52 Books You Must Read... to have read the same books

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Book 52: the Decameron

My final RNG offered up 853: Italian Fiction, and I thought why not go for something I'd been meaning to read for a while, which was Giovanni Boccaccio's classic The Decameron. 10 stories for 10 days in the frame narrative that people are escaping the plague in Florence and needed something to pass the time. However, I decided to go for two abridged versions, with not so much overlap between the two.

There's a lot of sex, every single story I heard, save one was about some kind of sex going on. The only one that didn't was some torture porn about the virtues of wifely devotion that if you read the Canterbury Tales in high school you might recognize as the Clerk's Tale, as Chaucer borrowed heavily from the Decameron. Not all of it is sexy sex unfortunately, there's some [TW: SA] trick sex that we would definitely call rape these days. A couple where the guy pretends to be the woman's husband, one where a holy man teaches a woman that sex is punishing the devil, and a few that were probably just plain rape back then too. They try to hand wave it like "Oh, but she enjoyed it" most of the time, but still not cool. [/tw] There's even a gay guy though he's presented as being in the wrong in the text. A lot of star-crossed lovers and some more lucky ones are there too. Not a few cuckolded husbands being outsmarted by their wives.

BEST LINE: Quick, climb in the butt!

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Well, it's 100 stories so it's a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's available for free on Project Gutenberg, though there are better translations these days, too.

ART PROJECT:

I hadn't done any coloring in a while and I found these delightful woodcuts on Project Gutenberg by Werner Klemke. They're available to alter (though I'm not to give the impression my alteration was endorsed by the license holders), - they're not public domain, so I'm linking back to the license as in its terms.

File:Klemke Decamerone.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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Book 51: Ayesha at Last

Random letters UZ led to Uzma Jalaluddin. I decided to go with her first book Ayesha at Last, which is a Pride and Prejudice retelling with Indian Muslims in Canada. Quite the premise!

Ayesha is a poet trying to pursue teaching from a semi-poor family living partially off her rich uncle's generosity. Khalid is the son of a rich family who is so fundamentalist he won't touch a woman, even to shake hands in a business setting.

They meet and through a series of mishaps Khalid judges Ayesha to be not the kind of girl he'd like to associate with and Ayesha finds Khalid a stuck up fundamentalist. But they end up growing closer through another series of mishaps, and are a regular Lizzy and Mr. Darcy.

It's not a perfect parallel to P&P, as in it has its own personality, but it lampshades it from the very beginning and fits pretty well throughout. The best character is Masood, a life coach who courts first Ayesha's cousin Hafsa, then when rejected tries for Ayesha.

My only real problem with the book is Kahilid, Mr. Darcy, refusing to shake hands with women, but shaking hands with men. I get that he feels it's against his religion to touch a strange woman, but this is Canada. He should be shaking hands with *nobody* rather than just one gender. It reminded me of Mike Pence eating alone only with men. Both or neither is right, one but not another is wrong. I don't want to come across as Sheila, the token prejudiced asshole, but I think that's a fair solution. Also that and depicting a post-Roe (granted in Canada) abortion as dangerous.

BEST LINE: "An ice-cream truck slowly cruised the street, a Pied Piper parting children from their allowance money."

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Do you need another Pride and Prejudice take in your life? Yes, you do. It's funny and clever.

ART PROJECT:

This is kinda what I pictured Khalid like in my head, minus a reference pic it looks uncanny valley, but there it is.

[52booksproject]

Book 50: Sea People

The random number generator created 99X (I forgot to put in the last number and can't remember what it was) which is History and Geography > Oceania and elsewhere. Two interesting books were available: Selkirk's Island about a real life Robinson Crusoe, or Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. I went with Christina Thompson's Sea People.

Sea People explores the history of Polynesia and the mystery of how humans populated a triangle of ocean stretching from New Zealand to Hawaii to Easter Island with some islands thousands of miles from each other. It goes through the "discovery" of the islands by Europeans, the first written accounts of their history, through Polynesian oral traditions, scientific attempts to decipher the origins, attempts to recreate sailing to the islands, and finally modern science's input.

