Our book club, the Community for Understanding and Hope Book Group, specializes in books about race in America. Here are the 84 books that we've read so far.
We had our annual potluck and book selection meeting on Thursday. I'll share, first, the ten books that we'll be reading in the coming year (our short list) and the many books that didn't make the cut this year (our long list).
I'm so looking forward to reading these books:
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Becoming Ms. Burton by Susan Burton, Cari Lynn
No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond by Marc Lamont Hill
We were sorry to leave these on the table - maybe, next year!
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall
Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil by Lezley McSpadden, Lyah Beth Leflore
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Gathering of Waters by Bernice L. McFadden
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by Angela J. Davis (editor)
Policing Ferguson, Policing America: What Really Happened... and What the Country Can Learn From It by Thomas Jackson
Called to Rise by David O. Brown
Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler
Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston
A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Have you read any of these books? What did you think?
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
