Author: Patricia Elzie

I used to be a sex educator, and so I’m incredibly picky about the sex and intimacy information that I trust. Dr. Emily Nagoski’s work is definitely work I can get behind. Her work is science-based (yay!), and she writes and educates in a way that is both compassionate and accessible. Her book Come As You Are offers such an excellent framework for looking at the sexuality of cisgender women.

While she was writing Come As You Are and then publicizing it and going on tour and giving talks, her sex life with her spouse was practically non-existent. She was writing a lot about sex and talking a lot about sex and actually having very little of it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having little or no sex if that is what you like, but in Dr. Nagoski’s case, she actually wanted to be intimate with her partner, and it just wasn’t happening much. This is a position that a lot of folks in long-term relationships find themselves in, both straight and queer. So, Dr. Emily Nagoski did what she does and took a look at the existing literature and advice; and it all ranged from not-helpful to flat-out incorrect. A lot of the advice out there is about spicing things up and novelty and variety, and when it comes to a sustainable, lasting sexual connection, this advice misses the mark.

Through this book, Dr. Nagoski takes us on a journey of exploring first the question: is having sex something important to the reader and their long-term partner or partners or spouse? Sex is not a necessity, and no one will die if they don’t have sex with another person. It is, or should be, something that people do because they want to. Then she gets to her primary recommendation: Center pleasure. The rest of the book explores how to do that, including how to create a context with your partner where pleasure is possible, how to navigate your internal emotional floorplan so that pleasure is more accessible, and more. Dr. Nagoski recognizes we don’t live in a vacuum, so she also writes about all the external factors that get in the way of cultivating and experiencing pleasure, like gender norms and expectations, heteronormativity, and traumatic experiences.

I love how this book is rooted in research and conversations with real people. It makes it more accessible and realistic and relatable. If you are in a long-term relationship then this book might be helpful to you.

This work of young adult fiction is incredibly heavy and an absolutely absorbing read. Our protagonist is Tracy Beaumont, a Black teenage girl whose father, James Beaumont, is in prison. James Beaumont was wrongly accused of murder, and at the beginning of the book, he has 275 days before he will be executed. The book is told from Tracy’s point of view, and interspersed with the chapters of prose are Tracy’s weekly letters to Innocence X, a nonprofit legal organization that helps to prove the innocence of people who have been incarcerated. They only accept requests via handwritten letters, and Tracy has been writing weekly for seven years.

Tracy is a high school junior and lives with her mother, her older brother Jamal (a senior who runs track), and their little sister Corinne. Tracy is involved with the school newspaper and also runs a Know Your Rights class at the local community center in the Houston, Texas, suburbs where they live. Flash forward, and there has been a murder, and Tracy’s brother Jamal has been accused. This book is not only a tale about police brutality and abuse of power but also the insidiousness of white supremacy, not only the blatant KKK history of the town this takes place in but on the micro level as well. On top of all this, it’s a high-stakes anxiety-inducing mystery. Tracy is simultaneously trying to get help for her father while also trying to prove her brother’s innocence and keep him from facing the same possible fate. Of course, she is also trying to keep herself from being harmed by the police. Just to make things more complicated, she’s trying to manage friendships and relationships as a teen because it’s not like all those things stop when something larger is going on.

I have a lot of content warnings for this book: murder, anti-Black racism, including discussion of lynching and cross burning, anti-Asian racism, and an incarcerated loved one.

This middle grade graphic novel was originally published in three individual issues; however, the one I recommend is all three together, plus a lovely bonus essay at the end of the book by Gene Luen Yang. This story was inspired by an actual 1940s Superman radio show serial titled the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

While Superman is obviously one of the main characters, the other main character is Lee Lan-Shin, who has been given the American name Roberta, which is mostly used throughout the book, but it’s good to keep her Chinese name in mind. Roberta Lee, her brother Tommy, and their parents are all moving into Metropolis from Chinatown. The family is Chinese American, and the year is 1946. Roberta has a lot of anxiety and a sensitive stomach. The whole Lee family is trying hard to fit into their new, mostly white community, and in doing that, there are definitely times when they are trying to downplay their own culture. It’s as heartbreaking to see on the page as it is in real life.