Yes, the Royal Society makes an appearance, in that they needed somewhere to study the Transit of Venus near the equator in 1769 and just as a ship returned telling of a wonderful island called Tahiti. There they were able to talk with the natives and learn a bit about them. Most importantly they met a learned man named Tupaia who agreed to go with them on their voyage home where they encountered other groups of islands like New Zealand where he was of immense help translating and advising on proper behavior. Most intriguingly he made a map of all the islands he had heard of, and it remains a mystery to this day how to interpret it. It's not strictly a Cartesian coordinate map and many people have tried to explain how the islands are arranged.

The book mentions Maui and his amazing fish hook, and a guy who humped a pile of sand to make humans (best origin story yet). Funnily enough, the best, most learned scholars of the 19th century thought that Polynesians were Aryan in origin. That's real Iranian Aryans- not phony baloney blonde Nazi Aryans. However science of the early 20th century tried to go by "race" for the origin by measuring facial features and using, I swear to god, a skin color chart like that Family Guy terrorist meme. Obviously that failed for so many reasons. Currents to Polynesia generally run East to West so a lot of people, including Thor Heyerdahl thought the people must have come from South America. Unfortunately for them, computer models show that Kon-Tiki only made it to Polynesia because it was towed out to a good current, and that natural rafts would not have made it that way. In fact it showed it was nearly impossible to drift to Hawaii or New Zealand and that meant the Polynesians who settled there must have been heading in a general direction of exploration to get there.

Spoiler alert modern DNA shows that Polynesians came from Taiwan via Melanesia to Polynesia though they're still working out the details of how long they stayed in Melanesia and when they settled various islands. And they're perfecting interesting techniques like looking at the rat DNA of the ubiquitous stow-aways from Polynesian settlement.

BEST LINE: "From the perspective of the twenty-first century , a lot of this work looks creepy, and for good reason."

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK:

I wish it had some maps of Polynesia and Melanesia and Micronesia so I could have had a better idea of keeping those straight, so look that up on wikipedia before you read, unless you already know, in which case kudos! But I do suggest reading the book. It's very interesting from a historical and science history perspective.

ART PROJECT:

The 20th century investigators took a lot of photographs of Polynesian natives and this is a drawing of one of them.

[52booksproject]

Book 49: Ukridge

My last (!!) choice book, I decided to do something humerous and while there are a lot of good, modern books out there they have tremendous waiting lists. So, I went with an old favorite, P.G. Wodehouse. A man so Bertie Wooster that he thought that showing he had a stiff upper lip by collaborating mildly with the Nazis would please the British government. But before all that unpleasantness he had a good handful of short stories about hilarious mishaps that he turned into semi-coherent novels. The most famous are the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but his personal favorite was reportedly Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge.

Ukridge is a get-rich-quick mad fellow and usually it ends to his detriment, or more often to the detriment of his friends. The novel Ukridge folloes 10 such schemes through the eyes of his friend Corky Corcoran. He has the Wodehousian stern aunt, and all the Edwardian trappings you could want.

BEST LINE: "He’s the sort of boy you have to be patient with and bring out, if you understand what I mean. I think he grows on you.”

“If he ever tries to grow on me, I’ll have him amputated.”

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Yes, you can't go wrong with P.G. Wodehouse and Ukridge is him at his finest.

ART PROJECT:

Ukridge always wears a Makintosh and pince-nez.

[52booksproject]

Book 48: Guide to Frogs, Snakes, Bugs, and Slugs

Random Number generator gave me 592 Natural sciences and mathematics > Zoology > Invertebrates. The name John Himmelman came up as a good one, and his Basic Illustrated Guide to Frogs, Snakes, Bugs and Slugs half fit the bill. It's a guide to finding bugs and what the Japanese would classify as "mushi" 虫, or creepy crawlies.

