DA_Gray's Half-Baked Reading List

My first year participating in Club Read.
My list is usually eclectic and I usually have a Lit Fic, a nonfiction and a book of poetry going at once. Will build it as I go along. This is probably about a third of the way and I usually add a lot more poetry and short fiction between longer works.

Literary Fiction
Miracle at St. Anna, McBride (2/25/2025)
The Master Butcher's Singing Club, Erdrich (1/17/25)
Tales of Burning Love, Erdrich
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
Martyr, Kaveh Akhbar (2/12/25)
Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Sadaawi
Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (5/10/25)
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (3/15/25)
54 Miles, Leonard Pitts Jr.
Erasure, Percival Everett (5/1/2025)
The Trees, Percival Everett (5/10/25)
Real Americans, Rachel Khong (5/25/2025)
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (5/13/25)

Short Fiction
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, CD Rose
Beethoven Was 1/16th Black, Nadine Gordimer
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo (4/15/2025)
Hey, You Assholes, Kyle Seibel

Nonfiction
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi (3/25/25)
In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, Walker
Kill'em And Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, McBride (1/9/2025)
Loving Sylvia Plath, Emily Van Duyne
Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (3/1/2025)
Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey (3/27/25)
A Most Tolerant Little Town, Rachel Louise Martin (5/28/2025)

Poetry
Mr. Cogito, Zbigniew Herbert (1/25/25)
Core Samples from the World, Gander (2/11/2025)
Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha (3/2/2025)
Watermelon, Amalie Flynn (2/5/2025)
Kitchen Hymns, Padraig O'Tuama (3/18/25)
Victims of a Failed Civics, Ken Poyner (5/9/25)
Ellipsis, Fady Joudah (5/28/2025)

Theology/Religion
A Theology of Liberation, Gustavo Gutierrez
God of the Oppressed, James Cone
Hopeful Imagination, Walter Brueggeman

History
Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, Tiya Miles (4/5/25)

Nature
Horizon, Lopez

That's a great looking list, Dwight. I requested Martyr! from my local library, so I'll probably start reading it next week.

I'll definitely follow your reading progress throughout the year.

Welcome to Club Read! We have similar reading tastes. I was not tracking Adichie's new book yet - I'm excited now!

Love your list. The two I've read were terrific - Kang's The Vegetarian, and Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Welcome to Club Read. Your list reminds me that I want to read more Erdrich. I love Adichie too. Are these books you have read recently, or want to read?

>5 labfs39: These are on my shelf to be read. Beginning with Erdrich's The Master Butcher's Singing Club and McBride's Kill'em and Leave.

I'll look forward to your review. I have this idea that I'm going to read the Love Medicine series in order, once I've collected all the books, but I think that's unlikely to happen. I should just jump back into reading them as I will.

Happy New Year! I also follow your pattern: I usually have several books (lit, poetry, and nonfiction) going on at the same time. I'm looking forward to your notes as you read along.

Happy New Year. I'm looking forward to your review of Night Flyer.

Club Read is a great group to be in. Good luck with your reading this year!

Highly recommend McBride's Kill 'em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. If one prefers a straightforward chronology of a person's life this might not be your cup of tea. But if you like biographies that reveal a lot about the world in which they existed, that don't try to make heroes out of their subjects but tell a story of complexity - this does that.

>11 DAGray08: That's searching for James Brown, not James McBride!

>11 DAGray08: James McBride is the author of the month for February (if someone decides to come join us next month in there)

>12 rocketjk: but by McBride. 🙂

>11 DAGray08: i would love to hear more about it. I’m interested, especially after your comment.

>11 DAGray08: This definitely sounds interesting. I wonder if McBride discusses Brown's supposedly abusive relationship with Tammi Terrell.

>15 kidzdoc: He did, briefly Even though the author was keeping the focus on the communities Brown came from and how hard it is to separate myth and reality. The women, his wives, his children were all in there, for better and worse. McBride didn't pull any punches when he talked about the ways Brown treated those around him

>15 kidzdoc: You just reminded me that My Sister Tommie: The Real Tammi Terrell - by Terrell's sister Ludy Montgomery is still sitting on my shelves.

>16 DAGray08: Thanks. I'll plan to read it in that case.