Meanwhile, Superman is also not living up to his full potential, and he has a lot of questions about where he is truly from.

Roberta and Tommy meet Jimmy Olsen, who, after seeing how great Tommy is at pitching, has him join the local Little League team. The team’s pitcher, Chuck, is low-key racist and really unhappy about Tommy joining the team, so he quits. Chuck sulks and tells his uncle, who is a part of a racist terrorist group: the Klan of the Fiery Cross. As you can guess, the Lee family gets targeted. It’s not as straightforward of a story as you think, and there are plenty of surprises. Content warnings for racism, specifically anti-Chinese and anti-Black racism, imagery of a burning cross, and Klan members in their costumes. Outfits. Whatever.

I enjoyed it way more than I anticipated, and I hope you do, too. As I mentioned, there are lots of surprises and some really great moments. I’m always a fan of Gurihiru’s art style, and it is a perfect fit for this story.

Our main human character is Janelle Baker, aka “Ellie,” who is Black, queer, and has anxiety. The story starts in New York City. An alien race, the Ilori, have taken over Earth. They tried to be peaceful, but the Earthlings fought back, and here we are at the beginning of the story, where humans are in Ilori-controlled confinement with little idea of what is going on. Ilori have learned that the arts, music, and literature inspire humans to rebel, so they destroyed every related item that they could. There were massive burnings of books, musical instruments, record albums, you name it. Many humans hid what they could, and it’s considered contraband. Our hero, Ellie, started an illegal underground library with about 60 books she was able to hide. She and her friend Alice have developed an intricate way of having people request books. Ellie then sneaks the books out from her storage in the basement into the desperate hands of the individuals. The stakes are incredibly high: if Ellie gets two infractions, she could be executed. Ellie’s parents are not doing well. Her father has been affected by the Ilori and is a mind-controlled member of the security team. Ellie’s mother has sunk deeply into paranoia and alcoholism.

In an alternating point of view, we meet Morris, an Ilori who is in charge of making a special chemical that will be given to all remaining humans. We learn that there are two tiers of Ilori: the true Ilori, who are incredibly wealthy and stay up in space, and the lab-made Ilori, like Morris, who are sent down to do all the dirty work on Earth and the other planets they colonize. Morris is different from both the true Ilori and the other lab-made Ilori in that he feels emotions. He has fallen in love with human art and music and literature. When he stumbles upon Ellie’s hidden library, he decides he must meet this beautiful human girl.

The book not only alternates between Ellie’s point of view and focusing on Morris but there is a third, seemingly unconnected focus, which is on a group called The Starry Eyed. The Starry Eyed was a popular music band on Earth. This book is a love letter to music and books, a sci-fi romance, and an exciting and anxiety-inducing race to save Earth from colonizing aliens.

This book is told from multiple viewpoints divided by chapter. We have three main characters, all young adults: Adiah, Koffi, and Ekon. It all takes place in Lkossa, a large town on the edge of The Greater Jungle. The Greater Jungle is an utterly terrifying place, and most people, if not all people, who go into the Greater Jungle do not make it out alive. There is a demon in the jungle called the Shetani that murders anyone who enters. It’s the most feared beast ever known and yet not much is known about it because no one meets the Shetani and lives.

Adiah is a daraja, which is a person who can use magic; however, in this book, it’s not called magic; it’s called the Splendor. The Splendor is something that a daraja can pull from the world around them and allow it to move through them as they use it. It is really dangerous to keep hold of the Splendor inside them, so they just act as conduits.

Koffi and her mother are indentured servants at the Night Zoo, a place that has all kinds of wild and fantastical beasts. The owner of the Night Zoo is Baaz, and he is an incredibly awful person. Koffi and her mother have been working there for years to pay off multiple kinds of debts that her father had owed.

Finally, there’s Ekon, who was raised in the temple of Lkossa with his brother. They were orphans, and their father was killed by the Shetani. All Ekon has ever wanted was to be a warrior, and when we first meet him, he is about to do his final test to become one.

There is so much I want to say about this book, but I don’t want to give it all away. It was really fun, and some parts were creepy and definitely violent. There are a few great twists, and the viewpoints and stories are woven together. This first book definitely ends on a cliffhanger, but the second book is already out, and the third comes out tomorrow, so there’s no need to wait.