This book feels pretty randomly set up and chosen, although I do get the feeling they're generally going up the complexity line of creatures in it. worms > bugs (both the layman and technical definitions) > amphibians > reptiles. There are some pretty good hints about finding these creatures around your neighborhood like roll over logs toward you so anything venomous can escape not toward your feet, and such. Or put a piece of meat on a string to attract planarians in water. It's geared toward kids, but you can still learn things as an adult.

Best Line: "Swimming through the water like a ribbon in the breeze, a leech can be seen as a graceful creature. Attached to your leg in a slimy lump as it sucks your blood, it loses that distinction."

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK?: Sure. It's got neat tips about finding these guys if you ever need to in a pinch, and it has bits of information about all the wonderful things that live in your backyard (maybe).

ART PROJECT:

I drew a spider I came across in my home once and got a picture of as I was depositing it outside.

[52booksproject]

Book 47: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

Random letter generator spat out EM so I chose Akwaeke Emezi's You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. It's a raunchy (in a good way) romance novel with a lot of depth.

I admit one of my guilty pleasures is reading Reddit's Am I the Asshole forum, which if you're not familiar people submit situations they've been in and the readers vote on whether they were acting like an asshole in the situation or not. Or at least that's how it's supposed to be, a lot of the entries are fake and it's really hard to tell which are which. Anyway, sometimes some of them feel like writing exercises in having the worst possible titles "AITA because I burned down an orphanage?" and yet somehow justifying it in the text. Well, in a lot of ways this book reminded me of that. [minor spoiler] "AITA for ditching my boyfriend for his hot, rich, celebrity dad?" and yet getting justified in the text.

It's a good read, it's a hot romance novel, but it deals with the topic of grief and survivor's guilt, etc all very well. It name dropped a lot of real people that my sorry white ass didn't know, but a well versed Black reader might (eg. Concha Buika and Helen Oyeyemi). And then some references I did get like Bojack Horseman and Bob's Burgers. It feels very hip, and modern.

Best Line: "I'm just trying to find out if it fucks like a duck"

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: I'd recommend it. If you absolutely don't read romance, or don't want to read something with dirty words you can give it a pass, but it's fun and deep all at the same time.

ART PROJECT:

Two pivotal scenes take place at an island sunrise, so I thought I'd give that a go.

[52booksproject]

Book 46: The Borgias and Their Enemies

The all mighty RNG brought 945 History:Europe:Italy. So I chose Christopher Hibbert's The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431–1519. It essentially covers Rodrigo Borja's ascent to power to Lucretia Borgia's death with some context before and after.

The first chapter describes how Rome was a shithole even for the middle ages before popes returned to it (they had abandoned it for France for a while) and then there were three goddamned popes even, and finally things settled down and popes returned to Rome and they wanted a strong leader over a pious one necessarily, so they elected Rodrigo Borja, made a cardinal at a precipitously young age by his uncle Pope Calixtus III (Not uncommon, about every Pope of that age - even the more "honest" ones- promoted relatives and friends left and right). And let's be frank, Rodriogo- AKA Pope Alexander VI, was not one of the more "honest" ones.

He was the first Pope to admit to his children being his and not "nephews" as the phrase "nepotism" comes from. And I think that reflects his biggest downfall. His son, Cesare was a bastard in every sense of the word. He killed his brother and brother-in-law and a lot of other people and his dad still supported him and used simony increasingly heavily to fund his wars.

The Borgias (Italian for the Spanish Borja) are quite well known for poison so it was very disappointing to find out historically it seems only to be mentioned in Alexander VI's death, rumored as a poisoning attempt gone wrong, but quite possibly just some pedantic disease. Lucrezia Borgia in particular, aside from having an asshole dad and brother seems to be made out as all right if not a little into secular humor for the time. So, big whoop.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Sure, if you want a rundown of Italian history in the 1400s-to early 1500s I'd give it a go. There's a who's who of that period of Italian history including Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, the guy who broke Michelangelo's nose (Pietro Torrigiano), Nicholo Machiavelli, etc. The only thing I'd suggest is getting a map of Italy of the time to figure out what the sam hill is so important about Naples, etc.

