2020 was a hard year for publishers, bookstores and libraries as they dealt with pandemic shutdowns, diversity issues, and cancellations of conferences and book releases. Virtual book talks helped but there is no replacement for people gathering to renew friendships, hear discussions, meet authors and attend readings. Let’s hope 2021 can bring us together again. Here are some January releases:
Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes
In this poetry collection, Nikki Grimes uses “The Golden Shovel” method to create wholly original poems based on the works of women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Each poem is paired with unique art from African-American women illustrators to create a thought-provoking book with timely themes for today’s readers. The idea of a Golden Shovel is to take a line or stanza of a poem, write the words down the right margin and build your own poem around the words.
This page spread gives you a hint of the delights inside. Note the bold words going down the right side of the poem, that's The Golden Shovel:
One word to know at the beginning of this novel is: mountweazel: a noun that refers to the phenomenon of false entries within dictionaries and works of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. The Swansby House Encyclopedic Dictionary is being edited and updated. What has changed from the Victorian age to the present?
Peter Winceworth, Victorian lexicographer, is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. His disaffection compels him to insert unauthorized fictitious entries into the dictionary in an attempt to assert some sense of individual purpose and artistic freedom.
In the present day, Mallory, a young intern employed by the publisher, is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels before the work is digitized. She also has to contend with threatening phone calls from an anonymous caller. Is the change in the definition of marriage really that upsetting? And does the caller really intend for the Swansby’s staff to ’burn in hell’?
Wonderful word fun throughout!
From the author of The Solace of Open Spaces, this collection of memories, observations, and narratives on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis.
“Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishing with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that that roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
Two titles from 2020, it was not that long ago!
A Burning: A novel by Megha Majumdar
A novel about three characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan’s fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free,
but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
It’s never too late to discover this debut novel that came out in June and was on many of The Year’s Best Books lists. Book groups take note there is much to think about and discuss.
Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.
But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today’s disarray.
Robert Putnam analyzes the confluence of trends that brought us from an “I” society to a “We” society and then back again. He draws lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. This is not a quick read, but does give much to think about and a bit of hope.
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