Category: Read This Book

Many people have really strong opinions about creative advice, regardless of the type of project. Some folks have advice that they swear by. Create daily, build a habit, etc. Other folks have the opinion that being creative is so unique to each individual that all advice, in essence, is incredibly unhelpful at best and flat out bad at worst. Personally, I apply a some/many/most framework. Some people think creative advice is useless. Many people find value in creative advice. Most people can usually find at least one thing of value in a pile of creative advice. This is why I tend to read books about creativity. I don’t expect that every single thing in the book will be inspirational to me but I expect to find at least a few things that I can identify with and apply to my own writing, music, cooking, etc.

Creative Quest by Amir Thompson (AKA Questlove) likely has a bit of something for everyone. Questlove is the co-founder of the music group The Roots (which is also the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon). Questlove is a drummer, a DJ, an author, a culinary entrepreneur, a designer, and more. This man does not stop.

A warning about this book which was written a few years ago, he does use a couple of comedians as creativity examples (one of the comedians is a transphobe, the other is a rapist). Otherwise, I enjoyed this book! He not only gives advice on being a creative, but he also explores what creativity means, how different people may define it, and has some great discussions on creativity inspired by other creative works.

One thing he talks about that I don’t read enough of in such advice books is the importance (for some people) of being an apprentice or having a mentor. A lot of people can benefit from that kind of relationship and there is always such an emphasis on doing things on your own when having a creative community is important because nothing happens in a vacuum. Related is another idea he talks about, which is cultivating a network. Something Questlove spends a lot of time talking about is curation. Curation as an important part of the creative process and curation as creativity itself. I’m inspired to read that section again because there was a lot of good stuff in it.

I do want to note that there is definitely music used throughout the audiobook which can be an absolute cacophony of sound if you turn the speed up on your audiobook players like I do.

Emilie Hornby is ready for the best Valentine’s Day ever. She’s finally going to say “I love you” to her boyfriend, and she’s got every romantic moment planned out. But things do not go as planned. She gets into a fender bender on the way to school, she loses out on the summer scholarship she desperately needed, and she catches her boyfriend kissing his ex. On top of that, her dad announces that he’s moving across the country with or without her. She goes to bed at her grandma’s house, but when she wakes up, she’s back at home, ready to repeat the same Valentine’s Day. As Emilie goes through the day again and again, she finds that many of the results may vary, but she can’t help but be drawn to Nick, whom she keeps running into no matter what she does.

Emilie is a really funny protagonist with laugh out loud dialogue and a hilarious insight on her world. She’s a self proclaimed book nerd and she likes things organized and in order, in part because of her lack of control in her home life, where she bounces between two feuding, divorced parents. Her plans for the Hallmark holiday are admirable even if they are doomed to fail, and while it might be a bit cringe to see her thwarted at every turn, it is super cathartic to see Emilie learn to let go — and when she decides to let loose and live like there are no consequences, well…that’s where the magic happens!

There have been a few time loop books and movies to come out in the past couple of years, and I admit to being a sucker for them all. (Blame it on my parents and the VHS tape of Groundhog Day we wore out when I was a kid!) This one is one of my favorites, ranking up there with the movie Palm Springs. What I love about this book is that Emilie rolls with the punches pretty quickly, and she had fun with scenario. She doesn’t get too bogged down in moral philosophizing or analyzing her way out, and instead shoots her shot(s), earning her some romcom movie worthy moments…and some unexpected consequences. I love the banter between her and Nick, and their challenges to overcome feel realistic, even in a lightly speculative setting.

Pick up this one if you want a YA book with hilarious dialogue, over the top moments, and “she had a marvelous time ruining everything” vibes!

We meet 19-year-old Magnolia at her grandmother’s funeral. Left with no one, Magnolia is forced to find a way to support herself. Enter a man named Cotton, who tells her that he wants to hire her to impersonate his clients’ dead loved ones. Families approach Cotton seeking a way to connect with dead family members and friends, which they didn’t get to do in real life. A makeup artist styles and makes Magnolia up to be as close to the real thing as possible. Then Magnolia video calls with Cotton’s clients.

The novel plays with ideas of death, the things that haunt the living, and how decisions we make in this life can impact the next. The storytelling includes both sinister and hopefull qualities, encapsulating where Magnolia is in her life. The city of Knoxville is an odd character in and of itself, a place abuzz with life, while a lost lower class wanders the edges of the city, intentionally forgotten by the city’s more well off citizens.

Author Monica Breashears is an Affrilachian writer from East Tennessee. She imbues her work with Black Appalchian folkways and folklore, giving her novel a horror-like feel, complete with hauntings and malevolent spirits. I love how she pulls from so many literary traditions, creating an Appalachian Southern Gothic novel, the likes of which I’ve never read before.

In the audiobook, Jeanette Illage performs House of Cotton with all of the twisted drama that this book needs. There’s suspense with a spooky quality that only comes from the American South that she just gets perfectly. She also finds a balance with the Affrilachian dialect that Magnolia and her grandmother speak. I had chills listening to Illage voice the ghosts in this book. I cannot recommend the audio edition enough.

