorious in a few days.  Have a great weekend folks!  It's supposed to be great here.

So, I last week I finished Pearl Cleage’s new book, Till You Hear From Me. I love her books. I love the sense of community all her books pull from. They’re all primarily centered around West End, in Atlanta Georgia. I think I Wish I Had a Red Dress was the first one in this semi-series. I say semi, because although all the books have a lot of same characters, they can easily be read independently and not necessarily in order, but I highly recommend reading them all.

Till You Hear From Me is her most recent novel, and the way she pulls in the events of what’s going on in today’s climate, with Obama and how he became elected and some of the people who helped get him elected is great. The political commentary, without being too political is also very engaging.

The story centers around two main characters, Ida B. (GREAT NAME!), and Wes, the children of two best friends. Wes & Ida B. were on opposite ends of the political fight to get Obama into office, although Ida doesn’t know that about Wes. Ida’s big dream is to work beside President Obama in the White House, and the book is set in the time right after he’s been sworn in.

Ida B.'s father, Reverend Horace Dunbar, is a retired pastor and...GET THIS...one of Jeremiah Wright's (I like when books play off of actual people to support fictional characters) biggest supporters and a good friend of his. Part of the story tells about the civil rights movement, which is great, and also explores the mentality of the "changing of the guard" so to speak between the old leaders as the new leaders emerge. LOVE that vein in the story.

Ida B. has headed home (back to the West End) from D. C. to try to talk to her father.  He's done some seemingly bone-headed, out of character thing that's turned up on Youtube.

Wes is also headed home.  Wes has a way more nefarious purpose for returning home, but a-headed there he is.

The conflict between Wes' horrible aspirations and Ida's more lofty ones is heightened because Ida doesn't even realize she's in a conflict & Wes is seemingly like a wolf in a hen house with no farmer in sight. 

The ONLY thing I didn't like too much about this book is the ending. I'm big on endings.  That is to say, I don't like them.  I don't like everything wrapped up in a nice neat little bow.  I once read something that said that the worst thing a writer can do is to take away the responsibility of it's readers to interpret in their own way, what the message of the book/story is.  I don't like it when the bow on the story is so tight it's pulling it's edges in.  I may be alone in this, but that's how I feel.  Till You Hear from Me isn't collapsing in on itself, but there's a bow there.

All that being said.  I highly recommend this book.  I also highly recommend this author.  I may go back and read and review her others.  Have a good day.

What I do

I love reading, I've loved reading since I was a child. Reading has always been my primary past time. I read alot. Alot, alot. Sometimes I read a book a week. Sometimes 2 books a week.

I have no degree. I just know what I like to read, and what, in MY opinion makes a book good. To me. Just to me. I value other's opinions what EYE like, but it's not going to change my opinion. I ALWAYS read a book to its end. To keep hope alive.

I ONLY read fiction. I read to escape the craziness in my own life, not get involved in someone else's REAL drama. And if it's a good book, I get INVOLVED in what I'm reading, I think about the characters and situations for days, weeks, sometimes years after. And I don't like being told what to do, so self-help is out.

I read mostly on my Kindle . I'm at the point where if it's not offered on the Kindle, I'm not going to read it. I love my Kindle, I know some purists don't like them, miss the physical aspect of holding a book in their hands, the smell and feel of a page-turning paper book. I'm not one of those people. I have hundreds of paper books all over my house, and feel like I don't need any more of them. I've got too many already. BUT I HAVE to read more, and the Kindle allows me instant gratification, and has significantly reduced the number of arguments I have with my fiance about my books all over the place. Our last one about Douglass' Women by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Douglass' Women : A Novel) "look, I know you like to read in the bathroom, and you know I don't like you leaving books in there (something I ALWAYS do), but I ABSOLUTELY DRAW THE LINE at Frederick Douglass staring up at me while I'm taking a leak!" I couldn't argue with that, & my fiance was more than happy to grant my birthday wish of a Kindle when they came out.

I primarily read African-American literature. Not very much urban fiction. Although, Eric Jerome Dickey falls into that category. I recently picked up one of his books, the LAST book published of the Gideon series, & it was so good that I had to go back and read the rest of the series and THEN went back and am now reading all of the books he's written. That are available on the Kindle.

I read a lot books over and over too. I always find something that I've missed when I read a book again. No matter the 2nd or 10th time.

All that being said, I plan, in the future, in this here blog, to review the books I read from here on out. Horrible, great or somewhere in between. Books I'm reading for the first time or the 30th. I will do my best to do so without revealing too much of the plot *spoilers*. This I will do, I think it's gonna help me, we'll see.