While I started this book with the expectation that it would be about how to become a better friend, I quickly realized it is so much more. In the exploration of friendship, the author is not limiting the idea or relationship of friendship only to your inner circle and expands the idea of friendship as a way of relating to other people, whether they be people you know or don’t know or maybe even people you don’t like. Thinking of friendship in this way makes room for friendship as a practice to help mitigate and maybe heal some of the ongoing trauma that is life in a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, as well as act as a catalyst toward collective liberation.

If you are familiar with Buddhism, it can help with relating to this book, but if you are not, I still think there is value for you as well. Johnson writes that oppression is fundamentally fragmenting, and it is the essence of oppression to separate us and tear us apart. She posits that friendship is the way to heal this fracture. The bulk of the book is focused on the Mitta Sutta, a passage from a longer body of the Buddha’s teachings called the Anguttara Nikaya. The Mitta Sutta offers seven qualities of friendship. After some real talk about making friends with ourselves, Johnson then goes through each of these seven qualities, what they mean, how they show up in the world, how they show up in us and in friendships, and the ways we relate to other people, family included. The latter part of each chapter is about how we incorporate these qualities into a meditation practice as we also cultivate these qualities in ourselves.

As I mentioned earlier, there is also a lot of discussion on how white supremacy shows up in Western Buddhist practice. It is notable that a lot of the faces you see of authors writing on Buddhism and speaking at conferences and retreats are white. Because of this, some cultural touchpoints are often left out, such as the importance of connecting to our ancestors. Johnson also talks about many ways white supremacy shows up in Western Buddhist practice that I hadn’t even considered, like ideas of perfection or senses of urgency, two things I often struggle with when meditating — same with the frequent ideas that there is a right way or a perfect way to meditate or that I can bully myself into meditating correctly. This was an unexpected and excellent read.

I have long been a fan of Roxane Gay’s writing, and this compilation of some of her essays spanning a decade does not disappoint. There are dozens of essays in this book, a few book reviews, and some celebrity interviews as well. The author, like many of us, loves to give her opinion and to give advice and you can sense her revelry in the act of doing so, even during some of the more heavy pieces.

This book is divided into seven sections, including “Identity/Politics,” “The Matter of Black Lives,” and “For the Culture.” She includes so many of what I consider to be her greatest hits, like “Cops Don’t Belong at Pride,” “How to Build a Monument,” “Who Gets to Be Angry?,” and “Dave Chappelle’s Brittle Ego.” I was overwhelmed by the amount of things that have happened in the past ten years and I nearly got whiplash as I bounced from essays on the Trump presidency to Chadwick Boseman to a beautiful memorial essay of Toni Morrison. I was also rocketed back in time to essays about the mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the murder of Sandra Bland, and the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Not all the pieces require readers to reflect on the horrors of the past ten years, and the composition of this book is skillfully balanced with intelligent book reviews, entertaining and thoughtful critiques of films and shows, and even some hilarious observations like the ones included in “Why the Beach is a Bummer” and “Why Are Most Father’s Day Gifts So Terrible?”

The author’s celebrity profiles are brilliantly written in such a way that a few were of people about whom I initially was indifferent, but after reading Roxane Gay’s profiles, I found myself endlessly fascinated. There are nine profiles included, ranging from musicians like Nicki Minaj, Janelle Monáe, and Madonna to actors like Sarah Paulson and Tessa Thompson.

Finally, there are a few choice pieces from her “Ask Roxane” column, which I deeply appreciate as a person who loves to give advice myself. From cover to cover, this book is an excellent and wide-ranging read.

I have a huge regret about reading this book, which is this: I will never again be able to read it for the first time.

This book is set in a steampunk Cairo in 1912, where djinn and other magical creatures live side-by-side with humans and have for the past 40 years. The world-building of this book is so incredibly intricate and luscious. A man named al-Jahiz changed the world when he ripped open the veil between the magical and the human world. When that happened, he vanished. Now, in 1912, there is a secret brotherhood of wealthy British men in Cairo dedicated to worshiping al-Jahiz, thinking they have the right to the power he had. In the very first chapter, a man in a mask shows up at a meeting of the secret brotherhood. He claims to be al-Jahiz and then slaughters them all.