This book is pretty high-intensity from start to finish and I could not put it down. Some content warnings up front for death of a spouse, suicidal ideation, violence against women, and death of a child. Some readers are hesitant to call this book a romance but I disagree. It’s gritty, real, and ugly sometimes but it also has some very important hallmarks of what makes a romance a romance.

Our heroine is Feyi Adekola. Five years prior to this story, there was an accident that killed her husband. She has been deep in grief and it shows in her art. Feyi and her best friend Joy live in New York and at the start of this story, Feyi decides that she is ready to have sex again, not for love, but she is ready to allow someone to give her physical pleasure. She has sex with a guy at a rooftop party and they date for a while but it doesn’t get very serious. They part amicably and Feyi meets someone else: one of this guy’s friends, Nasir. Nasir is perfect and he doesn’t rush her. He agrees to be friends, though he clearly wants more. He is patient and adoring and they grow a beautiful friendship.

Nasir is from Jamaica and he gets her a spot in a show at the National museum with a curator that Feyi has only dreamed about working with. He takes her to Jamaica and they stay with his father, Alim Blake, a celebrity chef with two Michelin stars. He had a gorgeous home built up on the mountain and Feyi is both star-struck and awestruck at the amount of luxury.

Feyi is putting everything in jeopardy because the minute she spotted Alim picking them up at the airport, she knew there would be trouble because he’s radiant in a way that makes everything and everyone want to orbit around him. She’s going to be in Jamaica for many weeks, in this beautiful, intriguing person’s home, trying desperately not to ruin everything she is trying to build with Nasir because she is absolutely smitten with his father.

Aside from consistent high-intensity lust, grief is always present in this book in some way and even in the chapters full of lust or love or beauty, grief is always right there. I think it’s brilliant to juxtapose these very high highs with the heart shattering lows and it makes the love even more beautiful, the sex sexier, and the sadness almost unbearable. By the end of this book I was rooting for so many of the characters to find love and healing and life in ways they had not been able to for a long time.

In an alternate 1880s Colorado, where people are descended from the fallen angels or the virtues elite and orders of heavenly angels rule life, Celeste is just trying to survive as a half-fallen woman with her sister. Prospectors are excited about the possibility of a new element called Divinity, making their mountain mining community a boom town. When Celeste’s sister is accused of killing a man — a virtue — she knows that she has little hope of saving her, but that doesn’t stop her from trying. And soon Celeste finds herself turning to the last person she wants to go to for help: the demon lord Abraxas.

I loved this inventive world and was really intrigued by the combination of historical fiction, Western, fantasy, and mystery. The book is short, and Roanhorse manages to pack a lot of world building details in, leaving me wanting more. Celeste, as a half-fallen, lives in fear of being discovered and discriminated against, making her mission even harder to pull off…but not impossible. She’s lived a tough life and so she is naturally slow to trust and quick to judge, but no one can doubt that she’d do anything for her sister. In fact, the crux of the book rests on the question of just how far Celeste is willing to go to protect her, and what it will cost her in the end. The ending will leave a lot of readers debating, I think, but that’s sort of the beauty of these short reads. For me, Tread of Angels was an impactful novella that I thought about for a long time after finishing.

I cannot even describe how much I love this series. I listened to all three books in one day! I love Harper and her supernatural goings on. Plus, she makes a fabulous new best friend. Ellen Oh’s storytelling is top notch, always keeps readers guessing what on earth could happen next. And for a middle grade novel, this book is so creepy, but in the best way. 

Harper is not enthusiastic that her family has moved from New York City to Washington D.C. She’s left all her friends, and D.C. is SO HOT, especially with their broken air conditioning. What’s worse, right before they moved, Harper had a serious accident which gave her amnesia. Soon after they move in, Harper’s little brother, Michael, discovers a new imaginary friend. At first his friend seems harmless enough, but then weird things start happening around her little brother’s room. Is there a ghost? But ghosts aren’t real, right?

Harper comes from a biracial family. Her mom is Korean American and her dad is white. Harper’s Korean grandmother is estranged from the family, and none of the kids in the family know why. A lot of the plot line revolves around the different family dynamics and Harper’s relationships with different members of her family. A lot of Harper’s motivation comes from wanting to take care of the people who she loves most.

For audiobook fans, Amielynn Abellera does such an excellent job performing all three books in the series. I found myself hanging on every word, and I couldn’t wait for the next book. Abellera’s narration possesses the perfect balance of suspense and heartwarming moments. There are ghosts, malevolent creatures from another dimension, spirit guides, and witches. Abellera can do it all.

Anna Sale is the host of the Death, Sex, and Money podcast and this book is an extension of that show. Sale wants us to have those conversations that we are avoiding, sometimes even for years. As you can imagine, content warnings for a bunch of hard things, especially around death including infant death.

The author’s argument is that we all go through these particular hard things and by avoiding the conversations that could actually help us and our relationships, we end up isolating ourselves and maybe even making things harder to deal with than they already are. The book is divided into five big buckets of “hard things” by chapter: Death, Sex, Money, Family, and Identity.

