Brown Book Recommendations

Hi my name is Jo and I read ~120 books a year (~10 books a month) Here to spread love of books written by for and including people of the global majority. All posts go through the Q Please ask me for hyper-specifc book recs. ex. old west yuri horror novel (with non-white lesbians)

[booksforblkwomen]

It’s women’s history month ladiesssssssssss💕

and I want to CELEBRATE 🎉 💐💐💐💐🥰

So thank you for letting me share my love of books with you and sharing yours with me!

We started this book club and community on tumblr back in 2023 and 2024 and look what it has grown into since then! Yall are my muses!

Thanks for letting me share my love for books, and for sharing your favorite stories with me🫶🏾

[lacangri21]

A Library of Taíno Books

These include fiction, non-fiction, and authors not of Taino descent. It can be quite hard to find booklists for this, so I'm generating my own:

The Aborigines of Puerto Rico and Neighboring Islands by Jesse Walter Fewkes

Anacaona: Golden Flower by Edwidge Danticat

Ancient Borinquen by Peter E. Siegel

Cacicas by Margaret R. Ochoa

Caciques and Cemi Idols by Jose Oliver

Canoa by Miguel Sague-Machiran

The Caribbean Before Columbus by William F. Keegan

The Cemi Guayakan by Naniki Reyes Ocasio

Cocuya Lights the Way by Danielle Smith-Llera

Comparative Arawakan Histories by Jonathan D. Hill

Conquistadora by Esmeralda Santiago

Los Cuentos de Mi Abuela by Tere Marichal-Lugo

Earth and Spirit by Maria Benedetti

Encounter by Jane Yollen

The Golden Flower by Nina Jaffe

Guak’toka Taíno by Selena Lapham

History of Puerto Rico by Fernando Pico

History of Puerto Rico by Loida Figueroa (out of print; very rare)

History Smashers by Kate Messner and Jose Barreiro

How the Sea Began by George Crespo

The Indigenous People of the Caribbean by Samuel M. Wilson

Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean by Maximilian C. Forte

Itiban ka Kalliare by Sergio Mojica

Keeping the Taino Language Alive by Richard Morrow Porrata

The Legend of the Cacique Princess by Michael Dorta (as well as its prequel and sequel)

The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction by Tony Castanha

The Mythology and Religion of the Tainos by Sebastian Robiou Lamarche

On this Beautiful Island by Edwin Fontanez

People of blue thoughts by Enrique Perez Diaz

The Peoples of the Caribbean by Nicholas J. Saunders

The Sea-Ringed World by Maria Garcia Esperon

Song of the Taino by Devashish

Taino Ceremonies, Myths, Rituals & Zemis by Lynne A. Guitar

Taino Genealogy and Revitalization by Richard Morrow Porrata

Taino Indian Myth and Practice by William F. Keegan

Taino Remedies by Isamar Rivera

The Taino Sun by Tere Marichal-Lugo

Taino Tales: The Secret of the Hummingbird by Vicky Weber

Taino Tales: The Legend of Coqui by Vicky Weber

Taino Tales: The Miracle of Salome by Vicky Weber

The Tainos by Irving Rouse

Tainos and Caribs by Sebastian Robiou Lamarche

Talking Taino by William F. Keegan

Zandunga by Robert Solano

The tale of the Tainos and Caribs by Gabriel Figueroa

Anani and the Cave of Cacibajagua by Selena Lapham

Anacaona by Viviana S. Torres

Tainos y Caribes by Sebastian Robiou Lamarche

Comparative Arawakan Histories by Jonathan D. Hill

Women in Caribbean History by Verene Shepherd

Taino by Ricardo E. Alegria

Tales of the Taino Gods by Osvaldo Garcia-Goyco

Taino Ni Rahu series by Lynne A. Guitar

Taíno Sun by Tere Marichal-Lugo

A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity by Sherina Feliciano-Santos

Anacaona by Maryse Noel Roumain

Taino by Jose Barreiro

Dreaming Mother Earth by Jose Barreiro

The Moonlit Vine by Elizabeth Santiago

I know there are more that I am missing, but this is what I can do for now.

[rifa]

Hate how much A Little Treat has infested me. Any small discomfort and I'm immediately like oooo maybe exchanging money for goods and services will fix this situation.

[ceylonsilvergirl]

Sometimes

SOMETIMES

Going to the library can activate A Little Treat pleasure centers

Coming home with music and books and some movies, and paying zero dollars for it all

It’s pretty awesome

[oberstein]

You don't even have to leave the house if you use the resources the library can provide electronically (Libby, Hoopla, etc.).

[rifa]

Oh fuck yeah this is a library post now!!!!

[makingqueerhistory]

Bookish Care Package for Queer Youth

In response to the increasing book bans, we are working with this project to get queer books in the hands of queer youth, and we want to encourage you to do the same!

