A Look At November Through Literature
With November coming to a close and the end of the year coming soon after, we look to new goals, new plans, and new hopes in 2021. Amidst celebrations, we have to recognize that everything happening in our country, good and bad, carries over into the new year. We don’t move on by forgetting and ignoring but acknowledging and changing. I find literature to be helpful in this regard and you might too.
Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for gift-worthy book recommendations for everyone on your list.
If you wish you'd gotten out of Dodge way back when, and became a paperback writer, and lived in New York City, and worked by day as a fact checker at The New Yorker and clubbed by night with ultra-hip friends with shaved heads and safety-pin earrings, this is the novel for you. In fact, this novel is about you.
Colson Whitehead's novel tells a familiar story of cultural failure to care about what becomes of people after they've entered our penal system…The fundamental fact that makes the system run is that we don't care. We are willing to pay our taxes and funnel more and more money toward the system, but then we turn our attention elsewhere. We don't pay attention to where the money goes.
This details the story of another long tragic American military conflict with massive casualties, plagued by massacres and other atrocities, against a non-white people who wanted to handle their own affairs and keep their own governments and lands. The conflict began with the arrival of the Mayflower but suddenly reached a climax in the 1870-80s and then was all but finished by 1890. Or maybe not.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.