Fearless: The Story of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Defender of Free Speech

Written by: Gattaldo

 

First line: In a house by the sea, on the island of Malta, lived a little girl names Daphne, together with her mom, dad, and three sisters.

Why you should read this book: A brief biography of writer, civil rights protestor, and free speech advocate Daphne Caruana Galizia, written by an old friend of Galizia’s after her murder in 2017 (Galizia’s murder is not part of the story, but is mentioned in a brief appendix at the end). The book tells of Galizia’s childhood, then transitions to her life as an activist, using the power of the pen to call out problems in her home country of Malta, even as she makes enemies and suffers for her beliefs. This is primarily a story about self-confidence and the power of one individual’s voice to work for positive change in the face of big problems and powerful enemies. 

 

Why you shouldn't read this book: It's intentionally vague about the issues that Galizia wrote and protested about as well as the retaliation she experienced, which perhaps makes it less interesting as a story about the struggle for human rights but more appropriate for first, second, and third graders who are ready for general concepts, but not the specifics details of corruption and intimidation that go hand in hand with the work of a defender of free speech.

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The Last Black Unicorn

Written by: Tiffany Haddish

First line: School was hard for me, for lots of reasons.

Why you should read this book: Pretty much everything that happens in the first three-quarters of this memoir is truly heartbreaking, but Haddish's comedic tendencies have a way of glossing over most of the horror of her life and forcing you to laugh at the worst things that have ever happened to her. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are running themes in her story, and she still manages to report the events in such a way that the reader can't help but smile. From her mother's accident and subsequent brain injury, to her experience in foster care and her terrible relationship history, the story proceeds to build upon itself until Haddish's success as a professional comedian and actress seems not only well-deserved, but also inevitable.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You've had sex with Tiffany Haddish.

Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Schlitzie the Pinhead

Written by: Bill Griffith

First line: Gather round, folks, gather round!!

Why you should read this book: Here is the never-before told life story of Schlitzie the Pinhead, a microcephalic individual who was sold to a sideshow manager as a child and spent nearly his entire life working as a circus freak. Schlitzie's immortality was cemented by his turn in the 1932 cult classic, Freaks, a film that decades later stirred the imagination of author Bill Griffith, inspiring his popular comic, Zippy the Pinhead (as well as the imagination of the author of this blog, some decades later). Schlitzie's story, reconstructed here through Griffith's research and in the words of those who knew him, is by turns inspiring, heartbreaking, hilarious, and provocative.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You find the very idea of a freak show "loathsome, obscene, grotesque, and bizarre" and would prefer all human anomalies to be safely ensconced within the very high, very thick walls of an asylum.

La Voz de M.A.Y.O. Tata Rambo

Written by: Henry Barajas and J. Gonzo

First line: It was the weekend before Cesar Chavez Day.

Why you should read this book: The author relates events from the life of his great-grandfather, interspersed with modern moments from his own life and Tata Rambo's last days. When the city of Tucson decides to build a highway through the neighborhood where the Pascua Yaqui people have begun to improve their own lot, the Mexican American Yaqui Organization and Congressmen Udall jump into action to save the community, and Tata Rambo is on the front lines the entire time. Through protests, political machinations, and meaningful alliance, the Yaqui people are able to make their voices heard, maintain their land, and eventually become officially recognized by the government.

Why you shouldn't read this book: No interest in local history, social justice, community organization, biography, or indigenous issues.

The Lady from the Black Lagoon

Written by: Mallory O'Meara

First line: In 1954, Millicent Patrick was an artist working for the world-renowned special effects shop at Universal Studios in California, the movie company famous for its monsters.

Why you should read this book: Author and filmmaker O'Meara sets out to prove that artist Milicent Patrick truly was the creator of the original Creature from the Black Lagoon design, and that an insecure male makeup artist acted maliciously to erase her contribution, take credit for her work, and ruin any possibility of her working in Hollywood because he was jealous of the recognition she received for her efforts (and her beauty). Simply tracking down the story of a blacklisted woman in an era during which movies didn't credit most of the people working on them turns out to be a story in itself, braided with O'Meara's own experience with sexism in Hollywood, and the book unfolds as part biography, part history, and part personal narrative, with emotional twists and turns, biting humor and withering observations. As I read this satisfying journey of a book, I felt a certain kinship with the tattooed, blue-haired, monster-loving author, whose personality shines through in every line of prose, and was therefore not too surprised when my best friend saw me with a copy and said, "Oh, you're reading my friend Mallory's book."

Why you shouldn't read this book: Your entire career is predicated on taking credit for other people's work.

Dig If You Will the Picture: Funk, Sex, God, & Genius in the Music of Prince

Written by: Ben Greenman

First line: The phrase is stuck in my head.

