Uterish Book Club Picks of the Year 2020
Did you tune in every month and read our Uterish Book Club Picks on The Provocateur? Is this the first you are hearing of it? Welcome to our full round-up of each book we selected and wrote about on The Provocateur, our monthly newsletter, in 2020!
JANUARY
Alex and Greta’s Pick —
In The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove grows up with the tangible presence of white-supremacist beauty standards and gendered expectations. As Pecola comes to understand the anti-Black conditions of the world around her, so too does the reader uncover life in the United States through Pecola’s unique eyes. (cw: racism, sexual violence, violence in general, incest...we suggest a quick google before buying if you have any triggers)
Alex: I first read The Bluest Eye promptly upon finishing Beloved. As with all of Toni Morrison’s works, the book seems to reveal more and more upon each new reading. I have been struck each read by how Pecola’s position as a child grants her character a perspective unlike that of many other protagonists in contemporary literature. Her traumas compel the reader to grapple with complicity, positionality, and processes of internalizing racism/sexism/etc. The Bluest Eye remains my favorite Morrison work and a book that I suspect will never stop opening my eyes. I just think that all feminists throughout time must read this book, ASAP.
Greta: Beloved was the first Morrison book I ever read, and I was sure it had to be her best. What shocked me upon reading The Bluest Eye for the first time was that Toni Morrison was able to produce another book of the same quality, with the same level of genius, yet that takes on a completely different tone. I absolutely agree with Alex’s comment about the use of childhood, and would add that while other books tend to use a child’s perspective to close-in the worldview, in this one, reading through a child’s view only serves to expand the universe. I am astounded, completely, by Morrison’s use of language. To my eyes, this book is largely concerned with the utility, force, deconstruction of, and power inherent in language, and attempts in itself to remake it altogether.
FEBRUARY
Allie’s Pick —
Told from alternating perspectives, Normal People’s central project is to reveal the complexities and layers of a modern relationship, keeping a focused eye on how gender, privilege, family, and mental health work to bring people together and apart. Each chapter jumps forward in time, skipping days or even months ahead––Rooney chooses to omit some of the most pivotal moments, instead opting to dwell on the aftermath. For the reader, this framing is infuriating: while reading Normal People I wanted to know everything that occurred between the two main characters. But the gaps in the story are Rooney’s reminders of the unknowability of relationships, even to the people inside them. Although Rooney’s writing develops these two entangled lives, it is her silences which truly give dimension to the characters, allowing them to exist beyond the grasp of the reader.
MARCH
Alex’s Pick —
This month’s book club pick is our first graphic novel and probably unlike any other book we’ve recommended so far. Your Black Friend delivers an eccentric ode to anarchy, apocalypse, and nihilism saturated in dark comedy and pastel colors. Sometimes creator Ben Passmore appears within the text and sometimes his characters are otherworldly and/or non-human.
Even though its graphic novel format might suggest that Your Black Friend is an easy read, Passmore weaves complex layers of references, critiques, and theories throughout the colorful pages. Your Black Friend is for everyone but it contains a direct address, a challenge, and a call to reflection for white readers, in particular. Passmore’s highly political, majorly funny, and visually stunning book is a lively addition for your shelter in place reading list.
APRIL
Greta’s Pick —
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard investigates how a person might disintegrate the separation between themselves and the natural world. It is a sharp, calming, gorgeous, and clever ledger of Dillard’s relationship with the world around her house. The writing is impeccable (it won the Pulitzer for a reason), and it is also an excellent quarantine read. Early on in the book, Dillard describes looking at a tree and suddenly perceiving it through negative space alone, as a “tree with the lights in it,” emblazoned from the setting sun behind it. The entire book is a search for this change in perspective, to find delight in the ordinary.
MAY
Alex’s Pick —
In The Undying, Anne Boyer presents an anti- cancer narrative: a narrative against the archetypal cancer stories of tragic martyrs or triumphant fighters. Instead, Boyer leans into the complexity of her relationship to cancerous growths, cancer medicine, and cancer culture. Boyer was diagnosed with Triple Negative breast cancer in 2014. She was quickly thrown into a world of wig-shopping, maxed-out sick leave, pink ribbons, unsolicited “cures” on online message boards, neoliberal “cancer journeys,” and chemotherapy drugs that often seemed more toxic than the cancer itself.
As a book, The Undying is interested in the problem of writing about the experience of cancer. So, Boyer looks to other literature to find language around pain, un/dying, and illness. In some parts, The Undying is a ruthless interrogation of the hoax of the cancer industry, and in other parts, a poetic treatise on the space of the sick bed. Throughout the whole book, Boyer considers the gendered experience of having breast cancer and being a body in the medical establishment. Boyer doesn’t hold back in The Undying, and the result is a raw, thoughtful, and intimate account of illness.
