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I write less here on this blog than I used to. The conversation I am having is mostly with myself. When my son calls and asks how I am—when friends ask—I have no news, no funny anecdotes, I am mostly absent. Perched on the edge.

I am reading, I am writing, I am reading more. I am reading memoirs or novels that might have been memoirs or books on the meaning of story. Eileen Myles (Chelsea Girls). Alison Bechdel (Are You My Mother?). Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts and Bluets). Decca Aitkenhead (All At Sea). Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness). Heidi Julavits (The Folded Clock). Ta-Nehesi Coates (again). Claudia Rankine (again). Joan Silber (The Art of Time in Fiction).

Every time I slip inside these books I am living, for a spell, as other. Walking, as they say, in others' shoes.

The news is crisis. It is a madness that requires us to absent ourselves from ourselves so that we might occupy the heart and mind of others. White. Blue. Black. Whatever color it is: take your own off, put another on, and see. Feel. Think.

Two weeks ago I taught memoir to a group of six who, in their glorious differences, were gorgeously one. Tonight we will have dinner with friends who know and love us. In between I am seeking, in the books I read, a path toward greater empathy and knowing. So that when I return to me I'll be bigger than I was. More capable of making some kind of earthly difference.

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No other series at Marvel has been promoted better this year than this week’s new release, Black Panther. That’s a statement I never thought I would make! When the publisher tapped popular author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic) to write the series, Marvel took advantage of the opportunity to create a comic that could reach more […]

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Blogs are dead, everybody knows it, the tweet spread the news long ago. Nobody reads blogs anymore. These days it’s all Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and short, short, short.

I get it, I do. We’re all feeling the time squeeze.

But because I’m childishly oppositional, I refuse to give up my blog. And I’m keeping my 8-Tracks, too. I started this blog back in 2008, so we’ve become attached. I like to have readers, but I’m not sure I really need them. It wouldn’t stop me from writing. There’s something about the open-ended blog format that offers room to spread out and say things, however long it takes. Whether anyone listens or not.

My pal, illustrator Matthew Cordell, used to blog with enthusiasm. One of his recurring features was his monthly-ish “Top Ten” lists, where Matt randomly listed some of his recent enthusiasms. It could be a song, a book, a movie, or a type of eraser (Matt was weird about erasers). It was always fun to read.

So I’m stealing it.

Here are ten things I’ve recently loved:

 

THE ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME AND MUSEUM

I visited Cleveland with my son, Gavin, to check out Case Western Reserve University. The following day, we headed over to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which was spectacular in every way. (Except for: The Red Hot Chili Peppers? Really?) I’m a huge music fan, so it was perfect for me. I found the museum strangely moving in parts, my heart touched. I could see that rock music was big enough, and diverse enough, to offer a home to people from every walk of life.

CARRY ME HOME by Diane McWhorter

Amazing, fascinating, and at times brutal Pulitzer Prize-winning book that’s stayed with me long after the last page. It provides a dense, detailed account of the civil rights struggle centered in Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King, the Klu Klux Klan, Fred Shuttlesworth, George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Kennedy, Bull Conner, and more. One of those books that helps you understand America.

FAN MAIL . . . WITH ILLUSTRATIONS!

I’ve been ridiculously fortunate in my career, in that I’ve received a lot of fan mail across the past twenty years. But I have to admit, I especially like it when those letters include a drawing. There’s just something about children’s artwork that slays me, every time. This drawing is by Rida in Brooklyn.

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This book has been on my list almost since the day it came out — the buzz was instantaneous, and huge — but on a tip from a friend, I waited for the audiobook to become available through my library. Here, Ta-Nehisi Coates gives a powerful reading. It’s poignant to listen to an author reading his own words, particularly since this book is essentially a letter to his son.

“WINTER RABBIT,” a poem by Madeleine Comora

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We’re not here to bash Jack Prelutsky. Because, after all, Jack Prelutsky is hilarious. But, but, but. There are times when I worry that too many people think children’s poetry begins and ends with Mr. Prelutsky. That a poem for kids always has to be bouncy and fast and slight and funny, i.e., Prelutsky-ish. Well, here’s a poem I came across while reading Oh, No! Where Are My Pants? and Other Disasters: Poems, unerringly edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins. I admire the heartfelt, beautiful sorrow of Comora’s poem. “I thought of his last night alone/huddled in a wire home./I did not cry. I held him close,/smoothed his fur blown by the wind./For a winter’s moment, I stayed with him.” The illustration is  by Wolf Erlbruch. Click on the poem if your eyes, like mine, need larger type.