Why you should read this book: Arranged by subject rather than chronologically, this book is part biography, part musicology, part history, part analysis, and mostly every thought the author ever had about his subject matter between discovering Prince in 1982 and turning the manuscript into his publisher in 2017. The chapters are short and sweet, peppered with anecdotes, quotes, descriptions of songs, philosophy, and personal reflection, written in an astonishing voice that tosses off stunning metaphors, name drops, and digs deep for comparisons to others artists, other art, and other types of thinking. The author doesn't pull his punches, never allowing his great admiration for Prince to overwhelm the reality of his research: that Prince was both a rock god and very human, capable of ascending to great heights while still remaining prey to the foibles of being a man.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You've never been inspired by Prince.

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Written by: Dorothy Allison

First line: "Let me tell you a story," I used to whisper to my sister, hiding with them behind the red-dirt bean hills and row on row of strawberries.

Why you should read this book: This is a book about taking ownership of your own narrative, of accepting that the past is where you come from but not who you are. It's also a book about growing up affected by generation of poverty, violence, and sexual abuse, but, the author promises, everyone has the choice to transcend this history and create their own story. Short and fast-paced, this is a powerful memoir that feels like poetry although it's written in prose.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Trigger for childhood incest and abuse.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

Written by: Zora Neale Hurston

First line: I was summer when I went to talk with Cudjo so his door was standing wide open.

Why you should read this book: This fascinating book, an interview turned on its head by the subject's desire to share his story in his own way, was an early work of a then relatively-unknown Hurston, who masterfully turned a series of conversations into the shape of a book that was then considered unpublishable, as Hurston insisted on retaining her subject's use of dialect; it has only been released now, nearly sixty years after the author's death (and even longer after the subject's). One of the few slave narrative recounting the middle passage, Barracoon follows the life of a young African man, plucked from the continent on a dare long after the transport of Africans to America on slave ships had been outlawed. The story covers traditional life in the village where Cudjo (originally know as Kossula) grew up, his kidnapping, sale, transport across the ocean, years as a slave, and years as a free man after the Civil War.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Don't care about history, hope to repeat it.

Frida

Written by: Jonah Winter and Ana Juan

First line: Frida enters the world.

Why you should read this book: Colorful and evocative, this richly illustrated book recounts the early childhood of the artist Frida Kahlo. Her early influences, including her father's work, her mother's exhaustion, and the illness and injury that sometimes confined her to bed, are recounted. It is an inspirational story of determination and triumph, or passion and imagination.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're colorblind.

Bluffton: My Summers with Buster Keaton

Written by: Matt Phelan

First line: Life in Muskegon, Michigan, was quiet.

Why you should read this book: In the summer of 1908, a large group of vaudeville performers chose a tiny neighborhood in Michigan as the perfect spot for a leisurely vacation, bringing with them elephants, zebras, and the young "knockabout" comedian, Buster Keaton. Buster was practically born on stage, and his ability to take a fall, make a deadpan joke, and engineer a prank all seem amazing and desirable to his new friend, a local named Henry who wishes he, too, could become a vaudeville star. Keaton, indifferent to his fame, prefers baseball and building things. This is both a lovely book about a boy in a small town yearning for bigger things, as well as an introduction to vaudeville and the state of American entertainment prior to the development of movie houses.

Why you shouldn't read this book: An actor stole your girlfriend.

Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song

Written by: Frank M. Young and David Lasky

First line: Alvin Pleasant Carter! You git away from that fiddle! That's th' devil's instr'ment!

Why you should read this book: With straightforward illustrations and simple dialect, this graphic novel tells the life of Pleasant Carter, patriarch of the musical Carter family. As a young man, music meant more to him than anything else, and collecting the old songs was more important to him than any job he ever had. Eventually, with the help of his family, he is able to make a living with his music (the book comes with a CD of the family's music, but someone seems to have stolen it from the library copy I checked out).

Why you shouldn't read this book: Johnny Cash only appears on the last page.

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins

Written by: Barbara Kerley and Brian Selznick

Why you should read this book: I adored this informative but entertaining and beautifully illustrated historical research about the eccentric artist Waterhouse Hawkins, who almost single-handedly created the field of dinosaur reconstruction and brought the thunder lizards to life in the imaginations of countless children. Already an accomplished artist when he took his first dinosaur-related commission, Hawkins exhaustively researched paleontology before merging his knowledge with his art to create the massive models displayed in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Park. A fascinating story about a fascinating man.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're just a boring person with no imagination and no interest in developing one.

Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai

Written by: Claire A. Nivola

Why you should read this book: A beautiful melding of biography and environmentalism, this is the true story of the life of Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan girl who grew up in a lush, tree-covered land, spent five years in America studying biology, and came home to find her country nearly deforested and suffering from poor land stewardship. A one-woman dynamo, she convinced the largely unlettered women of Kenya that they could improve their situation by planting trees--over thirty million of them, at the time of the book's writing--and changed the face of her nation. Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work, and seems to have largely protected her people from privation, but never considered her action brave or extraordinary.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're chopping down truffula trees just as fast as you can.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Written by: Willa Cather

First line: One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America  were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

Why you should read this book: Gorgeously written, evocative of time and place, a fictionalized version of the true story of an extraordinary life: Jean Marie Latour, appointed the first bishop of New Mexico, finds himself navigating a intransigent, unhelpful, and often deadly world. In a landscape unforgiving and uncivilized, where the people often hostile, Latour focuses on his mission: to bring the teachings of the Catholic church to the new world, and by and large, his determination and vision carries him through. As it does for all men, death eventually comes for the archbishop, but what he builds in his life and leaves behind him still stands.

