The Nook

 Despite my plans to have a Hot Girl summer with loads of road trips, barbecues and swimming, instead I spent the days binge watching shows, visiting one quarantined friend at a time and recommitting to my physical fitness. Now, as the summer draws to a close, I made a personal commitment to read two new novels a month. And despite Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Roku surprisingly having enough content to binge for our remaining socially distanced lives - they just keep adding stuff- I miss reading.

So for the month of September I chose the novels Kindred and Black Boy. 

Kindred is a novel by the late renowned science fiction author Octavia Butler. The book follows a black woman named Dana who inexplicably keeps time traveling to the antebellum south during slavery. Dana soon discovers that her ability to teleport to the past is uncontrollable so she must quickly learn how to survive hiding amongst her ancestors. Dana, a modern woman, is repeatedly torn from her husband Kevin and cozy home in 1976 to corn fields and rivers of 1815. As the story unravels, each trip becomes increasingly dangerous as Dana finds herself in the path of overseers, Slave Masters and members of a group of white men called The Patrol. 

Butler brilliantly illustrates the emotional traumatization and resourcefulness an African American woman would face being flung across two centuries at seconds notice. The story weaves past and present delicately the main characters Dana and Kevin constantly recovering from the dizzying pace the life of a time traveler would present.  Kindred plunges readers back to an era of slavery, torture, rape and the brutality of an uncivilized old world. I plan on finishing the science fiction thriller soon so I can order plenty more Octavia Butler books and read the next novel on my list.

 The second book that I was excited to buy is called Black Boy. 

Black Boy written by Richard Wright is a powerful story about the author's young black life during the thirties and forties.  The memoir is beautifully written detailing his experiences from setting his childhood home on fire, his father leaving, alcoholism and his path to becoming a gifted writer.

Since Black Boy was originally published in 1945 which is during segregation and Pre-Civil Rights, I anticipate that the tone and setting will also chronicle the racial strife Wright grappled during that tumultuous time in history. Because I am still reading Kindred every evening I have only read the first few pages of Black Boy. I have read many books from classic vampire romance noir to self motivational do-it-yourself to hood classics like Fly Girl. For word snobs like myself, Richard Wright's prose is deliciously complex making good use of elucidated vocabulary. 

 What are you reading?