ART PROJECT:

In a family known for its licentiousness the Feast of the Chestnuts stands out as a particularly bawdy episode in which they gave an orgy in which courtesans groped naked on their hands and knees in cadlelight searching for roasted chestnuts. Sorry for the poor scale in this, as I had an artistic vision in mind and stuck to it.

[52booksproject]

Book 45: The Icepick Surgeon

This week was a choice book, and last week has piqued my interest in a science history book again and who's more fun than Sam Kean? So I thought The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science would make for a fun read. I suppose I should have paid more attention to the subtitle, because sure it had fun piracy, dinosaur wars, and money lender murders, but it also has slavery, misgendering and animal torture. Not all fun topics at all.

The first topic was piracy and that was fun, but the second was how science was entangled with slavery. Even something as abstract as Newton's Principia Mathematica used slave ship data on tides to propose the moon affected tides. Natural science was even worse and one could practically only get to Sub-Saharan Africa or South America to study plants and animals by slave ship transport and once there that was who you had to trade with for supplies. Even worse, many unscrupulous naturalists relied on slaves to gather samples, especially in the more dangerous areas. So tons of science museums' collections are built on slavery (in addition to the outright theft of property in history museums).

Other topics include the origins of forensic pathology helping solve a Harvard murder that resulted in the second and so far last Harvard graduate (and professor) to be executed, the dehumanizing experiments performed on a teenage Ted Kaczynski that undoubtedly helped turn him into the unibomber, and a overzealous yet lazy drug lab scientist swearing in court that a crushed up cashew was crack cocaine. The title refers to Walter Freeman performing lobotomies with a kitchen Icepick.

Best line: "Now, there's no truth to the rumor that Freeman dubbed the car he used on these trips "The Lobotomobile", but probably only because he didn't think of it."

Should you read this book: well, if you can stomach all the crimes against humanity and animals, it is very interesting. But there is a lot to take in. Sam Kean is always smooth, interesting reading

Art project: Here are a handful of the dinosaurs discovered during the dinosaur wars, all impossibly ranged in age and size .

[52booksproject]

Book 44: The Map That Changed the World

RNG put me in the 500s, and I kinda forgot to go deeper so I ended up with general science books. There were a ton of all time greats, but I ended up with Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World.

This book was about William Smith (1769-1839) a groundbreaking geologist who started out as a surveyor/coal mine manager/canal builder/land drainer. He made the first large-scale geological map in existence. Even after listening to the book twice I'm not entirely sure what the rock he mapped out was, I mean, there are lots of layers of rocks under places, right? I guess it was the type of rock just under the surface of the ground? Anyway, it is considered by many to have birthed the science of geology and kickstarted investigations into the age of the Earth, etc.

William Smith himself had a hard life, his blacksmith father died when he was a child and his mother abandoned him to his cheapskate uncle who Smith had to borrow against his inheritance to get basic reference materials that would further his career as a surveyor. Eventually he ended up in debtors prison after some speculation went wrong and spending on making his extensive geological map. He was prevented from joining the prominent Geological Society by a rival who also made a rival map that stole from Smith's and cut into his sales which landed him in the debtor's prison (Wikipedia disputes this as the rival map came out after Smith landed in jail, but this book shows how anticipation of the rival map cut into his sales, not just when the map finally came out.) Smith's map was championed by our old friend Joseph Banks of the ever-present-in-these-books Royal Society.

Should you read this book: Sure, it's interesting and has lots of good facts about the life of William Smith and life and science in the 1700s-1800s. The author is a bit British, throwing around names like Boswell as if we all know him offhand here in America (I know him, just not offhand).

ART PROJECT: It was kind of impossible to not do the map, and I thought I'd laser burn it then hand color it, but it turns out I don't have the patience to hand color it like William Smith did. So here it is laser burned anyway.

[52booksproject]

Book 43: Hand Lettering A to Z

The random letter generator eventually came up with "SY" and I found a delightful book by Abbey Sy, Hand Lettering A to Z: a world of creative ideas for drawing and designing alphabets. I happen to have a font making program that hitherto-fore had only been used for making an ocarina tab font, so I thought why not try it for a real font?

