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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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How Juneteenth Became A Book Festival Holiday





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June is Pride Month! Join the #shelitbookclub with reading the recently banned young adult novel Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera 🏳️‍

Black authors still struggle to get recognized for their creative freedom

At the height of the racial justice movement in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Black authors started tweeting about their realities in the publishing industry.

Floyd, a Black man whose life is the subject of the new book His Name Is George Floyd by The Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, died after White police officer Derek Chauvin pinned his knee onto Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. A worldwide uprising followed people into their workplaces. Black authors like L.L. McKinney wanted to know how unfair pay can be for someone like her.

The A Blade So Black fantasy young adult author created the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag two years ago, where White authors were asked to share the amount of money they had been paid for their books. But Black authors and other authors of color began to share how they had been lowballed for their books. With more attention to the Black experience, L.L. McKinney started the Juneteenth Book Festival.

The festival, which was held in 2020 and canceled in 2021, played virtually on YouTube with authors such as Ashley Woodfolk, Mikki Kendall, and Nichole Perkins headlining panels. This year, the festival seemed to be offline; the last tweet posted in 2021 with L.L. being “on hiatus.” But in Portland, Oregon, Nanea Woods decided to have The Freadom Festival, the city’s first Black book festival this weekend.

“How we obtained our freedom has a lot to do with reading and literacy,” she told The Oregonian.

Juneteenth is the holiday many Black communities across the U.S. had been celebrating for generations to mark the official end of slavery when people who had been enslaved in Galveston, Texas, finally received the message in 1865 they were free. Over the racial uprising of 2020, the federal government moved to make Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021 observed on June 19. For many employees, this coming Monday is the first time Juneteenth is a paid day off.

We started the week with best-selling White male author James Patterson telling the U.K.’s The Sunday Times “that it is hard for white men to get writing gigs in film, theatre, TV or publishing.” This stirred debate on social media.

Many commented that most of the authors who make the best-sellers lists are White men such as Bill O’Reilly, David Sedaris, and Dan Pfeiffer, all sharing The New York Times Best-seller list for Hardcover Nonfiction with Patterson, who has the top spot with his eponymous memoir. Famous Black actress Viola Davis is the only woman and person of color in the top five this week with her memoir, Finding Me.

It should be common knowledge that non-White authors do not dominate the charts most of the time. In fact, many authors of color never see a publishing deal. And if they do, they’re not paid adequately, evidenced by #PublishingPaidMe. L.L. McKinney vowed this week to focus on the positive when it came to Patterson’s remarks.

“I been thinking about saying something on James Patterson for the past couple of days, but instead I’ve decided to talk more about books by BIPOC that I have written or that I have read/loved,” she tweeted Wednesday, mentioning Black, Indigenous, and people of color authors.

Patterson has since apologized. In 2020, data analysis group WordsRated found a record 26% of children’s best-sellers were written by Black authors. In 2021, that percentage fell to 18%, below the numbers in 2019. This shows there is a lot more work to do in the publishing industry.

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What we’re highlighting

Taking lessons on raising antiracist children this Father’s Day

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, who’s now made a career out of teaching the masses on how to be antiracist, has a new book in time for Father’s Day this Sunday. How To Raise An Antiracist follows his runaway hits How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby and focuses on how he turned away from thinking he had to shield his child from racism and decided to be a parent who teaches how to create a just world. The book is on sale now

LA’s oldest Black-owned bookstore closing

Eso Won Books, known as the main Black-owned bookstore in the Los Angeles area, will close its brick-and-mortar by the end of the year. Co-owner James Fugate recently made the announcement on The Tavis Smiley Podcast. The bookstore located in the predominantly Black Leimert Park neighborhood has been a fixture in the community for 33 years. More Black-owned bookstores have sprouted in LA over the last few years

What we’re reviewing

What we’re reading

What we’re watching

What’s lit around the web

James Patterson’s Claim That Racism Hampers White Men Is His Most Fictional Work Yet

Bernardine Evaristo Fears Publishers May Lose Interest in Black Authors

Why Food Can Be an Entry Point for Learning About Black History on Juneteenth
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Book Review: ‘Carefree Black Girls’ by Zeba Blay

Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Carefree Black Girls Zeba Blay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com

Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay examines how a viral hashtag focused on Black females living their truths forces the author to revisit periods of pop culture history where the notion of being a carefree Black girl actually comes with some hard truths.

