316 Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking

by Anya von Bremzen, 2013

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before.

This is the category for which I had the hardest time finding a selection. While I’ve eaten a number of different types of cuisines, I certainly haven’t tried everything, but I also didn’t want to select some sort of cookbook that I had no interest in reading just because it fulfilled the task. I found Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking on a list of food books on Goodreads and was intrigued by the premise: von Bremzen and her mother cook through a hundred years of Soviet history, decade by decade, using food as a way to explore social change in the former USSR. Although I’ve had Russian food before, it was by way of a Russian friend I had in college and I’ve never actually been to a Russian restaurant or had such food since that time. The idea of getting to learn more about a country that I, admittedly, know very little about through its food seemed like a great way to fulfill the task. I wish I could say that I enjoyed it.

314 Rejected Princesses

by Jason Porath, 2016

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: Read a YA nonfiction book.

I’ve been interested in learning more about this collection of feminist superheros throughout history since I first heard about it online. Alas, I am old and don’t really understand how tumblr works; luckily, Jason Porath compiled many of his entries into this textbook-like collection that, truthfully, should be taught in schools along all of the other white-washed, male-centric histories we uphold as definitive fact. The premise for the project was not, as I mistakenly believed at first, a collection of the women Disney had actually rejected as subjects of their own movies, but was borne from a lunchtime discussion among Porath and his coworkers about who could find the woman least likely to get the princess treatment. It turns out, there are a lot of them, and Porath has done the hard work of presenting us with their history, complete with full-color portraits, so that their bravery, intelligence, and power will go unnoticed no more.

238 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

by Jared Diamond, 1997

This is the second time I’ve read this tome on how the civilizations came to be how they are. The first time was for a book club, during which time I read the book as quickly as possible in order to have it finished by the discussion date and, as a result, I remembered very little of it. As I’ve been reading more books about history and culture and, especially, books about the history of racism, I’ve been curious to revisit Diamond’s ideas on why some cultures conquered others and not the other way around. The idea that some cultures dominated because they were morally and intellectually superior still somewhat persists and that is the exact idea that Diamond attempts to destroy. For Diamond, there no one culture was superior to another, some were just in the right places at the right times, aligned along the right axis.

210 Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi, 2016

Or, Everything You’ve Ever Known and Loved Is Racist and So Are You.

Seriously though, this is one of the most difficult books I’ve read in quite a while.  While I don’t consider myself to be lacking in knowledge on the racist practices of America, I still received quite a shock when I read Kendi’s tome. Part of that was not realizing just how far racist ideas permeate the country’s foundation (The SAT? Racist!), and part of that was not realizing that I, too, bought into some of that (but I like Planet of the Apes…). What’s so effective about this book is not that Kendi tackles the larger aspects of racism, but that he unravels some of the tightly knit beliefs that many people espouse as a salve for said racism. It is about slavery, yes, but it also about all of the everyday things that we accept into our lives as normal that were built from the need to oppress.

201 Night

by Elie Wiesel, 1972
translated from the French by Marion Wiesel

This is one of the most affecting pieces of literature I’ve ever read. Elie Wiesel was 15 in 1944 when the Nazis entered Hungary and he and his family were moved into concentration camps. Separated from his mother and sister, it was not long after that he and his father were moved to Auschwitz and Buchenwald, some of the most infamous concentration camps of the war. Wiesel’s treatise is, in a word, harrowing. His short, direct manner of writing (perhaps due in part to the translation) gives a stark portrait of some of the greatest evil known to mankind. Night is an exceedingly difficult book to read and, despite being barely more than 100 pages, was one that I found I could only consume in short bursts. However, it is one of the most necessary books that I have ever had the opportunity to encounter and it is imperative that we continue to read this story and hold this terror close to our hearts.

198 Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

by Joby Warrick, 2015

One of the things committing to reading prize-winning books has done is force me to read books on subjects I would normally overlook. I would have never picked up the Wayward Children series because it’s fantasy, and I doubt I would have ever gotten around to reading Evicted, even though the subject matter does interest me. Black Flags is another book I would have never endeavored to read, were it not for its having won the Pulitzer Prize, but, in this case, I think I would have been just fine not having picked this one up. Call me an ignorant American, but I only have a certain amount of mental and emotional energy to spend on the world’s ills and ISIS is not close enough to me to make the cut. Don’t get me wrong – to say they’ve committed terrible acts would be an understatement, but I’m more worried about someone walking into the school where I work and shooting up the joint. That’s just the world I live in at the moment. (Is that privilege? Yes. Yes it is.)

189 Long Walk to Freedom

by Nelson Mandela, 1994

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

“The bold man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

179 Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham, 2012
narrated by Edward Herrmann*

On to our third president! From the previous two biographies, I’ve gotten the notion of Thomas Jefferson as something of a contentious politician. Having drafted the Declaration of Independence and helped lead the country away from monarchy, TJ was as fierce a proponent of republicanism and anti-heredity as there ever was. His fears that the country would return to hereditary rule was one of his chief characteristics as a political leader and it was the cause of much of his conflict with John Adams. Additionally, Jefferson’s non-political ordeals  – specifically, his fruitful relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – are now a part of the national consciousness and can no longer be ignored. He has always seemed to be a man of contradictions and, in The Art of Power, Jon Meacham presents him as exactly that.

166 March: Book Three

by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, & Nate Powell, 2016

It has been some time since I finished the second installment in the March series. At first I wondered why I had put off completing it for so long – I did, after all, rush out and buy all three at full price immediately after borrowing the first one from the library. But, after starting in again, I remembered why: this read was going to be a difficult one.

137 The Mis-Education of the Negro

by Carter G. Woodson, 1933

Carter G. Woodson is one of those names I’ve heard bandied about for quite some time, thanks largely in part to the fact that one of the three huge regional libraries in Chicago is named for the writer. As such, I’ve always had him in my mind as someone I ought to read, but, as is often the case, I never got around to it. With the Read Harder Challenge’s task to read a book published between 1900-1950, this 1933 tome jumped to the forefront. It’s a fairly short book, coming in at around 100 pages, but it’s packed with some interesting ideas regarding education and race that not only were applicable to its time, but continue to be relevant today.