Nonfiction November: My list of potentials

It’s back! Lu (Regular Rumination) and Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness), along with two new co-hosts are bringing back one of my favorite blogging events, Nonfiction November! I’ve been getting ready for this event for the past month. While a slim majority of the books in my stack are written by men, I tried to make my reads almost even when it came to including minorities either as the subject or author.

My stack of potential reads:

Tomboy: A Graphic Memoir by Liz Prince
Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse
Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary Krist
Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble by Marilyn Johnson

The Little Red Guard: A Family Memoir by Wenguang Huag
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
Multiplication is For White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb

Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
It’ll probably take me until December to read it all.

What are you planning on reading for Nonfiction November?

brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson #diversiverse

brown girl dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
338 pages
Published in August 2014 by Nancy Paulsen Books
Source: Public Library

The first time I write my full name

Jacqueline Amanda Woodson

without anybody’s help
on a clean white page in my composition notebook,
I know

if I wanted to

I could write anything.

brown girl dreaming is Jacqueline Woodson’s wonderful and poetic memoir about her “very complicated and very rich” childhood. Shortly after her birth in Columbus, Ohio in 1963, Woodson’s family moves to South Carolina, her mother’s home state. The author and her two siblings live with their maternal grandparents for years as their mother travel back and forth to New York, trying to make a life for them. It’s there in the South that Saturday nights “smell of biscuits”, Jacqueline gets her hands dirty in her grandfather’s garden, and sit-ins are happening downtown. In New York, rainy days now mean staying in the house and being introduced to a new baby brother. Written in verse, brown girl dreaming is a book that both young readers and adults can enjoy.

There are many things that make brown girl dreaming so special that it’s hard to even write about it. Woodson has this wonderful way of writing from a child’s point of view. Readers see a young Jacqueline fall in love with stories even though she struggles with writing and is compared to a brilliant older sister by teachers. Thrown in with these moments are the huge events that were going on in the country like the end of segregation and what that meant as she and her grandmother shopped downtown, watching the Black Panther Party on TV from across the country, and the Vietnam War.

brown girl dreaming was just nominated for a National Book Award in Young Adult Literature, a nomination it rightly deserves. You won’t regret reading it, so buy this book, don’t borrow it. My rating: 5 out of 5 stars.