Hey guys!

I must say that I had a successful summer of reading! I managed to read all the books on my list with the exception of one ( The Mother’s of Brit Bennett. I just can’t seem to finish this one…. maybe one day )

In addition to the books on my list I also managed to dive into and finish the following books:

• The Wedding Party : Jasmine Guillory

• Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of “The View”: Ramin Setoodeh

• A Woman is No Man: Etaf Rum
• Darkness to Light: A Memoir : Lamar Odom
• The Thing Around Your Neck : Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Here are the books I have chosen for Fall 2019! Its a very ambitious list but fingers crossed I can!

Speaking of Summer: Kalisha Buckhanon

The new novel from the author of Upstate, one of five books selected by the National Book Foundation for the inaugural Literature for Justice Program: a literary thriller about one woman’s desperate search for her missing twin sister, a multi-layered mystery set against the neighborhoods of Harlem.

On a cold December evening, Autumn Spencer’s twin sister Summer walks to the roof of their shared Harlem brownstone and is never seen again—the door to the roof is locked, and no footsteps are found. Faced with authorities indifferent to another missing woman, Autumn must pursue answers on her own, all while grieving her mother’s recent death.

With her friends and neighbors, Autumn pretends to hold up through the crisis. She falls into an affair with Summer’s boyfriend to cope with the disappearance of a woman they both loved. But the loss becomes too great, the mystery too inexplicable, and Autumn starts to unravel, all the while becoming obsessed with murdered women and the men who kill them.

In Speaking of Summer, critically acclaimed author Kalisha Buckhanon has created a postmodern, fast-paced story of urban peril and victim invisibility, and the fight to discover truth at any cost.

I must say I chose this book solely based on an Amazon recommendation and how pretty the cover is. I’m hearing mixed reviews on this one. I’ll let you know how it turns out. 

 

Make Room: Finding Where Faith Fits : Jonathan McReynolds

God wants to be in everything that has to do with our lives, yet we learn how to separate God from the rest of life early in our spiritual development. But no attitude, no activity, and no element of our lives should be without a faith-infused, God-led foundation.  There is a godly basis for everything you do—posting online, relating to your boss, submitting to your teacher, honoring your mom and dad, performing on your job, and appropriating your talent and money. Making room for God means giving Him unrestricted space to operate in and through your life. It’s the time, energy, and identity you allow Him to use, challenge, and redeem in you so that you can make a difference in the world. Truly making room for God extends into every crack and fold of your life. In his first book, author Jonathan McReynolds draws on the testimony of Scripture and of personal experience to appeal to readers to make room for God in every area of life—public or private, mental or spiritual—to experience the fullness that can come only through an authentic relationship with God. In every chapter, he enlightens marginal and seasoned believers alike about the ways that we shut God out. More important, McReynolds offers honest, practical advice on how to make room for Him every day and in every way.

 I love Jonathan McReynolds music and so naturally when he put out a book, I snatched it up! I’m already halfway done this one and I’m loving it.

I have been trying to read this book for years and I always get sidetracked.This fall I must finish it!

Dear Haiti, Love Alaine: by Maika Moulite    and Maritza Moulite

Co-written by sisters Maika and Maritza Moulite, and told in epistolary style through letters, articles, emails, and diary entries, this exceptional debut novel captures a sparkling new voice and irrepressible heroine in a celebration of storytelling sure to thrill fans of Nicola Yoon, Ibi Zoboi and Jenna Evans Welch!

When a school presentation goes very wrong, Alaine Beauparlant finds herself suspended, shipped off to Haiti and writing the report of a lifetime…

You might ask the obvious question: What do I, a seventeen-year-old Haitian American from Miami with way too little life experience, have to say about anything?

Actually, a lot.

Thanks to “the incident” (don’t ask), I’m spending the next two months doing what my school is calling a “spring volunteer immersion project.” It’s definitely no vacation. I’m toiling away under the ever-watchful eyes of Tati Estelle at her new nonprofit. And my lean-in queen of a mother is even here to make sure I do things right. Or she might just be lying low to dodge the media sharks after a much more public incident of her own…and to hide a rather devastating secret.

All things considered, there are some pretty nice perks…like flirting with Tati’s distractingly cute intern, getting actual face time with my mom and experiencing Haiti for the first time. I’m even exploring my family’s history—which happens to be loaded with betrayals, superstitions and possibly even a family curse.

I truly loved this book! ( I finished it already)  I only wasn’t too keen on the parts that delved into the practice of voodoo which is very prevalent in Caribbean ( predominantly Haitian culture) Other than that, the story of mothers and daughters and how they navigate through various means of  trauma really pulled on my heartstrings.

The Marriage Clock: Zara Raheem

In Zara Raheem’s fresh, funny, smart debut, a young, Muslim-American woman is given three months to find the right husband or else her traditional Indian parents will find one for her–a novel with a universal story that everyone can relate to about the challenges of falling in love.

To Leila Abid’s traditional Indian parents, finding a husband in their South Asian-Muslim American community is as easy as match, meet, marry. But for Leila, a marriage of arrangement clashes with her lifelong dreams of a Bollywood romance which has her convinced that real love happens before marriage, not the other way around.

Finding the right husband was always part of her life-plan, but after 26 years of singledom, even Leila is starting to get nervous. And to make matters worse, her parents are panicking, the neighbors are talking, and she’s wondering, are her expectations just too high? So Leila decides it’s time to stop dreaming and start dating.

She makes a deal with her parents: they’ll give her three months, until their 30th wedding anniversary, to find a husband on her own terms. But if she fails, they’ll take over and arrange her marriage for her.

With the stakes set, Leila succumbs to the impossible mission of satisfying her parents’ expectations, while also fulfilling her own western ideals of love. But after a series of speed dates, blind dates, online dates and even ambush dates, the sparks just don’t fly! And now, with the marriage clock ticking, and her 3-month deadline looming in the horizon, Leila must face the consequences of what might happen if she doesn’t find “the one…”

Sounded interesting! Starting this one today!

The Woman Next Door: Yewande Omotoso

Hortensia James and Marion Agostino are neighbours. One is black, one white. Both are successful women with impressive careers. Both have recently been widowed. And both are sworn enemies, sharing hedge and hostility which they prune with a zeal that belies the fact that they are both over eighty.

But one day an unforeseen event forces the women together. And gradually the bickering and sniping softens into lively debate, and from there into memories shared. But could these sparks of connection ever transform into friendship? Or is it too late to expect these two to change?

Interesting concept. Interested to see how this turns out. 

Behold The Dreamers: Imbolo Mbue

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses’ summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.

However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ façades.

When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende’s job—even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

I started this last year but had to return it to the library before I had a chance to finish it. I honestly forgot about it until I heard a colleague of mine speaking about it.  What I’ve read so far was great so I’m looking forward to finishing it. 

Thick: And Other Essays : Tressie McMillan Cottom

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more—by one of today’s most intrepid public intellectuals

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom—and of course Black Twitter snark—about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.

This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.

McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.

I don’t generally gravitate towards anthologies /short stories . But I am trying to branch out and try new reading content, I figured this would be a good start. 

 

What are you guys reading this fall? Let me know!

Til Next Time.
xoxo

( All synopsis’ are from Goodreads.com. )