by Liao Yiwu
★★½
Mom & Me & Mom
(Maya Angelou’s Autobiography #7)
by Maya Angelou
This is not written in Maya’s voice. Her previous six autobiographies are among my favourite books. Mom & Me & Mom is largely a diminished retelling—of an incredible and heartening life.
Citizen: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
★★★
Farthing
(Small Change #1)
by Jo Walton
★★★★½
The Beggar Maid
by Alice Munro
★★
A Bestiary
by Lily Hoang
★★½
Mind of My Mind
(Patternmaster #2)
by Octavia E. Butler
★★★★
Balm
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
★★★
Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
★★★★
Another Country
by James Baldwin
★★★
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
by Madeleine Thien
★★½
Giovanni’s Room
by James Baldwin
★★★½
Wild Seed
(Patternmaster #1)
by Octavia E. Butler
★★★★★
The Conjoined
by Jen Sookfong Lee
★★
Best from the Past
Five-star books I read before I started methodically recording stats in 2016:
- All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
- All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou
- The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
- How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee
- I Know Why the Caged Bird
Bits from the Past
A few books I read before I started keeping track of read-dates, minus many Russians & classics:
★★★★½
- The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou
- In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
- The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir
- Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
Kaleidoskop: Kultur, Literatur Und Grammatik
by Jack R. Moeller, Winnie Adolph
Great intermediate textbook with reading, vocabulary, grammar notes, exercises, pictures.
Prego!: An Invitation to Italian
by Graziana Lazzarino, Andrea Dini, Maria Cristina Peccianti
Excellent balance of reading, vocab, grammar notes, exercises. I like a lot of reading and self-study and I got to a B1 level with this.