September 19, 2024: Summer Reads: Let Us Descend

[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?