[dykecadence]

periodic reminder that the queer liberation library is an awesome non-regional library you can add on libby to access hundreds of queer titles. NO LIBRARY CARD NEEDED. i just found an audiobook for a pretty new release on there with no waitlist. also everyone use libby for your local library too NOW

Libby Access — Queer Liberation Library

[realluigi16]

this is gonna be my first read on there… i was looking for nonfiction history books but like… look at these grandmas… i’m so excited

[realluigi16]

A NOVEL ABOUT DRAG HISTORY IN NYC OUGHHH DELICIOUS DONT MIND IF I DO

[thegaylibertarian]

[liminalweirdo]

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

[read-alert]

Happy International Women's Day! As far as I know, all of these authors identify as women, but please let me know if I'm wrong about that!

Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans

My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn

They Don't Make Plus Sized Spacesuits by Ali Thompson

Woodworking by Emily St James

Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel

Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by RF Kuang

Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America by Matika Wilbur

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[booksforblkwomen]

[isuggestlandback]

Have you heard of The Misewa Saga series by David A. Robertson? I’ve been reading it for a bit and really enjoy it! It’s about two Cree kids doing some Narnia-type adventures but instead of Christian it’s centered around Indigenous culture. It’s middle grade so it’s probably not on a lot of people’s radar, but when I can read a Cree word in a post of yours I realize it’s bc of the series which is cool!!

Thats so cool!! What word did you learn? 👀

[gandalfsbignaturals]

learning to notice an absence of people of color is crazy. you start seeing it everywhere. ill see a random pic of characters or people or whatever and be like "these are all white people. why"

[gandalfsbignaturals]

all the babies in those baby youtube video memes. humanized character posts. like. its the little innocent shit. and like, the people making those baby memes probably arent seeking out white babies. maybe theyre just easier to find. but why are they easier to find? a complicated question, surely... but you know what it probably comes down to. someone, somewhere, maybe a lot of someones in a lot of places, made a choice. maybe knowingly, maybe not. but they made a choice. it starts to make you feel like a conspiracy theorist!!

[tartrazeen]

It's also interesting seeing photosets of images here of various illustrations, and all of them are white

"I notice you have a very specific art style."

"oh that doesn't mean anything"

"Like I said."

[storyweavingspider]

The thing is that it IS a conspiracy, its literally just the conspiracy of White Supremacy. Its just right there, proven. Shit, they didn't let Black people be in commercials until what, the 50s? And we surprised when shows and ads and culture in White Supremacy Land (that wasn't ripped straight out of Black folks hands anyway) are all-white, all the time?

Shit, look at how many popular memes with Black folks either depict us negatively, or the Black origin gets completely erased if not (think tik-tok dances, etc.). Half the time we ain't even looking at the absence of us, we're looking at them dancing in the skin off the corpse of what we made.

Wanna really put yourself into hell? Start counting how many BIPOC are showing up to your "community events". Start figuring out what the demographic ratios for your events are. Its one thing to think "oh we had a 120+ person event with a dozen people of color" its another to think "our event was only 10% people of color, where did WE fuck up here?" (If you think I'm exaggerating know that gods I am not, just ask DC and the DC Klans Picnic, 5% Black in a 50% Black city)

You HAVE to start noticing this. You have to start thinking about this in your online spaces too because of the BIPOC Attention Tax. This shit actively holds us back. This shit actively kills us - look at Tinu and Fiqah (sassycrass) who died despite being well known, well loved Black women and disability activists, because they couldn't make enough mutual aid to pay for medical needs.

Start noticing who's not in the room with you. Start noticing who you ain't seeing.

[layaart]

Fen & Alekhai from The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa. I love friendship focused sff.

bonus:

that one bit where she yoinks his hair. idk. Also I wanted to draw the other two but couldn't be bothered figuring out 4 characters in the main composition

(Fen pose ref in the main art was from TrueRef)

[creatingblackcharacters]

"The sexuality of women of color is either amplified or negated depending on its usefulness to whiteness. AOC is Puerto Rican and her congresswoman status saw her quickly cast as an Angry Brown Woman rather than the most common archetype associated with Hispanic and Latina women: the Spicy Sexpot.

You've all seen her. She is loud and passionate, with a quick, fiery temper that is softened by her sex appeal. With her curvy body, glossy dark mane, and gleaming olive skin (Afro-Latinas have no place in this derivative image of what a typical Latina looks like), her sensuality turns what would otherwise be regarded as unpalatable anger into manageable zest.

And that's the point: there's no need to take a woman, her opinions, or her legitimate concerns seriously when they can be dismissed with an "oh, you're so cute when you're mad" wave of the hand.

The Spicy Sexpot trope is not merely about sex appeal; it is part and parcel of the legacy of violence that has been enacted on Mexicans and other Latin Americans from at least the time of the Mexican-American War."

