Tag: bell hooks

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New Year, Old Books

SHE LIT: New Year, Old Books 🥳

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Out of the 16 books below, I’ve only read seven 📚😬

Books with red covers by female authors on the shelit.com bookshelf.

Staying relevant as a book blogger by still reading new books, rediscovering old books

Happy 2023! Champagne clinks and literary links ushered in the new year. Innovating shelit.com for another year means thinking more about the blog’s future and purpose.

Like many readers, my library has expanded beyond its limits, multiplying on several shelves and already outgrowing those spaces. I love buying books from thrift stores, used bookstores, new bookstores, book festivals, library fairs, yard sales, garage sales, estate sales. Anywhere a book can be bought, I bought it.

The urge became more important when I noticed books by Black women on sale, sometimes a rare sight, a revelation I learned from The Free Black Women’s Library Los Angeles. Books by Black women are usually not uplifted online or in the bricks-and-mortar as much as they could be. Neither are books by women of Indigenous, Latine, and Asian descent.

Young adult author Kalynn Bayron shared her disdain for walking into a bookstore that promoted books by BookTokers and noticing only one out of the 10 books was by a non-Black author of color. Diversity is still a problem in the publishing industry in many aspects, especially when it comes to fewer marketing dollars being given to non-celebrity authors of color.

While I’ve been collecting gems by female authors, I also haven’t been reading as many books as I want. As a book blogger promoting new books for search engine optimization and overall audience boost, I ignored most of my books in favor of buying new books, getting new books from publishers, and checking new books out from the library.

Books were piling up like I hadn’t learned anything from Christine Platt’s The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less where she offers the viewpoint of having too much stuff to meet a Eurocentric society’s desire for excess. Or when Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace advised on how to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not working and reflect on how to make things work for you. So, I have too many books that will take me years to read. And I need to refocus my love for books on forgotten treasures while still checking on the over-marketed new books, especially if they’re written by a woman of color. #PublishingPaidMe is still relevant today as it was in 2020.

I have read books in the last year that I want to share more with readers who may not have known about the book or maybe never had the chance to read it. One example is Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, which I bought from Myopic Books in Chicago. Another is bell hooks’ Bone Black. Both had been on my bookshelf for a while, so it felt gratifying to finally read these great works by great authors and discuss those stories.

More bookish outlets are also trying to elevate older works like Belletrist’s 2021 book club selection with Tananarive Due’s The Between, which was originally published in 1995. That book is also on my bookshelf. Thanks to the Ladera Heights Goodwill Store in Los Angeles for that find.

Books from previous years and even decades still need our support and attention. The marketing problem is a historic problem, where books by women, particularly women of color, got lost in the mix among Harry Potter-type fantasies, mysteries by men, and celebrity memoirs, just to name a few. I look forward to sharing my library and love for curation this year by discovering works that deserve to be rediscovered.

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What we’re highlighting

2023 forecasted to be a rough year for books

The spike in book bans spreading from school libraries to big-box retailers over the debate of what’s appropriate in children’s literature is considered to be a major factor in the book sales slump, according to end-of-year media reports. Mostly works by non-White authors and LGBTQ+ authors are at the center of these book bans.

How the publishing industry markets books was one of the insider secrets the public received during last year’s blockbuster trial between the U.S. Department of Justice and Penguin Random House over the publisher’s proposed merger with Simon & Schuster. A federal judge blocked the merger in October. PRH’s global CEO stepped down. Authors and readers alike worried about the Big Five becoming the Big Four. Most of the books we tell you about are from Penguin Random House, as you will notice linked below in other news.

Publishing industry employees going on strike echoed all last year. The only major unionized publisher, HarperCollins, went on strike in November. Workers are still on strike, according to updates to the union’s Twitter feed. They claim that “untrained temps” will be hired to replace them to edit stories, design covers, and promote books. This week, the union asked the publisher’s CEO to return to the negotiation table to end the strike. The employees are demanding mostly fair wages to live in the publishing megalopolis of New York City.

Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry sold less than one quarter of the first week print sales of her 2018 memoir Becoming, the NPD Group found, as the Forever First Lady’s book had a massive book tour with rock concert audiences (and prices) and still became a No. 1 best-seller. The NPD Group also noted Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home by the global superstar organizer ranked as low as No. 4,742 on Amazon.com upon its release, as reported by The New York Times. The reason for the lower book sales: The industry is trying to rebound from the pandemic highs. And a recession is looming.

Ketanji Brown Jackson announces upcoming memoir

The first Black female Supreme Court justice will write about her journey to the highest court. Titled Lovely One for the translation of her West African name, Justice Jackson plans to discuss her upbringing in Miami and her advancement in Big Law as a mother, a wife, and a Black woman. Publisher Random House has not shared a release date.