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

I’m so grateful that I live near a cool, little movie theater that makes room for small foreign films such as this, a mind-blowing look at life on the Amazon, spectacularly filmed in black-and-white. Click here for more details.

THE AMERICANS

My wife Lisa and I don’t watch hours of TV together, but we do like to have a show we can share. We’ve been a loss for a few months, but recently discovered season one of “The Americans” on Amazon Prime. We’re hooked.

DAVID BROMBERG: “SAMMY’S SONG”

We have tickets to see Bromberg this coming weekend. He’s an old favorite of mine, first saw him in 1980 on Long Island. I’ve just rediscovered “Sammy’s Song,” which I haven’t heard in decades. What a chilling coming-of-age story, brilliantly performed. Oh, about that harmonica part? That’s Dave’s pal, Bob Dylan, with an uncredited guest turn.

JIGSAW JONES

I just finished writing my first Jigsaw Jones book after a long time away. For many years, Scholastic had allowed the series to die on the vine, with book after book slowly going out of print. It’s been a crushing thing for me to stand by helplessly and watch. But with the help of my agent, I got back the rights, and now Macmillan has plans to relaunch the series. I am thrilled. There are more than 10 million copies of those books out there in world, and it seems like every second-grade classroom in America has a ragged copy or three. Writing the new book, The Case from Outer Space, was such a pleasure. It felt like being home again.

THE DAY THE ARCS ARRIVE

For an author, it’s a special day, always, always. That book you’ve been toiling over for months, years, finally arrives in book form. Uncorrected, unfinished, but for the first time you can hold it in your hands — a book! — and think, “I did that!” Note: Arc = Advanced Reader’s Copy. The Courage Test, a middle grade novel, will be out for real in September.

BONUS SELECTION . . .

THE BARKLEY MARATHONS

I love documentaries of almost any nature, but I can’t recommend this one highly enough. A pure joy, with twinkling mischievous wit and surprising heart, too. If you like running at all — or not! — see this movie. About the toughest, wildest, and weirdest race in the world. Catch it on Netflix Instant!

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The winners have been announced for this year’s NAACP Image Awards. The organization honored entertainers, filmmakers, movies, television shows, music, writers and works of literature.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the winners were revealed during a ceremony hosted by actor Anthony Anderson. We’ve posted the full list of winning book titles below. (via The Wrap)

2016 NAACP Image Award Winners (Literature Categories)

Outstanding Literary Work – Fiction: Stand Your Ground by Victoria Christopher Murrary (Touchstone)

Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction: Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga by Pamela Newkirk (HarperCollins/Amistad)

Outstanding Literary Work – Debut Author: The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown & Company)

Outstanding Literary Work – Biography/ Auto-Biography: Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)

Outstanding Literary Work – Instructional: Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family by Alice Randall & Caroline Randall Williams (Clarkson Potter)

Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry: How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes (Penguin Books / Penguin Random House)

Outstanding Literary Work – Children: Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Jamey Christoph (Albert Whitman & Company)

Outstanding Literary Work – Youth/Teens: X: A Novel by Ilyasah Shabazz & Kekla Magoon (Candlewick Press)

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Sometimes, as the first day of a new semester begins at Penn, I think of how very close I came to saying no to this opportunity all those years ago.

It would have been one of the greatest mistakes of my life.

And so, again, on this bitter cold day, we begin. We're focused on home this semester. We're reading Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, George Hodgman's Bettyville, and Ta-Nahesi Coates's Between the World and Me, not to mention John Hough on dialogue and countless excerpts (countless as of now, anyway, because I can never tell what's going to inspire me before and during class). We'll be tapping into the new Wexler Studio—recording some of our work. We'll be laying the groundwork for the Beltran evening on March 1—all invited—during which time we'll be visited by my writing friends (and worldly talents) Reiko Rizzuto, A.S. King, and Margo Rabb. We'll hear from former students. We'll write letters to the people in our lives, in Mary-Louise Parker and Ta-Nahesi style.

And today, if all the machines are working, we'll start out with this.

I can't tell you why or how we'll use it.

You'll just have to imagine.

Meanwhile, before any of that, I get to share an hour with Nina and David, who will be writing their theses with me.

How lucky I am.

