350 The Emissary

by Yōko Tawada, 2014

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: Read a book about a natural disaster*.

Something bizarre has happened in Japan, leaving the older generation to live indefinitely and the younger generation to wither away years before their time. There is now a hierarchy of eldery, with the young elderly a spry 70 years old and the middle-aged eldery well into their 90s. Retiring from jobs is considered a bizarre practice, as it’s no longer necessary to relinquish positions from one generation to the next. Young Mumei is doing his best to survive these unprecedented times with the aid of his great-grandfather, the 100-something-year-old Yoshiro, who devotes nearly every moment of his day to keeping the boy alive, for Mumei and all children suffer a host of physical ailments due to an unspecified event that changed the course of Japanese lives. 

269 Brown Girl Dreaming

by Jacqueline Woodson, 2014

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge: A children’s or middle grade book (not YA) that has won a diversity award since 2009.

I’ve heard many laudatory things about Jacqueline Woodson’s work for some time, but, as often goes, I never quite made the time to pick up one of her books. This Read Harder Challenge task gave me the push I needed, and I’m so glad it did. Having won the Coretta Scott King Author Award in 2015, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2014, as well as the John Newbery Medal in 2015, Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir in verse, containing stories from the author’s childhood growing up in both the northern and southern parts of the country during the civil rights era. The poems are incredibly easy to read, but they are thick with meaning, offering those of us who were born many years later (or those of different races) a unique window into life as a black child when being black denoted membership to a de facto second class.

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.

181 Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward, 2011

I’ve heard much praise bandied about for this National Book Award-winning novel, so I was excited to finally get my hands on it. Alas, sometimes award winners leave you nodding in complete agreement with the book’s judged greatness, and sometimes award winners leave you wondering if, perhaps, you just don’t understand what makes a book great. Sadly, it was the latter for me with Salvage the Bones, and while I can see glimpses of greatness in it, overall this book just wasn’t my style.

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.

149 The Performance of Becoming Human

by Daniel Borzutzky, 2016

Part of the problem with loving books is that when you religiously read book blogs, listen to book podcasts on your runs, and watch booktube videos before going to bed at night, you end up with a lot of books that you want to read. And sometimes – let’s be honest, a lot of the time – you get distracted from what you want to read in the long term by the shiny new book you MUST READ RIGHT NOW. I’m not a huge fan of planning out everything I read, but I’ve found the Read Harder Challenge has been pretty good at getting me to read books that have languished on my TBR. I’ll say the same for my Year of Toni Morrison challenge – even though I’m spending the last quarter of the year catching up with her, I’m really quite delighted that I decided to do this. So, all of this is to say that I’ve decided I want to make more of an effort to read each year’s prize-winning books (from 2016 on). This decision is how I came to find myself reading this National Book Award-winning collection of poetry.