“Women with cancer are often forced to watch themselves dissolve, lamentable objects intolerable as lamenting ones, witnesses to everyone else’s sad stories but socially corrected as soon as a sadness issues from their own mouths.” (excerpt from the book)
JUNE
Alex’s Pick —
It almost feels like Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote Beyond Survival specifically for 2020. The book lays out practical applications of transformative justice -- a justice praxis that addresses individual harm through community accountability rather than punitive, carceral systems. Beyond Survival turns to the wisdom of transformative justice organizers across generations to present a clear, hopeful, and imaginative vision of the future. The diverse essays throughout the book work to challenge, expand, and inspire transformative justice in our communities. Beyond Survival almost reads like a workbook, each page a provocation to re-examine our own lives and the way we lead them.
As a text deeply concerned with mutual aid, justice, abolition, and societal transformation, Beyond Survival could not be more relevant. Each chapter explores abolitionist approaches and dense political terminology, but does so in a thoroughly accessible way. The pages are steeped in radical love, community care, and passion for a more just, safe world. Beyond Survival offers a rare moment of joy and uplift while critically interrogating systemic injustices.
“Beyond Survival. The title is poetic. Recursive. Survival already means to live beyond. Beyond what? Beyond disasters, systemic or interpersonal. Beyond the halted breathing of our ancestors. Beyond yesterday. And five minutes ago. Beyond that.” -- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Foreword from the book
JULY
Greta’s Pick —
All About Love recognizes our society for what it is: imbued with binaries, division, and difference. Writing from this climate, bell hooks decides that we as a culture are woefully unprepared to talk about––and unprepared to practice––love. She begins the book by writing how our popular conceptualization of love posits it as a noun, which is limiting. Only by thinking of love as a verb can we begin to utilize it as a fundamental function for social change. hooks applies what she calls a “love ethic” to different aspects of society, from childhood to education to literature, writing that love is antithetical to capitalism and ultimately a political force in and of itself.
image from @yungbrujobooks
AUGUST
Hannah’s Pick —
Forty Million Dollar Slaves takes readers through a history of the Black athlete, from jockeys on Southern plantations in the 1700s to Jack Johnson’s legendary defeat of James Jeffries to become the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion. Rhoden argues that the “plantation mindset” has been preserved at the heart of American professional sports, a stark example of the obsession that wealthy white people have with controlling Black bodies. Though the book was published in 2006, some of its messages seem to be particularly relevant to 2020. As the “Black Lives Matter” movement grows, Black athletes have made powerful social justice stances, from the recent week of strikes spearheaded by WNBA and NBA to NASCAR banning the usage of the Confederate flag. Through Rhoden’s work, readers gain historical context to understand the magnitude of how modern Black activist-athletes are pushing back against a system insistent on destroying their bodies, restricting the growth of their personal brands, and manipulating their public image.
SEPTEMBER
Alex’s Pick —
Jenny Offill’s second novel Weather is steeped in the pervasive dread, anxiety, and slow-moving disaster that together define our current moment. Offill gracefully shows us how apocalypse and mundanity exist simultaneously in our lives, producing a constant state of fear about the next disaster around the corner. In Weather, the protagonist Lizzie Benson faces crises such as right-wing tyranny in government, a loved one’s substance abuse, unaffordable health care, and climate change. The power of Weather is in how Offill reminds us that these disasters, however familiar and seemingly quotidian, are just as emergent and catastrophic as our anxiety tells us. The apocalypse is already here.
OCTOBER
Alex’s Pick —
Gingerbread is a fairy tale. But even with that disclaimer, the story eludes any preconceived idea on the part of the reader. Rather than following a familiar narrative arc, Oyeyemi’s readers are forced to plod forward confusedly as uncommon twists and unforeseen turns unravel a one-of-a-kind plot. Experientially, the reader feels like they are constantly missing something, and that’s precisely what makes Gingerbread so whimsically refreshing and strangely rewarding. Rarely, can you pick up a book where the narrative itself, not the plot, takes you completely by surprise. Oyeyemi’s writing is warm and rich, just like the gingerbread that provides a throughline for the fantastical plot of the book. Uterish friend Cecilia recommended this book to me and now I am recommending it to you, so this is a doubly blessed endorsement.
NOVEMBER
Michael’s Pick —
Raven Leilani’s Luster is one of those books that I haven’t known how to describe, other than to fling it at people and demand that they just start it.
It is effortlessly funny, with a Black woman protagonist whose thoughts are full of little, incisive takedowns of all of the people in her life. She can get very mean, but she is always—speaking here as a generally cynical and self-deprecating person—concerningly relatable. Luster proves that smart, sophisticated writing can actually be accessible. You never have to work to understand what’s going on, and I really believe more books should be like that.
The part I admire most, though, is the way the plot of the book reverses itself. I won’t get too into it, but let’s just say that while in theory the book hinges around the unnamed protagonist’s affair with a married man, she quickly becomes far more connected to everyone else in that man’s family than to him.
DECEMBER
Greta’s Pick —
Exit West covers the lives of Saeed and Nadia, a couple who is forced to escape their unnamed city undergoing a civil war. The two of them discover that there are magical doors throughout the world, essentially portals, that will transmit them to a new place. Because of these doors, the book manages to be a story of migration without ever featuring travel. The experience of migration itself is condensed to a single point, and the story focuses instead on the lived experience of being noticeably “other.” Exit West is a beautiful, accessible, and thought-provoking read. I loved in particular the attention to relationships: how we see each other and want to be seen.