Books like Maniac Magee

What I found most appealing about The Gunslinger was the thrill of exploring a new world.

Roland himself was cool as he tried to figure out who he was; I was with him, wondering how he fit into this world. King doesn't explain everything upfront. He leaves tiny details everywhere and lets the reader discover through imagination.

The book also showed me the many different styles he has as a writer. What especially gets me is the little easter eggs he leaves connecting stories; it makes rereading fun as you go into it with a new perspective, find connections you may have missed, and it's like a whole new experience in his worlds.

What I remember most about Hatchet was watching Brian have to grow up quickly because he was forced to be alone.

He couldn't depend on others like most kids could. He had to figure everything out for himself. I think the biggest thing I connected with is that I always felt older than I was, being forced to learn quickly because the older siblings got to do everything, so I tried mimicking what they did. He didn't have that luxury, though.

Watching the way he adapted to the situation is how I always felt I handled things, so it stuck. Like him, when bad stuff happened, we picked ourselves up and kept going.

Mostly, I loved Tolkien's fascinating world he created.

He opened me up not only to the people but to the world around them as well. When entering his story, the world felt lived in, and everyone had their own stories, from Tom Bombadil to Aragorn. I thought the Ringwraiths were very cool, and characters like Samwise, Gollum, and Gandalf really stole it for me.

Tolkien explained why things were the way they are but still left most to the imagination. Before the movies, I had my own picture in my head, as I imagined others did as well. When I finally saw Moria on screen, I knew I hadn't done it justice in my head.

This was probably the first book I loved.

The rhymes and how goofy the characters and the whole story were. Some early memories connect to my mom, sisters, and brother reading to me at night. Eventually, it became the first book I read on my own, which led me to my first writing.

Yes, even then, my inspiration to write started with short stories. My taste in books I read and stories I wrote changed throughout the years. But this was my gateway into the world of reading and beyond.

A restaurant where customers walked through a caricatured Black man’s mouth to enter? A fine dining establishment that advertised itself as a Slave Market? An eatery housed in a giant mammy that sells mammy-shaped lamps? This sounds like a racist dystopia, but it’s not–it is the reality documented in Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s book about racist restaurants, past and present. You may feel queasy about going out to eat after ingesting these sordid tales. 

I became involved in anti-racist politics as a student. The first campaign I organized was a protest against a lecturer who had written an essay advocating the deportation of everyone in Britain who was not white. The lecturer presented his argument in terms of the need for cultural homogeneity, which meant he did not have to make easily discredited claims of racial superiority. While the racism was obvious to me, I was struck by how many people believed the lecturer’s cultural argument. To respond to it required understanding how racist arguments could change their form, as older racist ideas lost their plausibility. For a while, I struggled to make sense of this. Then I came across Martin Barker’s book and all my confusion was dispelled. Accessible even as it wrestles with complex ideas of culture and biology, The New Racism shows how, from Enoch Powell onwards, conservatism in Britain has… show more.

Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen! I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.

In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.

Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.

This is sort of a cheat of the assignment, because it’s not Anastasia Higginbotham’s actual lived experience, but it is not one unfamiliar to her, about growing up in a country in which white parents cover up racism even unintentionally. I’ve known Anastasia for 30 years and no less than six children’s books she’s published. Her book series, Ordinary Terrible Things, published by dottir press is among my favorites because the illustrations are collaged and stunning and she creates indelible characters. Her other kid’s books deal with divorce (Divorce is Stupid), sex (Talk to Me about Sex, Grandma), incest (You Ruined It), so you can see, she’s doesn’t pull punches. Book by book, Anastasia is building a more just and beautiful world. Like the others, on this list, she’s also hot. 

Fatal Invention is a masterfully researched book on the faulty science of biological race. Roberts shows how race continues to be re-invented as somehow in the skin, bones and genes. Using extensive and wide ranging sources from history and genomics to medicine and business, Roberts shows how the notion of biological race is continually reinvented to support existing hierarchies. Roberts explains clearly the fundamental flaws of race science and what is at stake in believing that race is somehow genetically a real think. A must read to understand how racism, rather than race, gets into our bodies and souls.