The bulk of the book is actually stories upon stories not only about the author but folks she has interviewed for the Death, Sex, and Money podcast about the hard conversations they’ve had in their lives or that they wish they had in their lives and how that experience of having (or not having) the conversation has affected them. In the introduction and at the end of each chapter, which, again, is full of stories, Sale offers up what she has learned about how to have such conversations. She does such a phenomenal job of acknowledging not only that these conversations are hard but also how they are hard and then the importance of having them anyway.

Personally, I am remarkable at avoiding conversations, especially around and with family as well as conversations around death. One quote in the book was, “Family is where we tend to lose our maturity” and wow, that hit close to home. I can’t say that after reading this book I was excited to have all these conversations, but recently I have been unexpectedly forced to have some of them. I am deeply grateful to have read this book a couple years ago because I felt like I had a bit more support and bravery around these incredibly hard conversations and topics.

In this moving story, former best friends Noor and Sal have gone months without speaking to each other after Noor confessed her feeling for Sal and he rebuffed her. Now, Sal’s mom is on her deathbed, his family’s motel is about to go under, and Noor is trying desperately to figure out a way to go to college and leave their small California desert town for good. Tragic loss brings them together again, but the choices each of them make may drive them apart, too.

This novel does one of the things I love the most in YA, which is tell a multigenerational story. Tahir alternates between Noor and Sal’s points of view, but the story is also sprinkled with chapters from Sal’s mother’s point view, going back to Pakistan when she was their age. Her chapters provide history and context for the difficulties that Sal and Noor find themselves facing, and offer glimpses of a woman whose death has devastated them. The story is a little gritty, about survival and figuring out how to make ends meet and what to do when you’ve exhausted all other options, but it’s also beautiful. There’s a lot of love and hope within the pages of this story, and ultimately it’s about forgiveness — forgiving others, and yourself. I cried so hard at the end of this beautiful story, which balances hope and heartbreak in a magical way. This book is absolutely deserving of its many awards!

When I first read Twitty’s debut, The Cooking Gene, I was blown away by the way he wrote about his ancestry through his perspective as a chef. Food connects us to our cultures, and Twitty uses his commercial genetics test to profile his background and connect to his ancestry through food. The whole reading experience was just stunning.

In Koshersoul, Twitty takes us on a spiritual journey through his connection to his faith and food. These more memoir-ish sections give us a look at different anecdotes from his life that led him to think differently about the food he was cooking. He looks at African Jewish cuisine in a new way, connecting the dots between many different traditional Jewish dishes and cuisines, adding his own twist here and there. 

He also details the history of African and African American Jews and how that has impacted Jewish culture as a whole. He describes how Jewish people of African descent are, and have always been, an integral part of Jewish cuisine. There are so many different experiences among the different diasporas that have created a diverse collection of dishes that Twitty highlights in his cooking. And, of course, Twitty includes dozens of recipes throughout the book, giving readers his own take on much-beloved recipes.

I love reading about all of the different aspects of Twitty’s culture that have led him to become the chef he is today. There’s something so deeply personal about the recipes that he shares with his readers that makes me want to keep reading his writing for ages. So if you love to read about food or culture — or both! — Koshersoul is perfect for you.

I want to give content warnings for sexual assault, suicide, abuse, anti-trans violence, and racism up front because I’m going to talk about some of these things in this recommendation.

Kai Cheng Thom is the author of Fierce Femmes & Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, which is an excellent bit of fantastical fiction and I am pleased to say that her nonfiction is just as good. I Hope We Choose Love is nonfiction about how we on the left/liberal side and specifically the queer community tend to eat our own. Our capacity for forgiveness and for allowing people room to improve and grow is sometimes non-existent, especially for people who we consider a part of our own community. Often the people in the queer community who aren’t allowed to be human, that is, to make mistakes, are also often queer people of color.

This book is organized into three sections: Let Us Live, Let Us Love, and Let Us Believe. It alternates between thoughtful, nonfiction essays and powerful, intimate poetry. She covers so many of the unnecessarily difficult and incredibly unhealthy things that happen in the liberal queer community that often aren’t talked about, such as the almost toxic self-righteousness, the culture of enabling, lack of internal and peer accountability, and more.

One of the essays about suicide I found particularly important. There is a sometimes extreme culture around allowing our peers and loved ones have the final say on what they do to their body, which, yes, my body my choice but stick with me. This then extends to the idea that if someone is determined to take their own life, then it is not anyone’s job to stand in their way. That author argues that hey, this is incredibly messed up and maybe what they need is someone to step up and say, no, I’m not letting you do this, even if you hate me for it. I’d rather you be alive and hate me, than not alive at all. The author also urges us to work harder on making the world a place where people want to stay living.

Another essay that I appreciate as a person who is childfree is about how radical queer culture is often about things like communal living but the reality is often people pairing off and creating a queer version of the nuclear family.

Phenomenal book that I highly recommend!