1. Ed Gordon’s recently released Conversations in black. I haven’t put a big enough dent in this just yet to give thoughts-but I’m excited.
2. Londrelle’s Eternal Sunshine + Sun Flower Soul both of which are super transformative and filled with everything you need to do daily maintenance on your mind, body, + soul. There’s chakra affirmations, meditations, and so much more. He typically creates an audio version that you can download on Apple Music or Tidal.
3. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black. A dystopian story collection + all of them are amazing and take the reader on an excursion that he’s never quite ready for. The Finklestein 5 story is probably one of the best short stories I read all year last year, aside from Rion Amilcar Scott’s The Nigger Knockers. A world with a blackness scale is an interesting landscape for any reader to travel through.
4. Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Antiracist. I’d heard about his other book, “Stamped from the beginning” but this one caught my eye, so I bought it first. Y’all. I haven’t thought about race like he does within these pages. One of my favorite chapters so far is the chapter in which he challenges the notion that black people can’t be racist. I was stuck like this 🤯.
5. Mitchell S Jackson’s books The Residue Years + Survival Math were the two books featured in the post before this one that sparked this post.
6. Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is quite literally one of my favorite books of ever. From his relationship with writing, his mother, and his peers —everything was eerily familiar and it was super cool to meet him and try to get some of that “Black Abundance” to rub off on me.
7. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ main book featured is his latest release The Water Dancer which was his first foray into speculative fiction. I enjoyed it, but The Beautiful Struggle and Between The World and Me are still my favorite works from him —especially The Beautiful Struggle because his father reminds me a lot of my own struggle to ensure that my son knows who he is…
8. Damon Young’s What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker was a super interesting read. I’ve been following his work with VSB (Very Smart Brothers) so when I saw this was coming I wanted to gain an insight as to how he did what he did with his site, because I wanted to create something similar. I also was hoping to figure out why he hated Kappas so much (it’s not in there lol) and get a deeper understanding of his usage of the N-Word.
9. Last is Rion Amilcar Scott’s The World Doesn’t Require You, another collection of short stories. Scott takes us to Cross River, Maryland a place that has a living breathing culture that jumped out of the book and into my mind-scape like nothing I’ve ever seen. This man had the audacity to write God’s children into a book and he did it seamlessly. My two favorite stories are The Nigger Knockers and Special Topics in Loneliness Studies both of which were page-turners and engrossing.
I hope these titles and authors connect you guys with these stories the way that I was connected! I really enjoyed each and every single one of these books.
-Akili
