‘Tis the season for book awards and best-of lists! What have you read and loved in 2019? Any immigrant, refugee or mental health works you’d recommend for fellow Foreign Bodies subscribers? Other unrelated books you can’t stop thinking about? Tell us in the comments!
Good Talk by Mira Jacob is the best memoir yet! And The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri is spectacular also. Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur held me mesmerized.
I'm really liking Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen! I find it uses the lens of memory to beautifully tie together the politics of remembering and unremembering, the SEA refugee experience, and visibility in the United States.
Both Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and There, There by Tommy Orange we’re incredible personal reads. My middle/high school book clubs are reading Lisa Ramèe’s A Good Kind of Trouble and Angie Thomas’ On the Come Up. They’re enjoying them a lot, and we’re finding them to be both age appropriate and thought-provoking!
I just started reading A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin. The book is about a young Nigerian boy who grows up in Utah but his mother has to leave to return to Nigeria because of her mental illness. It’s good so far.
Oh, one more: Right now, I’m reading ORDINARY GIRLS by Jaquira Diaz, and it’s astonishing. Diaz’s writing stays with you, and when I’m not reading, I can’t wait to get back to this book. It discusses mental illness quite a bit, too.
My #1 recommendation comes out in January 2020! It's called ALMOST AMERICAN GIRL by Robin Ha. It's a graphic memoir published by an imprint of HarperCollins, and it made me laugh and cry and feel so much empathy. And the art is stunning!
I'm in the middle of 'Girl, Woman, Other' right now, which is fiction but sometimes is so painfully on-point I have to put it down (in a good way!) Traces the lives of a group of people (as this review describes it, "twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly black") over years as they adjust to life in Britain. Lot of heartbreak and loss and confusion and survival, I'm so impressed by it.
I know I'm a few years late, but loved "One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter" by Scaachi Koul! Also, some poetry including If They Come For Us and Citizen Illegal!
Hey Foreign Bodies, what have you been reading this year?
Good Talk by Mira Jacob is the best memoir yet! And The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri is spectacular also. Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur held me mesmerized.
I'm really liking Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen! I find it uses the lens of memory to beautifully tie together the politics of remembering and unremembering, the SEA refugee experience, and visibility in the United States.
20 love poems and a song of despair-pablo neruda!
The Border Of Paradise was a good mix of mental health and migrant trauma, and some of the writing was absolutely arresting.
Both Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and There, There by Tommy Orange we’re incredible personal reads. My middle/high school book clubs are reading Lisa Ramèe’s A Good Kind of Trouble and Angie Thomas’ On the Come Up. They’re enjoying them a lot, and we’re finding them to be both age appropriate and thought-provoking!
I just started reading A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin. The book is about a young Nigerian boy who grows up in Utah but his mother has to leave to return to Nigeria because of her mental illness. It’s good so far.
Oh, one more: Right now, I’m reading ORDINARY GIRLS by Jaquira Diaz, and it’s astonishing. Diaz’s writing stays with you, and when I’m not reading, I can’t wait to get back to this book. It discusses mental illness quite a bit, too.
My #1 recommendation comes out in January 2020! It's called ALMOST AMERICAN GIRL by Robin Ha. It's a graphic memoir published by an imprint of HarperCollins, and it made me laugh and cry and feel so much empathy. And the art is stunning!
I'm in the middle of 'Girl, Woman, Other' right now, which is fiction but sometimes is so painfully on-point I have to put it down (in a good way!) Traces the lives of a group of people (as this review describes it, "twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly black") over years as they adjust to life in Britain. Lot of heartbreak and loss and confusion and survival, I'm so impressed by it.
I know I'm a few years late, but loved "One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter" by Scaachi Koul! Also, some poetry including If They Come For Us and Citizen Illegal!
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins undid me.
in the dream house by carmen machacdo!!