April Reads

It's May! Whoa! I have a life-update kinda of post scheduled for this week, but, needless to say, things have been a bit chaotic lately (but in a good way). I'm trying to simultaneously do like seventeen things right now, so I'll keep it brief:

I reread Shakespeare's Macbeth for maybe the fifty-seventh time? Fine, fine, probably the seventh, but still. I actually really enjoy teaching this play and really getting into the analysis. It has been different this year, though, since I can't have them read it in groups like a normally do, but we're making it work!

I ready Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun with Julie, which I have an in-depth post about here. 

Two of my books were for book club, Therese Anne Fowler's A Good Neighborhood and Emmanuel Acho's Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. Fowler's was about a white family and a black family's whose social awkwardness takes a very serious, intense, catastrophic turn for the worse. We definitely criticized her writing a lot, but I think the message she conveyed about race in America was important. We agree this was a good book for someone who is still sort of trying to navigate the beginnings of their "what is white privilege?" journey, which actually so was Acho's. I really appreciated how organized his text was, breaking down the book into chapters focusing on different questions white people have, and then answering them with historical, social, and personal context.

Finally Patricia Engel's Infinite Country was absolutely beautifully done, examining immigration in such a poignant, thoughtful way- it was literary and socially realistic.