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Having trouble tracking down the right gifts for the bibliophiles in your life? In the video embedded above, The Fault in Our Stars author John Green shares his choices for a “book giving guide for the holidays.”

Green named titles from a variety of different genres including Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña, and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. For more recommendations from Green, follow these links to watch his Vlogbrothers videos on “18 great books you probably haven’t read” and “a gift giving guide for nerdfightastic readers.”

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Barnes & Noble has unveiled its “Best Books of 2015″ picks.

Some of the titles include The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Last Ever After by Soman Chainani, and Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard. The bookseller’s list features several different categories such as “Bestselling Books with Staying Power,” “Books That Will Make You Laugh,” and “Hoping for a Movie.”

Here’s more from the press release: “Spanning serious literature to pop culture sensations, the nation’s largest retail bookseller and a leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products has identified the books that got people talking, debating, laughing, imagining and reading through the night…Barnes & Noble has compiled this year’s lists based on proprietary criteria, most notably the trendspotting expertise of its booksellers in nearly 650 stores nationwide who converse daily with customers.”

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I bought two copies of Between the World and Me, the Ta-Nehisi Coates National Book Award winner, this famed letter to a son. One for me and one for my nephew Owen, with whom I stood, not long ago, on the Yale campus during commencement. We were there in celebration of Owen's sister. The crowd had settled and was waiting. During the pause a near stranger accosted first me and then (this was my fault) Owen with her singular world view. It was hard, she said, to be a white man in today's world. It was hard. In fact, it was terrible.

Politely, with economical urgency, my nephew offered his perhaps not. Perhaps being a white man in this world is not the hardest thing to be. Perhaps, he said, laying out the logic.

I love my nephew. He teaches me many things— Rubik's cubes and emoji and a recipe for tortilla soup. But I love most the conversations between the funny stuff, the glimpses of serious that we allow ourselves, the guy he was at Yale that day, dissuading Privilege from her ideas about wronged privilege. And so I bought me a copy of Coates and I bought Owen a copy of Coates, and I suggested that we together read.

"Book club of two!" Owen declared. Indeed.

Between the World and Me is fearless in its construction, damning in its accounting, a sandblasting of "Dreamer" ideology, a history of racecraft. It is deliberately bold, self-awareishly extreme, the sort of testimony that rocks readers from a long sleep:

Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.

Body is the word here. Living inside a black body is the question, the experience, the theme, the springboard from which Coates tells the story of his own coming into awareness as a quester, as a young man whose father beat him so that he might be strong, as a Howard University student who left the classroom for the library and found his heart inside The Mecca, as a friend whose friend was wrongly gunned down, as a father, as a husband, as an excursionist to Paris. Yes, Paris, beautifully rendered here.

Bracing and blunt, Between the World and Me is a missile launched toward the heart of comfortable ideas. It is a cry out from a place of long darkness:

Do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. 

But here in these pages readers will also find the salve of knowledge, the power of curiosity, and the potentiality of language—learned and deployed.

I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago—the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth—loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions—beautiful writing rarely is.... Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.

Dear Book Club of Two member: I want to know your thoughts.

Dear World, Dear Privilege: We are standing on the precipice. Narrow, excluding points of view will not, cannot save us.

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The Amazon editors have revealed their picks for Best Books of 2015. According to the press release, 22 debut authors were selected for the Top 100 Books of the Year list.  Follow this link to see the full list of 100 titles.

We’ve listed the top 10 books below. In addition to a general list, the Amazon team has also put together “top 20 lists in over two-dozen categories.” Did any of your favorites make the cut?

Amazon Editors’ Top 10 Books of 2015

1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

3. Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt

4. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

5. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

6. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

8. Purity by Jonathan Franzen

9. Hold Still by Sally Mann

10. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

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There is no matter more important in the United States right now than the matter of race. Between mass incarceration, permanent economic disadvantages, lack of access to health care and education, police shootings and the rise of overt racism it’s never been clearer that there are two Americas, and if you’re black, you don’t get […]

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I could say that Between the World and Me, a piercing exploration of race in America, is a book that is timely and important. There's no doubt that it is. But it also has a purity and intensity that demands it be read. I cannot think of another book in recent memory so powerful, so [...]

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Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

I thought of my favorite Langston Hughes poem, "Let American Be America Again" while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's extraordinary new essay at The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations" (for which we should just give Coates the Pulitzer right now):

If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one’s ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’s body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Read the whole essay. If you're a U.S. citizen, or even not, it's unlikely you'll read anything more important today.

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