Chapter 2, White Tears/Brown Scars- Ruby Hamad

[sapphicides]

in honor of black history month 2025, i’ve put together a list of books written by black sapphic authors for you to read in the month of february

non-fiction essays/memoirs:

all about love: new visions by bell hooks

black lesbian in white america by anita cornwell

sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde

mouths of rain: an anthology of black lesbian thought by briona simone jones

blues legacies and black feminism by angela davis

does your mama know?: an anthology of black lesbian coming out stories by lisa c. moore

fiction:

the color purple by alice walker

loving her by ann allen shockley

the gilda stories by jewelle gomez

in another place, not here by dionne brand

pomegranate by helen elaine lee

the summer we got free by mia mckenzie

these letters end in tears by musih tedji xaviere

dead in long beach, california by venita blackburn

girl, woman, other by bernadine evaristo

young adult:

escaping mr. rochester by l.l. mckinney

this ravenous fate by hayley dennings

faebound by saraa el-arifa

so let them burn by kamilah cole

where sleeping girls lie by faridah àbíké-íyímídé

adult:

honey girl by morgan rogers

the deep by rivers solomon

sweet vengeance by viano oniomoh

come back (love concealed) by terri ronald

house of hunger by alexis henderson

short stories:

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw

additional info:

-> “why wasn’t this book listed?” probably because it wasn’t black sapphic-centric, the author isn’t a black sapphic themself, or i just simply haven’t heard of it! so feel free to add on if it meets those two criteria

many of these books require trigger warnings, especially some of the older ones that are more likely to feature racial struggles of the time. please do your due diligence and search for tws if you want to read them!

please feel free to add onto this list in the rbs or comments! happy black history month

[headspace-hotel]

One of the books I recommend everybody to read is Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It rewired my brain and I mean that in a really physical, tactile way.

One of the main topics of the book is Indigenous Australian information technologies. Indigenous Australians don't use written language. They have different information technologies. Not inferior. Different. Yunkaporta demonstrates the very basics of how these technologies work, and you immediately feel your brain do something you had no idea it could do.

It feels like he's walking inside your house, gesturing to a wall that was always there, and then walking right through it, demonstrating that the wall was never there in the first place.

In a written-language-based society, children grow up learning to communicate by written language, and it shapes the way their thoughts and memories work. But there are other information technologies that work very, very differently than how written language works. The very idea of ideas is fundamentally different.

The author re-iterates that writing these things down into a book mutilates the idea because writing makes you think and understand a certain way.

I think everyone should read this book because basically everyone is brainwashed nowadays to believe that human cultures follow a linear progression from being dirty cave men in the woods, to settled agriculture, cities and written language, to smelting iron and writing on paper...and it's totally wrong.

Some cultures used writing, others didn't. Writing is not a "later stage" of "advancement," it is just a different technology, and it has advantages and disadvantages.

Same with agriculture. Yunkaporta explains that there were indigenous Australian people that tried settled agriculture in the distant past, but that culture collapsed. The ecosystem just isn't good for settled agriculture.

Same with metal working. Something that pisses me off is people calling indigenous North American cultures "stone age." First of all, they made plenty of things out of copper. Second of all, they didn't NEED bronze or iron. Mining is back breaking, dangerous work, and smelting involves so many unhealthy fumes. Maybe the labor and impact upon society and the environment just wasn't worth it for them.

Colonization has made a monoculture of thought. Monoculture is in the essence of colonialism. Not only does colonialism literally replace diverse agricultural ecosystems with sameness, it also replaces human diversity with sameness.

And replacing human diversity with sameness, enforces sameness upon the ecosystem, because everyone is forced into using the same machines, consuming the same resources, valuing the same aesthetics, eating the same foods, playing the same sports, raising the same animals, wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses.

Just think about it. If two cultures live next to each other and have different cultural foods and clothes, for example one eats fish and berries and wears wool and the other eats chickens and roots and wears linen, their foraging and agricultural practices are different, so more biodiversity can exist, and they aren't using the same resources, so the resources are more sustainable. If EVERY culture eats the same food and wears the same clothes, they are all putting strain on the same resources, and every area will have the same agro-ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity.

[tineiya]

[genderoutlaws]

Never read Baldwin before?

Nonfiction

The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)

The Fire Next Time (pdf download)

Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)

Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)

The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)

Fiction

Giovanni's Room (pdf download)

If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)

BONUS

Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)

Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)

Another Country (pdf and epub download)

Sonny's Blues (pdf download)

Going to Meet the Man (pdf download)

[creatingblackcharacters]

My next Black History Month request:

Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!

[soracities]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[paper-mario-wiki]

HEY wanna read but annoyed on where to find copies of books?

Here's an archive with millions of PDFs of books and papers and magazines and essays and stuff.

[meltedgarment]

I've been looking for such archives, thanks

[fealty-to-thee]

you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).

i was not going to publish this essay because i don’t like to yell but here the fuck i am.

the first link broke, here you go