50books_poc | Entries tagged with jamaica

If I Could Write This in Fire by Michelle Cliff
A series of essays and some poetry. Cliff talks about being queer and Jamaican and light-skinned and a writer and living outside and inside of Jamaica as all of those things, and it's all lovely and furious and important.

nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
A memoir in essays of the author's experience growing up queer, non-binary, and First Nations (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux) in the Canadian Prairies. Nixon is open about the messiness of life, about being punk and fucking up and the various complexities of their family situation (adopted by a white couple as a baby, now with a complicated relationship with their birth family as well and a furious relationship with the Canadian system that keeps allowing this to happen).

Special Lecture on Korean Paintings by Oh Ju-seok
This is clearly the book I should have read before I read these books on Korean art, but alas that was not the order in which my library holds arrived. This is about how to read Korean paintings on their own terms: the direction in which your eyes are intended to move, various ideals the artist might have been aiming at, that kind of thing. Lots of color plates make the points very clear and it's very engaging. The author is proud of Korean art to the point of being unintentionally humorous (for example, he insists that a particular picture of a tiger is not merely a world-class picture of a tiger but the best tiger picture in the world), but by the end his insistence that his audience recognize Korean art on its own terms becomes endearing and understandable. Highly recommended.

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz
As the title suggests, this is in part a response to Reading Lolita in Tehran. Keshavarz writes a clear and lucid critique of RLiT's central premise and approach, but also waxes lyrical about her experiences with literature that she feels are part and parcel of her Iran, from her whole high-school class breaking down over the death of a favorite poet, to discussing literature earnestly with her devout uncle. Her recollections of her family members are rose-tinted and loving, but she isn't interested in painting a picture of a perfect Iran, merely a more complicated one that contains a literature of its own and a reading public to go with it, as well as an interest in international writing. Her writing is eminently readable and this is an excellent source of further readings in Iranian literature, if that sort of thing interests you.

lyras.livejournal.com

I was lucky to see Kei Miller reading from this at a recent writers' festival (during which he charmed me, and I suspect much of the audience, into buying the book). This gave me an idea of how the (two very distinct) narrative voices should sound, which I think was helpful in reading the book.

( On to the review, which contains vague spoilers )

Worth reading for anyone who can stand a little unreliable narration.

Miller has a website and blog here.

glitter-femme.livejournal.com

I seem to have moved from watching the community and adding everything that looks interesting to my library list, to counting and posting. Hi, everyone! There's no way I'm going to read fifty books total this year, even if my reading list is shaping up to be mostly authors of color, but I'll certainly keep track and be more conscious of who's getting my attention. And even so far, that's been awesome.

1. Walter Dean Myers, The Legend of Tarik
I read this because of a recommendation here (and here's another), and they do a far better job of it than I will at this hour. It's a classic fantasy quest novel, complete with mini-quests first to obtain the magical items that will help the hero on said quest; except that he's black, and African, and that colors everything about the story. His quest is to kill the warlord who killed his father and brother and had him sold into slavery, and that brings a lot of complexity and depth that kill-the-dragon-rescue-the-maiden novels don't often have. I agree with the previous reviewers that I thoroughly enjoyed this even though I'm kinda over the quest subgenre of fantasy at this point. And I'm as thrilled as

annwfyn that the grief-stricken young woman who joins Tarik on his journey doesn't magically heal with a kiss.

2. Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
This one is cross-posted from my blog on bisexuality and so is much longer. ( So let's just put it behind a cut, shall we? )
Other reviews on this community: here and here.

3. Lavanya Sankaran, The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories
This one was also from a rec here.It's a beautiful collection of short stories set in Bangalore. The stories are somewhat linked by common characters, but only enough to show you that they're all happening in the same time period. They're quick, lovely stories. The overarching themes seem to be about how Bangalore's rapid modernization has set the traditional values of the older generation (and, to an extent, the poor) somewhat against the global sophistication of the city's new breed of young professionals, but the stories address everything from men taking credit for their female coworkers' work to the effect of a father's suicide on a family, a girl's contentious relationship with her ayah (nanny? Is that close enough?) to mothers matchmaking for their children. My favorite passage is from the thoughts of a chauffeur, appalled by his employers' lack of traditional values, who nonetheless finds himself sympathizing with her when her nagging mother-in-law turns out to be his father's old employer, whom he met in childhood and loathed:

Raju glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her eyes filling with uncontrollable tears. And though Mother-in-law Choudhary's words expressed his sentiments exactly, at that moment, all he wanted to say was: please don't be upset by that woman -- she's awful, I know, but she shrinks with time.

billies-blues.livejournal.com

I'm excited about this community and this challenge. I hope I can do it in a month. I'm going to start by counting the book I read last month.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Much like everyone else, I fell in love with this book. It was hard for me to put down. Even the characters I found hard to take, were made a little relatable as I continued reading.
The Third Life of Copeland Grange by Alice Walker...I have read this book already. I believe it was her first novel.