I admit the book itself wasn't much help to what I was doing. It was about traditional media like ink pens and watercolor, and if you want to do some lettering on paper it's a brilliant resource. It did have some good universal tips like making sure your size is consistent and thinking about coherent design and all that. It was also very helpful in providing a wide variety of font styles to be inspired by.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: If you want to be inspired to make your own font it's great. Again, the meat of the book is traditional paper media, so whether that's helpful to you is something you would know.

ART PROJECT:

Ok, here is what I was most looking forward to. I ended up having so much fun making the first typeface that I made a second, bonus one. The first is all animal shapes with each letter starting with the name of the animal it was shaped like.

and the second font. As you can see I need to work on the S, which was inspired by those diamondy line Ss that were popular with schoolkids.

[52booksproject]

Book 42: Art Matters

Back to the RNG and it popped up 701: Philosophy and theory of fine and decorative art. Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color by Philip Ball looked brilliant, but it only has an ebook version in Spanish, so that was a no-go. So I went with Neil Gaiman's Art Matters: Because your imagination can change the world.

It's a set of a few essays by the renowned author, the first exhorting people to read fiction, support libraries, and encouraging children to read (what they want, not what you want them to). Very much propaganda, and commissioned as such by a library organization, but it's for a good cause- reading and libraries- so it's ok. He admits it's in his self-interest as an author to promote such things, but he says he's more enthusiastic to do so as a reader. (Yeah, right, Neil, we're onto you! After all....)

The other major essay was one encouraging people to make good art. Called, surprisingly, "Make Good Art". I think the message is all well and good, but telling people to make good art- to reference the Simpsons again- is like Mr. Burns telling Daryl Strawberry to hit a home run as "good" coaching. It's easy to say to make something good, but a lot harder to actually accomplish it. I think a better message is to encourage people to just make art. Good art will come and bad art will come and not everyone will agree on which is which.

Incidentally I borrowed both the audio book and the ebook of Art Matters. I'm glad I got both because the ebook is gorgeously illustrated by Chris Riddell. But it's also a fustercluck of some kind of handwriting font that my feeble ADD brain couldn't stick to, so getting the words through the audio book first helped an awful lot.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK:

Sure, it's short, insightful, and very beautifully drawn.

ART PROJECT:

So, I made art of Neil Gaiman. He suggests making your own art and not copying other people's. Which is too bad, because I generally try to match the style of the illustrated books. So I compromised and did partially my style a little sketchy like the book's illustrations. Is this the good art Gaiman said to make? I don't know, but it is art, and I think that's what's important.

[52booksproject]

Book 41: The Memory Librarian

Back to our regular schedule and time for a choice book and I chose The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe with contributors Yohanca Delgado, Eve L. Ewing, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, and Sheree Renée Thomas. This book was absolutely delicious. I'd call it candy, but it was way more substantial than that. It's a set of five Afro-Futurism stories set in the same New World Order, in this case New Dawn where "cleanliness" and order are valued above all else by the powers that be. All of the protagonists from the stories are "dirty" in some way, be it lesbian, non-binary, or just wanting to defy the New Dawn that can and does collect your memories and stores them to be reviewed.

The book feels like it has a lot of classic sci-fi sources including things like A Wrinkle in Time or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There is the ever present white is oppressing Black element, but there isn't too much horrible violence, unless you count mind wipes, which you probably should, I guess. The world building is fun- it sort of throws you in and you (I at least) grasp around until you start to put all the pieces together and they fit beautifully.

BEST LINE: "The obelisk has fully metamorphosed into its metaphoric counterpart now, a giant golden circumcised penis spitting white-gold ejaculate into the air like a pornographic Mount Vesuvius"

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Omigod, yes, it's fun! I don't want to oversell it, but it was my favorite of what I've read so far.

ART PROJECT:

I drew the title character, the Memory Librarian, Seshet, based on a picture of Janelle Monáe, of course. I had to imagine what her outfit with ceremonial hat and robes might look like, and this was it.