>17 DAGray08: My Sister Tommie: The Real Tammi Terrell also sounds very interesting. She grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, roughly. 15 miles SW from where I live, and even though it's been well over 50 years since her tragic death she is still beloved here. (Actually she went to Germantown H.S. but I'm not sure which neighborhood of the City she grew up in.)

Finished with Erdrich's The Master Butchers' Singing Club. First this took a little longer, even though the characters and the narrative were beautifully written, enough to keep me drawn to the story. The stories that were woven together and the surreal dreamlike description often required setting the book down to process what was happening.

Erdrich, in addition to dealing with a great historical period, through the eyes mostly of German immigrants moving to the northern plains between the World Wars - deals with the subjects of love and trauma in all their complexity. The love is not surprising, since it is an integral part of most Erdrich stories - but a story of people who seem to wed out of social responsibility rather than romantic feeling will keep the reader wondering if there's anything there, until the story challenges the readers' own definitions.

It is the trauma that repeatedly rears its head, and seeing this story unfold through the eyes of a German sniper and a girl who didn't know her own identity (an emotional revelation at the ending) and the resilience that makes the characters so memorable. Not for the squeamish.

Terrific review. I really need to read Erdrich.

>19 DAGray08: I really like Erdrich, who I read thanks to members of CR. Your review is terrific, I think I know which one will be mu next Erdrich!

Finished Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Still processing - so much depth - before writing a review.

& Watermelon by Amalie Flynn, a terrific collection of poems based on the massacre in Gaza.

Beginning McBride's Miracle at St. Anna

>22 DAGray08: I just purchased a copy of Miracle at St. Anna last month. I'll look forward to your impressions. Have you read anything else by him?

>23 labfs39: I've read all of his novels but this one (not sure why I skipped it because I loved Spike Lee's adaptation). He's an amazing storyteller. If you like Miracle, Deacon King Kong and Song Yet Sung are a couple of excellent reads as well.

>24 DAGray08: Good to know. I've read Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and listened to a wonderful narration of The Color of Water so far.

>22 DAGray08: I’m very interested in your thoughts on Martyr

>26 dchaikin: I seem to be drawn to first novels by really good poets. A few months ago it was Rachel Eliza Griffiths' Promise and now Akbar's Martyr!
And it was fascinating to see how the structure held together in a story that was doing so much, back and forth between surreal dreams (conversations with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Lisa Simpson and Rumi) and reality, narrative back and forth between history (the American downing of an Iranian flight in 1988 to emigrating to the US a few years later) and the present, between drunkenness and sobriety. Akbar's novel centers around the character Cyrus Shams, a name which reaches far into Iranian tradition, Cyrus being the King at Persia's height of power and Shams al-Tabrizi being Rumi's teacher. Which proves important in helping the protagonist live in the present. The trauma of believing one's mother was on the flight downed by an American ship and then living in the country that was the source of that trauma is perhaps the part that grounds this story along with the meditations on Martyrdom -- the literal meaning, the symbolic meaning, the western stereotype around the term. One of the better books at covering so much psychological terrain.

>27 DAGray08: I tend to like novels by poets too. This was a lovely response. Thanks. I’m much more tempted now.

>28 dchaikin: Anne Michaels' Held is also a fantastic novel, by a poet, although not her first.

>29 rasdhar: Pearl, How to Build a Boat … 🙂

>29 rasdhar: Thanks. Going to add this to my list.

>30 dchaikin: Thank you.

Finished Reading Lolita in Tehran which was one of the better works of nonfiction I've read. The author's voice, and the way the story interweaves themes of novels read in a subversive setting, the history of the Iranian Revolution and the varied experiences of women living under the revolutionary times -- amazing story telling. And I appreciate the commenters who suggested reading more of the works that Nafisi taught or referenced. Will be reading Invitation to a Beheading soon. I didn't realize there was a 2024 movie based on the novel - adding that as well.

Still working through Chimamanda Adichie's Dream Count and beginning Nathasha Trethewey's short memoir Memorial Drive.

>33 DAGray08: i’m so glad you enjoyed Reading Lolita in Tehran. Great perspective in Iran. And - I’m a lover of Invitation to a Beheading. It gets a lot weird. But it left an impression on me. Hope you get to it!