I am looking forward to finding book ideas through this community and am glad to have joined.

Edit: I also meant to add Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. This story is amazing, dark, funny. It's mystical, futuristic and yet has an old feeling to it.

So two read, one current.

badgerbag.livejournal.com

This week I read Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson; it's a collection of sort of mythical or magical-fantastic short stories, Caribbean-Canadian with lots of fantastic or ghostly elements from Trinidad and Jamaica. There were a couple that were more science fictiony including the future where body switching is possible but expensive, and the future where the air is saturated with glass dust so it kills you to be outside unprotected. I liked the stories very much, especially the last story with the incredibly creepy sex toy body suits that were also duppys. (Duppies?) It was creepy but not too scary, and really great in how it showed the tensions in a sexual relationship, in the subtleties of how people think about each other & communicate.

The story about Tan-Tan and Dry Bone reminded me a little of Amos Tuotola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts though I haven't read it in a long time.

Also? Fisting story! Butch woman! Non U.S. context for trans characters! That made me happy.

The stories inter-related beautifully at times. The glass in the air story, for example, led into another story where glass was important - which was echoed later in the duppy sex toy story where there was broken glass. Same with eggs, and pregnancy - and of course, skin. All those echoes built up and left a big impression on me by the end of the book.

If I have any criticism it is that occasionally from like, sentence three, I could tell "And here is a story about a child molester" before I had any time to build up investment in the character, or "And in this story the guy is going to be an abusive jerk" when maybe that should not have been obvious! A couple of the stories squicked me out too much - especially the one from the point of view of the child molester. I think actually that people who like horror and dark fantasy and super gothy things would *really* like this book! I don't usually like that, but I enjoyed the book very much. It gave me uneasy dreams, and made my day feel a little more unreal in its normality.

were-duck.livejournal.com

This has been on my reading list for quite a while, and I finally got around to it yesterday. I read it in one morning and loved it.
( Cut for spoilers and review )

gwyneira.livejournal.com

Mer is a plantation slave in the Caribbean, a healer who both hopes for and fears liberation. Jeanne Duval is a Paris entertainer, lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire. Thais is a prostitute in Alexandria, who journeys to Jerusalem. Weaving their stories together across centuries are their shared experiences of oppression and a mysterious spirit who moves within them, prompting their actions, living their lives, and giving them hope. Hopkinson's style is lyrical, sensual, and full of vitality, and I loved her use of mythology to tie the novel's different threads together.

This was a challenging and thought-provoking book, especially as my first book for this community. The various settings were very new to me, and it was a shock to be plunged abruptly into the book's first scene, of Mer making a physical examination of a pregnant fellow slave. Hopkinson uses lots of words and phrases which I had to figure out from context, and I could feel that my unfamiliarity with the language and the settings made it more of a challenge to engage with the book, though eventually its sheer energy and magic drew me in. By contrast, I had no problems engaging with the book I'd just finished, a historical fantasy set during the Italian Renaissance, much more familiar territory to me. It was really interesting to have such a clear demonstration of what my usual reading boundaries are and why it's valuable to stretch them.

chipmunk-planet.livejournal.com

This is an interesting book.

Three women (a healer slave in what I guess is 17th century Haiti, an actress in 19th century Paris, and a prostitute in 4th century Egypt) are linked by encounters with a goddess. The story is about their lives and how the goddess assists them and their families at various times.

The goddess/narrator gives the story an almost allegorical tone as she philosophizes about the Ginen (African) peoples and how they spread over the world.

Bring a strong stomach and an open mind. There's alternate sexuality of every kind, violence, and very gritty depictions of life. I literally almost lost my lunch at one scene.

What I liked about the book was how down to earth these very different women were, grounded, even as they each had to make difficult decisions as to how they lived (some decisions didn't turn out well, either, which made it more real).

If you like historical or literary fiction, you'll probably like this book.

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Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Entries tagged with jamaica

Art and memoir

The Last Warner Woman - Kei Miller

Walter Dean Myers, Nalo Hopkinson, Lavanya Sankaran

So I just joined

Skin Folk - Nalo Hopkinson

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

#1: Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads

3. The Salt Roads, by Nalo Hopkinson