[52booksproject]

Book 40: A Black Woman's History of the United States

Since it was a mix of Black History Month and Women's History Month the book A Black Woman's History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross seemed appropriate. Forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but the content of this book was hard to hear (Yes, I know, if hearing about it is bad try living it like millions of Black women have). Except for the first Black woman they could find a record of in the US, from a petition to get papers of protection from slavery and marriage (aka slavery back then) to join an expedition to Santa Fe, Black women were almost exclusively brought as slaves to the US. Up front [TRIGGER WARNING] sexual assault and violence are a huge part of this book, so the whole thing will be sensitive subjects until the end. Sir Frances Drake's expedition raided a Spanish ship and got a hold of a Black woman they raped, made pregnant, and then dropped off on a random island also with two Black men presumably to die, but who will ever know? Definitely one of the sickest stories in American history (that has no end of them) and paints Drake in a whole new light for me.

Then in 1619, the gaping asshole masterfully played by David Ogden Stiers in Disney's Pocahontas (I think it's the same guy) bought some slaves in Virginia and that began 250 years of Black slavery in America. The book defends the few Black women that owned slaves as just trying to escape slavery for their family, which *I* can't possibly judge these women for that. The only fun part of these chapters were the escapes. We barely know anything about these women historically except for the advertisements in escaped slave classifieds which almost always include descriptions of fine clothing they took with them to pass as free women. So the women were free and had nice clothing at least. There's also a daring raid during the Civil War where Harriet Tubman (hey mr. president, still waiting on that $20 bill, btw) took a river boat and helped a bunch of slaves escape and burned plantations along the way, so that was sweet. However, post-bellum and Jim Crow were hardly better for Black women. In fact, the book has to get to the incredible Shirley Freaking Chisholm before the stories start to take a real positive turn. In the last chapter they even mention Roxanne Shante's Roxanne's Revenge and and Lauryn Hill's the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as triumphs of Black culture, and having both I agree they are.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Assuming you can handle reading the horrible things that happened, then, yes. Not many books are a broad sampling of primary sources to learn about Black women in US history.

ART PROJECT:

I already drew many of the women mentioned in the book, but my favorite part was hearing about Shirley Chisholm and I inexplicably missed her when I did my faces project last year, so I drew her.

[52booksproject]

Book 39: An Unkindness of Ghosts

I chose An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon off of a great books list my library curated. It's possible this was my hardest book to read yet. It flows fine, but there's a lot of hard content to read. It's Handmaid's Tale meets Afro Futurism meets MST3K movie Space Mutiny (not in a bad way, they're just both about space ships searching for a home). Essentially a white higher class lives above a middle class that lives above a Black lower class where a mysterious power drain has caused the white upper class to turn off their heat. It's really hard to read about people essentially living in slave conditions in the future.

The protagonist is Aster, a woman who, because she's the assistant to the ship's Surgeon General, has a modicum of privilege that she uses to help people. However, this also catches her in the jealous eye of the Surgeon General's powerful uncle. Bad things happen to the characters, and bad things happen, and bad things happen. One neat thing about the book is a handful of first chapters in parts are told from the perspective of another character besides Aster and that is very interesting too.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: I can't say that I found the payoff at the end exactly made up for all the horrible things that transpire throughout the book, but I can say I'd probably read it again (for the first time) knowing that. It's not for the faint of heart though.

ART PROJECT: There's a star chart hidden as a collection of molecule drawings in the book, so I thought I'd do that.

[52booksproject]

Book 38 The Juneteenth Story

I chose The Juneteenth Story off a curated list of Black History Month books from my local library. By Alliah L. Agostini, this is a cute, illustrated book about the history of Juneteenth from the root causes through current times (it has a person in a mask celebrating it).

I like that there are no punches pulled about the causes. Though of course it goes into why slavery is wrong (you're not free), it doesn't get into any horror stories of slavery which is age appropriate, I think.

Then it talks about the Emancipation Proclamation and Black people in Texas not hearing or at least being able to do anything about it until Union soldiers arrived in June 1865. It then describes how things like Jim Crow Laws or the Great Depression affected celebrations. It even has a little blurb at the end about the author's personal experience with Juneteenth.