Fatma el-Sha’arawi is an agent working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, and she is one of only two women who work there. She also wears fantastically tailored suits. Feminism has not come very far in Cairo in 1912, and she has had to work incredibly hard to get the respect she deserves, but she is damn good at her job. She is now tasked with finding and apprehending this al-Jahiz impersonator, but every time she thinks she learns something new, a dozen new questions pop up. Nothing is what it seems to be, and she has to deal with some amazing characters, both human and djinn alike.

This book has everything: magic, murder, mayhem, sapphic romance, badass women, clever twists and turns, and some absolutely hilarious comedy. I was shocked at how funny this book was because I wasn’t expecting it. I laughed out loud multiple times, and it just endeared me more to P. Djèlí Clark’s writing.

This book takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it starts with our hero, Ben Stephens, who is running late to work. Ben works for an ad agency, and they have a major project pitch to give to a tech company. He did a lot of work on the project and knows it backwards and forwards; however, this doesn’t really matter because Ben knows his bosses and the rest of the team will do the presentation and take the glory while Ben, the only Black person, will be present to show how “diverse” their team is. At least, that’s how it normally goes, and that is what Ben is expecting. The universe has other ideas, and he gets a call from the rest of his team, who are stuck in L.A., which is an hour flight but a good six-hour drive from where they need to be, so Ben is going to have to give the presentation alone.

He arrives at the company, about to start his presentation when the most beautiful woman he has ever seen walks in the door to the conference room. This woman is Oscar-nominated actress Anna Gardiner, and she is the talent for this ad campaign. No one expected her to show up to the pitch meetings, and she was counting on that. Of course, she was charmed by Ben, and he got the contract. At Anna’s request, he also oversaw the entire project, and they spent a lot of time together on set.

During one of the shoots, Anna gets a call. Her parents are down near Palm Springs on a trip, and her father has to get rushed to the hospital. Unbeknownst to everyone, Anna deals with severe anxiety. She knew it would be ridiculous to rush down to Southern California to check on her dad when it was likely just dehydration, but she really started to freak out a bit. She called her assistant to get her a flight, but there were none that could work with the schedule. Ben notices Anna’s barely controlled freakout; one thing leads to another, and there is suddenly an impromptu road trip to Palm Springs.

The attraction between the two of them is palpable, and they don’t even try to hide their flirting and chemistry. They get to Palm Springs, but the hotel they get to only has a single room. They keep their physical fun a secret, but Simon, Anna’s manager, catches on. Simon’s not mad; he actually thinks it’s good for Anna’s image, and Ben agrees to no strings and only fun, just how they both want it (this is totally not sustainable).

This book was so incredibly steamy while also being incredibly hilarious.

The overarching metaphor in this book is of capitalism as a toxic romantic partner who constantly puts you down, gaslights you, and is just using you. The author is unmasking this toxic person and making it clear that they’re just not that into you. The author also teaches us there is a healthier and supportive option available. While this metaphor isn’t necessarily everyone’s vibe, it does serve to make the content so much more accessible and relatable. This book is written in a way that clarifies how capitalism is at play right now in our own lives and not just some nebulous thing that we have nothing to do with.

This book introduces readers to so many people fighting against capitalism. There are dozens of quotes from anti-capitalists, past and present, like W. E. B. DuBois, Ella Baker, Evo Morales, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Kathleen Cleaver. The book repeatedly makes it clear that class struggle cannot be separated from racial equity. It’s been so helpful to learn about it in more detail to better my understanding of all the interconnections.

The author teaches readers about how capitalism tells us that if we just work harder, hustle more, and sacrifice more, we will get ahead. That is actually rarely the case because the system is designed to keep people in the middle class and the lower class in those classes. Capitalism depends on folks’ inability to move upward. There might be anecdotes of this happening, some people here and there, but it doesn’t help the nation as a whole.

This book gives really clear definitions of capitalism and socialism and spends most of the pages giving examples of these frameworks in action. After reading this book, I can confidently say, “Yes, I know what these things are and some of the ways they affect me and my communities.” I also want to mention that this book is packed with illustrations and infographics and graphs and charts and quotes that help make this information very present and relatable to readers.