Jill Norgren’s Late Summer Reading Suggestions

Natasha’s Trethewey’s (Harper Collins, 2020) Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, takes up many of the same questions as those that drive Shuggie Bain. Trethewey, a former U.S. poet laureate and 2007 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, revisits her childhood and a violent stepfather in this powerful account of adults who fail a child. The Stone Angel

Canadian author Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) wrote extraordinary volumes that examined the lives of twentieth century women. In The Stone Angel (McClelland & Stewart, 1964) we follow Hagar Shipley, a head-strong but self-aware prairie-woman from childhood through to old age. She fights for independence in her relationship with her father, then husband, and finally, son. The novel is brilliantly shaped with luminous writing. The Stone Angel is one of five novels in Laurence’s Manawaka series.

Recently, Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing (General Press, 2019), has received renewed attention, and for good reason. Framed as a story of friendship, marriage, and suppressed sexuality Passing explores attitudes about race through the act of race passing. Pick up this semi-autographical book and read it in one sitting — it is that good, provocative in the questions that Larsen raises.

Les Payne worked on The Dead Are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright, 2020) for two decades. He died before it was fully edited. His daughter, Tamara Payne, completed it. Payne gives extensive attention to Malcolm’s childhood, and nicely shapes the tension that builds between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad (and his family) as Malcolm’s singular leadership talents and charisma become evident. Payne’s volume also stands out for not stinting on historical context. The Dead Are Rising won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 biography Pulitzer Prize. In this beautifully crisp, fascinating book, Stanley, a history professor at Northwestern University, plays successfully with biographical format to produce the life of Tsuneno, an unconventional, early nineteenth century Japanese woman and the life-story of Edo. Stanley writes with compelling word-pictures, letting the reader envision Tsuneno’s rural birth country as well as the gritty world she inhabits in Edo. Stranger in the Shogun's City

And what books are on my late summer reading list?

James Shapiro’s (Penguin, 2021) Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future; Seishi Yokomizo’s mystery The Inugami Curse (In translation, Pushkin Press, 2020; originally published in 1972); Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom (1st published in 1910; republished by Virago in 1981); and Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (Random House, 2019).

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Jill Norgren’s Late Summer Reading Suggestions

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