Bookin' It in 2022

I finished 20 books in 2022.  The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. Cack-Handed: A Memoir by Gina Yashere 
2. Can Black People Grow Hair? by Andrea Krystal 
3.  Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
4. Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color by Gilbert Baker
5. Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
6. High School by Sara Quin & Tegan Quin
7. Femme in Public by ALOK
8. Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism by Megan Phelps-Roper
9. Unprotected: A Memoir by Billy Porter
10. Your Wound / My Garden by ALOK
11. If You Give a Pig the White House by Faye Kanouse
12. Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity Edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane
13. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts 40x40: Bad Reputation / I Love Rock-n-Roll
14. Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson
15. Bearing My Seoul by Taryn Blake
16. The Little Book of Pride: Love Is Love by Joanna Gray
17. Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family by Amanda Jetté Knox
18. Enter the Blue by Dave Chisholm
19. Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game by Abby Wambach
20. Saint Peter and the Goldfinch: Poems by Jack Ridl

Quote of the Day

The Europeans had done slavery differently.  They had set up plantations in the countries they had colonized, therefore not bringing their dirty work home ... The Americans, by bringing all their stolen people to the American continent, had done the equivalent of burgling a house, then keeping the stolen goods in their own home.  The Brits and the Europeans had also burgled but kept the stolen goods in someone else's house.  If you'd gone to England in the 1700s and shouted, "Hey!  Thieves!  You have stolen Black people," they could have smugly waived their arms across the quiet English countryside and said, "But where?"  They had separated themselves from the evidence of their misdeeds.

-- Gina Yashere, Cack-Handed, p. 84

Quote of the Day

The missionaries' main purpose [in Nigeria] was to convert as many people as possible to Christianity while also educating them from a Eurocentric perspective, turning them away from their apparently primitive and barbaric way of life, plus getting them to give up land that was theirs to house churches they never knew they needed.  This education included learning the Bible.  The same Bible that had been used to subjugate Africans who were stolen and taken abroad.  The same Bible with all that worshipping of an impossibly blond and blue-eyed Jesus, with Black people being cursed as descendants of Ham.  And with all that obey-your-master, turn-the-other-cheek shit.  That stuff that keeps you accepting horrendous abuses in this life with a hope of ascending to heaven in the end.

-- Gina Yashere, Cack-Handed, p. 60