Bookwormish, 3rd quarter of 2019

Extremely belated because life is even more of a catastrophe than usual, but here are my favorites from this most recent quarter-year of reading (July, Aug, Sept):


VERY TOP BOOKS

Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian – I was so fortunate these last couple months to stumble across some FANTASTIC YA books, and I fell for this one so hard. A beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking story of three friends navigating teenagehood in AIDS-crisis-era New York City. I know a lot about that era, of course, but I’m just young enough that I didn’t quite live through it directly. This book brought home to me, I think more than anything else I’ve read/seen, what it was actually like to be a teenager at that time, trying to figure out your own desires when the world around you was equating sex with death.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter – An author who’s been recommended to me for ages, for her dark, female-centered takes on classic fairy tale tropes. I found the first story in the collection, the retelling of Bluebeard, especially memorable.

Black Boy by Richard Wright – One of those books that’s so painful to read, but you know you have to. As with the above book about the AIDS crisis, this made me think: I knew racism was bad – but did I know it was this bad?

Driving by Starlight by Anat Deracine – The other book I read at almost the same time as Like a Love Story, that made me swoon with how lucky I was to find such fantastic YA books all at the same time! Teenage girls in Saudi Arabia throwing everything they have at the question of how to have a life despite oppression and constant surveillance.
 

( so many more great books! )

 

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