[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
I wrote about
Jesmyn
Ward’s phenomenal new novel a couple weeks ago, as I’ll be teaching it in
my English Studies Capstone course this semester. As I noted there, I’ve long been
a fan of Ward’s, but I’d argue that with this novel she’s done something
particularly impressive—created a genuinely unique and unfamiliar historical novel
about slavery. By “unfamiliar” I don’t mean that she’s not engaged with
American histories with which we all need to grapple, nor that her book isn’t
in conversation with prior works such as Morrison’s
Beloved and Whitehead’s
The Underground Railroad (among many others). But nonetheless, despite
my own relatively thorough knowledge of both those national and literary
histories, at virtually every moment of reading this bracing and beautiful book
I felt as if I was encountering something new. This is quite simply a book
every one of us needs to read.
Last
summer read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
have you been reading?
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