Yet the culture that Black women pour talents and their creativity into, the culture that emulates Black women, steals from Black women, needs Black women, is the same culture that belittles Black women, excludes Black women, ignores Black women.

Culture critic Zeba Blay coined the phrase #carefreeblackgirl in 2013 as “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.” She studies how the hashtag evolved in the chapter “Free of Cares,” starting with a phrase of the early twentieth century: “I’m free, white, and 21!” This phrase became a Hollywood catchphrase between the 1920s and 1940s with Black journalists at the time criticizing the phrase as perpetuating White supremacy since being White equates freedom, which is the untrue experience to groups who are not considered White. Though the term falls out of vernacular, the author sees the phrase still play out today from Sex and the City to the modern-day Karens quick to call the police on anyone who’s Black. And even the phrase “carefree Black girl” takes a life of its own where it seems to easily be bestowed upon lighter-skinned, thin Black actresses such as Zendaya and Yara Shahidi while Black critics argue Black females will never have the comfort to be carefree in a Eurocentric society. The phrase even derives from fellow Black writer Collier Meyerson’s Tumblr blog called “Carefree White Girls” that featured White female celebrities from Taylor Swift to Zooey Deschanel who epitomize the “deification of white womanhood.”

The first chapter “Bodies” explores how the Black female body is berated constantly from the Middle Passage to the present. Lizzo and her body is the highlight of the chapter, particularly a moment in April 2020 when the pop star was twerking for a charity “dance-a-thon” hosted via social media by Diddy to raise money for people affected by COVID-19. Once Lizzo begins twerking, Diddy tells her to stop because the watchers need family-friendly entertainment, especially on Easter Sunday. Later in the Instagram live special, reality TV star Draya Michele, who’s thinner and lighter-skinned, begins twerking without any protest. Many think it’s fatphobic for Lizzo to be told to not twerk in public. Others berate Lizzo all the time for revealing her body on social media every chance she gets. The author also shows how Lizzo announced she would be participating in a smoothie detox and points out how White female fat-positive bloggers accused Lizzo of being fatphobic.

The conversation on Lizzo turns to the 1990s portrayal of Countess Vaughn on the hit show Moesha about a Black girl growing up in South Los Angeles. Countess played opposite pop star Brandy’s Moesha as best friend Kim Parker. Her weight becomes a constant punchline, many realize after reliving the show twenty years later when its August 2020 debut on Netflix alarms Black Twitter as tweeters share the collective disgust. The author even calls out the desexualization of fat Black women in entertainment. She points to the portrayal of Kelli, played by Natasha Rothwell, on HBO’s Insecure, where explicit sex scenes are a constant but never feature Kelli. The character talks about her sexual romps, but we never see them or meet her lovers. In the recent series finale, Kelli announces she’s having a baby with a character the audience barely knows because her romantic love growth is never shown on screen compared to the other three main female leads.

The author puts a recent moment like Lizzo’s twerking for COVID-19 relief under a microscope and another moment from a generation ago about Kim Parker’s treatment from her so-called friends on her weight. Then there’s self-reflection as the author views how hard it is to accept her own body thanks to the Eurocentric beauty standard where her body, Lizzo’s body, Countess’ body are unacceptable, and the fact that they are living in their body is too much for many people to accept.

In “Strong Black Lead” playing on Netflix’s name for Black programming, the author details her mental health struggles including suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts. (The book comes with a trigger warning in the beginning.) What she was going through materialized in her writings at the time as she pondered how she was really helping readers then with sharing her draining experiences. It makes her think of other Black women in her life who have struggled but are determined to “stay strong.” The strong Black female trope is examined with calling out somewhat beloved characters such as Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope on the Shonda Rhimes-helmed political TV drama Scandal to Viola Davis’ Aibileen Clark in the film The Help that many view as problematic with the White savior theme.

Overall, the book is like reading viral pop culture tweets coming from Black Twitter and getting the context that you may never think to reference as the reason why you would like such tweets. The content dives deeper with making comparisons between famous Black women living the height of celebrity now to those who lived at the height in yesteryears. The author shows how the battle is the same, rooted in underappreciation for the Black female’s talent whereas a non-Black female’s talent may receive better treatment over her weight, her age, her appearance. It’s amazing to see the author tie in so many current events with past events and pick them apart to study the relevance and the definition of being a carefree Black girl.

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Well-Read Black Girl Festival Recognizes Works Centering on Black Girlhood

Well-Read Black Girl marked five years with its annual book festival on Saturday centering on the theme of Black girlhood.