Why you shouldn't read this book: A fierce antipathy to organized religion.

Becoming Unbecoming

Written by: Una

First line: My name is Una.

Why you should read this book: Stark, powerful, and unique, this graphic novel recreates the evolution of the author's understanding of sexual violence, beginning at the age of ten, weaving together the story of a serial killer terrorizing her region and the story of the repeated sexual assaults perpetrated upon the author by older men. While sexism and incompetence bungle the police investigation and keep the killer on the streets years after he might have been caught, Una's experience causes her community to slut-shame and ostracize her, so that her further victimization creeps into every aspect of her life. As she grows into an artist, she comes to learn the truth about sexual violence, both as it affected her own adolescence as well as it impacts the planet at large.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Trigger warning for an entire book about sexism and sexual violence.

The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of the Legendary Codebreaker

Written by: Eric Liberge and Arnaude Delaland

First line: Who am I?

Why you should read this book: Framed by the knowledge of his suicide and colored with the theme of the poisoned apple, this book tells the life story of genius code breaker and computing machine inventor Alan Turing, whose work breaking the German's Enigma helped bring World War II to a close. Intelligent, unusual, and well aware of his queer identity from a young age, Turing lived by his own rules and made great leaps in technology while hiding his sexuality from Britain's draconian laws against same sex relations. This lovely book treats its subject with compassion and honesty.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You always root for the Nazis. 

Lumberjanes 1: Beware the Kitten Holy

Written by: Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis

First line: Mal, Molly, what the Joan Jett are you doing?

Why you should read this book: As our tale opens on this popular graphic series, five friends have sneaked out of the cabin at their overnight camp in the middle of the night, and spooky things are happening. There are weird three-eyed foxes to fight and mysterious messages in anagram, and their counselor doesn't believe them, but the camp director might. It's girl power all the way as the Lumberjanes investigate the strange goings-on around there, using all their scouting knowledge to defeat monsters and solve problems.

Why you shouldn't read this book: It always bothered you that Harry Potter never got busted for sneaking around in the middle of the night.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Written by: Rebecca Skloot

First line: There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape.

Why you should read this book: It's mind-bogglingly good, an interdisciplinary work that melds science, psychology, history, ethics, journalism and a bunch of other guiding principles and somehow reads like a thriller, a page-turning story that makes you desperate to find out what happens to a wide cast of characters. Henrietta Lacks, a poor, uneducated black woman with 5 children, died of a really brutal form of cancer, cells of which were harvested from her body without her consent, and subsequently proved to be immortal and became the basis of most research in eradicating human disease. Many scientific advances were made based on her tissue, and many people got rich off it; meanwhile, Lacks's five motherless children suffered without health insurance or knowledge of what had really happened until the author set out to finally tell Henrietta's story. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't believe in consent.

Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped inside His Own Body

Written by: Martin Pistorius

First line: Barney the Dinosaur is on TV again.

Why you should read this book: A remarkable page turner of a memoir, it's the autobiography of a boy who contracts an unknown degenerative neurological disorder in his twelfth year, loses half a decade to darkness, and then gradually reawakens, horrifyingly with a type of locked-in syndrome: he is well aware of everything going on around him, can see, hear, feel, and think, but is unable to move or communicate his cognizance in any way. At the age of twenty-five, a care worker decides that he is not a complete vegetable and Martin slowly begins to train his body and mind to employ adaptive technology and rejoin the world. Although he can neither walk nor talk, Martin is able to hold down a steady job, find the love of his life, and take his place as a fully fledged adult.

Why you shouldn't read this book:  You love Barney.

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka

Written by: Roger Kamenetz

First line: Once a tale was told by Rabbi Nachman about a wise man who journeyed to find a portrait of a humble king.

Why you should read this book: In 2003, I was supposed to take what sounded like an amazing class about Kafka and Kabbalah in Prague with Kamenetz, but apparently I was the only person who thought it sounded amazing, because no one else signed up, the class was cancelled, and I had to read the books on my own, meaning that I didn't learn anything about Kabbalah. This book seems like it might contain some kernel of what would have been in that course, as Kamenetz creates a magical history, comparing the lives of two renowned storytellers and bringing the ghosts of both men on his own mystical journey to enlightenment. It's sort of hard to sum up what this book is actually about, but its an amazing voyage through literature, psychology, religion, belief, faith, magic, fear, hope, and mysticism, which kept my interest to the last page.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You would have signed up for the seminar about the Czech revolution.