“Mine has been an unlikely journey,” she said in a statement from Random House. “But the path was paved by courageous women and men in whose footsteps I placed my own, road warriors like my own parents, and also luminaries in the law, whose brilliance and fortitude lit my way.”

Celebrity-helmed book clubs select January picks

What we’re reviewing

From Scratch Episode Recaps

Luckiest Girl Alive Film Makes Character’s Traumas Leap Off the Page

What we’re watching

Kindred on FX Hulu

Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel Kindred has been adapted to the screen with an eight-episode series streaming now on Hulu via FX. The story follows a Black woman living in modern-day Los Angeles who keeps getting transported to antebellum Maryland. She ends up saving her White ancestor as a child and embarks on a journey of fighting for her freedom physically on the plantation and mentally in order to return to her present life. Our book review can be found here.

Want your book and bookish news to be featured? Write us at shewrites@shelit.com.

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book reviews

Book Review: ‘Bone Black’ by bell hooks

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood by bell hooks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bone Black by bell hooks is a raw narrative of a Black girl navigating a world that seems to not be able to accept who she is.

bell hooks’ girlhood memoir starts in the countryside of Kentucky where the author is given a keepsake from her late grandmother and sensing the talk around why she gets the beaded purse when she wasn’t her grandmother’s favorite, nor her mother’s favorite. The book opens with a foreword emphasizing how the author’s behavior as a Black girl among six daughters and a son in a poor family came off as rebellious as she pushed against the frustration her family felt for not being able to understand her behavior.

She was sent to bed without dinner. She was told to stop crying, to make no sound or she would be whipped more. No one could talk to her and she could talk to no one. She could hear him telling the mama that the girl had too much spirit, that she had to learn to mind, that that spirit had to be broken.

The main theme throughout the memoir is the loneliness she feels within her family. She is considered the bad girl in the house, and that accusation eats away at her though she tries to conceal it through finding her comfort in raising her voice. She asks her family for a Black doll. Instead of happiness that she wants a doll that looks like her, she’s met with aggression; the White dolls are cheaper and easier to find. But somehow she gets her Black doll, Baby. This example shows bell’s young self fighting for what she wants, something that shouldn’t be a hassle, but her family processes her asking for a Black doll as a hassle. And those conflicting perspectives make bell look like the “problem child.”

She wants to express herself—to speak her mind. To them it is just talking back. Each time she opens her mouth she risks punishment. They punish her so often she feels they persecute her.

Backtalk is a cornerstone of one of her books, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , that explores the concept as a way to silence people, especially people of color, who have been taught to stay quiet and not talk to others with equal authority. In her memoir, her family targets her for backtalk, but she feels she’s just expressing her thoughts. Because of her tongue, her family brands her in essence an “old soul,” or how she puts it as an “old woman born again in a young girl’s body.” How she speaks seems to scare her family, according to her, to the point she is believed to be a witch. That leads to her being given a book of fairy tales that describe old female characters as cannibalistic and evil. But a book in her hands transports her to another world, a world where she doesn’t have to be with her family. And reading so much inspires her to start writing.

Loneliness brings me to the edge of what I know. My soul is dark like the inner world of the cave—bone black. I have been drowning in that blackness. Like quicksand it sucks me in and keeps me there in the space of all my pain.

The color black is a recurring theme. Not necessarily about race, but more about the darkness she feels as being treated like she’s too different to understand. “Bone black” is a color she learns about in art class. She defines it as “a black carbonaceous substance obtained by calcifying bones in closed vessels.” To burn bones into ash is like disappearing altogether. Her art teacher allows her to paint with all the black she wants. Her mother doesn’t allow her to wear black because it’s a color only for women. bell rebels against this notion, but it becomes a point of contention between her and her mother. While her mother may not think it’s appropriate for a girl to wear black, bell thinks she should be able to express herself the way she wants.

Overall, the memoir, told mostly in third person, observes everyday acts and unpeels the trauma of a Black girl trying to use her voice when it’s restrained by others. The restraint becomes overwhelming, as in she knows her faith in believing her voice could be stomped out, and that conjures feelings of invisibility and unimportance. Instead of her voice being valued, it’s devalued with her family saying she’s too weird, incomprehensible. Though it’s set in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Kentucky, the pain points of being misunderstood, being silenced, being depressed, being poor, being female, being Black resonate beyond its time, unfortunately since these issues remain commonplace for many children in American households. The writing is simple, but every word conveys more meaning than what meets the eye.

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