On Girlhood is the name of founder Glory Edim‘s second anthology released this week from the W. W. Norton & Company imprint Liveright featuring works from the literary organization’s library by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove.

The daylong event started with a prerecorded surprise message from former First Lady Michelle Obama, who opened up about the support she received from the Black female audience for her record-shattering memoir Becoming.

Keynote speaker Gabrielle Union discussed in-depth the themes underlying her latest autobiographical story collection You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories with Glory in a prerecorded conversation.

The collection is a follow-up to Gabrielle’s 2017 best-seller We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True. She said she learned from the “overwhelming” response from readers that there is a “desperate need for community and to be seen and understood and to be embraced by one another.”

“I left out a lot in the first book,” she said. “And as brave as folks thought I was and as revealing as folks thought I was, I knew that there was a lot I hadn’t healed enough from to include in that first book.”

Brene Brown’s podcast and TED talks on shame and vulnerability along with therapy helped her cope with the stories she wanted to share in her new book, she said.

“It logically just clicked; it made perfect sense. Then to see a shaman who said very similar things, and he was like, ‘Yo, Gab, what if what if your vulnerability is actually your superpower?” she said, adding, “You associate vulnerability with being weak and you feel that it is counterintuitive to just expose your full self to challenges, struggles, joys, all of it, random feelings. You feel like that’s giving the opposition the ammunition to take you out but really it’s sharpening your sword to tackle the world.”

Feeling more comfortable with the situations that made her who she is, Gabrielle said she has adopted a “zero fucks given” philosophy with age when it comes to sharing her stories and battling the haters. She turned 49 on Friday.

“When the chatter gets little louder and the folks around me are like, ‘Did you hear what so-and-so said?’ No one with a hot take on my family or me has ever been anyone I’ve admired or whose life I wanted to emulate,” she said.

She discusses in length the backstories behind some of her new book’s chapters. The she lit book review can be found here.

On Girlhood

For the On Girlhood panel, WRBG scholar-in-residence Bianca Williams moderated the conversation with Glory and Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature published by W. W. Norton.

“Nikki Rosa” a poem by Nikki Giovanni in the The Black Woman: An Anthology and Sula by Toni Morrison were the titles Farah said became inspiring Black girlhood works. Toni and Zora Neale Hurston defined the Black girlhood subgenre, she added.

“They both handled girlhood so well. They both gave us unforgettable Black girls,” she said. “Toni gave us Pecola and she also gives us Claudia and Frieda [The Bluest Eye] and Denver [Beloved], all of these Black girls. Janie [Their Eyes Were Watching God] is a girl, so we see ourselves as girls for the first time, fully dimensional in the work of Black women writers.”

Zeba Blay was the featured author for the On Carefree Black Girls panel. Her book Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture came out Oct. 19 from Macmillan imprint St. Martin’s Griffin. In conversation with Marjon Carlos, Zeba said she had to revisit her younger self who depended on the internet to collage images of Black women and inform her cultural understanding that led to her pop culture writing career.

“In writing this book, I was thinking a lot about my childhood, that younger Z who created the life I am living now and didn’t even know it,” she said. “I went through my old LiveJournal because that Live Journal was my life and I was astonished to see I was posting very similar mood boards in a different format.”

#BlackGirlMagic creator CaShawn Thompson discussed her children’s book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic edited by Lilly Workneh in partnership with edutainment publisher Rebel Girls. The book features stories for girls ages six and up on groundbreaking Black women like singer Aretha Franklin, tennis player Naomi Osaka, and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.

“Girlhood is a universal experience, but even in that, it happens in so many ways, so I had a real keen understanding after doing the work of putting this book together is that girlhood, much like womanhood, looks like a lot of different things, but it all leads us to who we eventually will become,” CaShawn said. “I felt like having a book that exposes the girls to the many ways that we show up would give them a wider and deeper breadth of what they can possibly become when they grow up.”

Festival sponsors include Rebel Girls, 4 Color Books, The New York Times, and HarperCollins Publishers along with partner indie bookstores Reparations Club in Los Angeles, Mahogany Books and Loyalty Bookstores in D.C., Café Con Libros in Brooklyn, and Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery in Chicago. Brooklyn-based Center for Fiction provided the space for the festival events.

WRBG announced this week it has partnered with podcast and audiobook producer Pushkin Industries for a podcast to debut in February 2022.