Black Love, Haunted Woods, & Touching Essays
My July-in-Books so far (3 book recommendations) and my leftover TBR
I’ve been craving more quiet. The smell of the pages, the sound of pages turning, and being completely silent and absorbed into a story. Add in the loud clicks of me writing out another essay on my laptop.
I’ve realized that my siblings and I are all coming of age. Rather than stressing myself about who I’m going to be in the world, I’ve been reminding myself that the world is huge and nothing is really about me— and accepting that as a freedom.
Today, I made hibiscus tea and spent a while this morning reading Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. As I reflect on my reading year so far, I am very pleased with the books I’ve decided to pick up, the speed I’ve been reading, and the genres I’ve explored. This month specifically I’ve just read some gorgeous books.
1. Honey & Spice
Elegantly written, absolutely delightful, deeply hilarious, and full of longing and tension. Set in a tight-nit and beautiful Black community within a PWI.
Wow, this was one of the best books I’ve read all year. I picked this book up on a whim after seeing one braggadocios review on it via bookstagram. It was the middle of the night and I couldn’t sleep so I checked this out on Libby and started reading it.
Honey & Spice is full of culture.
It felt like a perfect cup coffee — sweet enough with just enough strong bitterness involved to balance out the sugar. Utterly addictive and yet you want to sip slowly. So delightful and heartwarming.Honey & Spice is a book I would recommend going into blindly because so much of the reading experience lies within finding out more and more about these characters.
I absolutely savored this book.
2. Bad Cree
Predators shapeshift and take on many forms in Bad Cree, but their goal remains the same: to keep us isolated and feed on our grief. Are these dreams memories, warnings, or a siren song— an attempt to lure Mackenzie to her death?
For example, during another horrific dream Makenzie snaps the head off of a crow, and wakes up holding the crow’s head. Her sister, Sabrina, recently died and Mackenzie is having flashbacks and visions about her life and how she died. The dream world, the past, the present, and reality are messily clashing.
The entire reading experience is haunting, skin crawling, and eerie. Yet so bewitching and breathtaking. The quietness, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the regret, and the fear are all deeply reciprocated by the reader. But it’s also very cultural and full of aunties, sisters, moms, and cousins. With a dose of ancestry and strong generational ties, the story also contains an urgent and fierce plea to stop the way we treat indigenous people and the land that belongs to them.
Bad Cree is in a league of its own and I couldn’t recommend it more.This book made me laugh, cry, and sleep with my light on. It will definitely be on the list of my best books of the year.
3.
"This is one reason why the erotic is so feared and often so relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we began to feel deeply, all aspects of our life, we begin to demand from ourselves and our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy that we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lense through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe."
(The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, 34)
Full of complexities and diverse styles, Lorde writes essays and poems that are blunt, secretive, and often straightforward yet always extremely engaging. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde covers a range of topics: womanhood, menstrual cycles, feminism, politics, anger, and a bunch more.
This is my current read and every essay I’ve read so far has been unreal and absolutely stunning.
Yulani.