What I'm Reading: 'The Souls of Black Folk' by W.E.B. Du Bois

Nothing about this book was easy. It was written in a very different era, and if my aborted attempts at reading Feminist literature have taught me anything, it's that there is nothing more difficult than reading dated social science. That being said, The Souls of Black Folk is still and probably always will be a hallmark of American Civil Rights literature, and I'm glad I struggled through it.

I was motivated by the Library of Congress' 'Books That Shaped America' list; I'm not necessarily interested in reading every book on the list ( I feel no need to read anything by Ralph Nader, for example), but there is a lot of important American literature and non-fiction on the list that I feel a sense of obligation to read. Plus, after Uncle Tom's Cabin, everything feels like a breeze.

Many folks are thinking about writers of color and the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement; I've seen so many literary blogs resolving to bring greater diversity to their reading habits this year and while that's not officially one of my reading resolutions this year, it's certainly on my mind, and I'm happy to say that there are much more contemporary and relevant books on Civil Rights that I'll be posting about in the coming weeks.

#ReadWomen2014 Non-Fiction: 'The History of White People' by Nell Irvin Painter

I've had to enjoy Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People via the Audible app on my phone; I was way too embarrassed to buy the book because visitors frequently browse my bookshelves at home, and I wouldn't want anyone seeing this title and giving me side-eye. It is not actually a history of white people at all, but a history of "white people," i.e. a history of the notion of whiteness and race, starting with the Greeks and moving all the way to the United States in the twentieth century. I've found it to be a really good non-fiction follow-up to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which left me with a lot of frustrations and questions. I also found it a particularly appropriate read (unfortunately) as I watched the news coverage of recent events in Ferguson.

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Revisiting the Classics: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Each and every chapter of this book has been a monumental struggle for me; technically I've been listening to it with a free audio book app on my iPhone (whether or not listening to audio books counts as reading is not a topic I want to unravel today). Even halfway listening to it while doing my normal work has been difficult. It's hard to motivate yourself to listen to a book that is blatantly racist when you have new episodes of Radiolab in queue. However, if you, like me, are determined to get through it, the audio book is a great option, because if I were actually reading the text I would certainly have given up a long time ago.

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