BEST LINE: "Falling just weeks before Independence Day each year, Juneteenth is a time to remember and celebrate our enslaved ancestors' strength and perseverance.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? Do you already know a bit about Juneteenth? You might still learn something new from the book. It is for little kids, but the facts are there and the illustrations are charming.

ART PROJECT:

Another illustrated book, another attempt at recreating the artist's style. Although the style is the closest yet to my native style, I didn't quite capture the charm. I drew former Texas representative Al Edwards who was instrumental in making Juneteenth a holiday.

[52booksproject]

Book 37: How to be an Antiracist

This week I chose How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. It was a tough book. There is just a ton of historical racist ideas and rhetoric presented as what we're fighting against and it made for very uncomfortable reading. My library's copy was an updated book that had annotations that fixed problematic terms and clarified points he had been criticized about.

Kendi's premise is that one cannot simply be a "not racist" person and the opposite of racism is antiracism. There are two kinds of racism - one that thinks some races are inferior and always will be and one that says some races are inferior, but not inherently because if they assimilate to the right (white) ideas they can become equals. He talks about the connection and intertwining of Capitalism and racism and the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality. Apparently modern Capitalism was born when Prince Henry the "Navigator" started Black slavery. Racism isn't necessarily about bad people hating other people for the color of their skin- it's more about self interest and using the concept that others are inferior to justify unfair policies.

Kendi is absolutely frank about his own history of internalized racist ideas and college era bigotry against white people. At one point he even believed whites were aliens that came to oppress Earthlings of color (his friend laughed him out of the room at that one and he soon dropped the idea).

Essentially to be an antiracist is to support policies that seek to eliminate racial injustice.

BEST QUOTE: We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK? I give this one a resounding yes! It's an interesting premise and a great look into America's and the World's racism problem.

ART PROJECT:

Ok, I really couldn't think of anything to do for this that wasn't totally cheesy.

So I thought in the spirit of the self confession in the book that I would share my history of being racist. I started a few spaces ahead as my parents are antiracist oriented (nobody's perfect though), and and raised me as best they could in a racist society. I still held a lot of racist ideas and ignorance honestly. And though I was raised to be a gay ally, back when I was a kid I was pretty transphobic and would be until the trans movement gained better traction in the 2000s and I finally learned that trans men and women are in fact men and women. Unfortunately for me, I was in a very white area and the only substantial population of people of color were Latinix. That thankfully made most of my racist mistakes not targeted at actual individuals. I still struggle with racist ideas though I try very hard to be antiracist. All I can do is continue to chip away at my ignorance and be eternally vigilant.

[52booksproject]

Book 36 Beloved

So, I threw out the RNG for Black History Month and am just picking books by Black authors. And I thought I'd start with a banger of a book- the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Toni Morrison, Beloved. Beloved is just about on every "Books you must read" list there is, so I decided it was time that I "must". I think I'd been avoiding it thinking it might be a hard read - and the subject matter is - but the book itself is very accessible.

If you haven't read it already it's the tale of former slaves in 1873 where mother Sethe and daughter Denver have been living alone as pariahs since the death of Denver's grandmother. But they're not completely alone. The ghost of Sethe's infant older daughter haunts the house until an old friend of Sethe's visits and drives her out. Beginning more trouble to come...

Upon finishing I noticed a number of thematic similarities to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which really is inevitable when both books are on the cruelties of slavery (the myths and truths of "kindly" slave owners, especially cruel masters, escape, the lengths a mother will go to to prevent her children from being slaves, etc.) But Beloved goes beyond all that too, and focuses on the aftermath of slavery and the intricacies of Black families and communities.

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: Yes, with the caveat that there is a lot of hard subject matter. If you're triggered by horrible violence or SA you might want to avoid it, but if you can I'd suggest reading it.

ART PROJECT:

There's a scene where Denver sees her mother praying and being "comforted" by a nightshirt. So I drew that.