Some books I read in 2022 (many of these came from my 1851 media diet):
James W.C. Pennington: A Text Book of the Origin and History, etc, of the Colored People (1837) – one of the earliest Black histories written by a Black person that I could find. It turned out to be more of a preface to such a history since Pennington had to first knock down common racist assumptions.
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (1847) – I read this way back when. It has vastly improved since then.
Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1849) – I also read this way back when. It has not improved upon a second reading.
Sojourner Truth: Narrative (1850) – one of those books I am embarrasssed not to have read. Embarrassed no longer!
Melville: Moby-Dick (1851) – Ditto. This book has its moments – some fine writing (but also some terrible writing) and a shattering end – but it fits Mark Twain’s definition of a classic: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” I could not NOT read it, but having read it I have no desire to read it again.
Frederick Douglass: Speeches (1841-52) – an X-ray machine on the US. Especially White Christianity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – I read this a chapter a week to match its serialization 170 years ago. Slave narratives packaged as a Victorian tear-jerker aimed at White mothers. Longish, somewhat racist, but excellent. It spawned two new racist stereotypes via later theatrical productions, but it humanized Black people to a large White audience as never before.
Josiah Henson: Life (1849) – this is who Uncle Tom was based on! Somehow Henson was able to talk about his life without lapsing into minstrelese like Uncle Tom does. But as fugitive slave narratives go, pretty pedestrian. I’m spoiled.
Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955) – about Vietnam in the 1950s, but is a better guide to the Vietnam war of the 1960s and 1970s than almost anything written later.
Iris Chang: The Chinese in America (2003) – good intro to one of the gaps in my education. I read chunks of this before to do posts on The Transcontinental Railroad, Gold Mountain, and Taiwanese Americans, etc, but it was good to read it all the way through.
Jules Verne: Paris in the 20th Century (1863/1994) – considered too far-fetched to publish in 1863, it is surprisingly prophetic, so much so that it amounts to a 19th-century man’s view of the 20th.
Anthea Butler: White Evangelical Racism (2021) – A gentle introduction for the racially fragile. She spent 20 years studying this and I spent 5 months on the waiting list at my library, so my expectations were probably too high. It seems to be all right as an introduction, especially for White Evangelicals. She seems to take pains to keep them with her. But that seems to water down the book. A prologue to the Trump Era.
Bible (367) – both the New Testament and Psalms/Proverbs a chapter a day each. I read it in the King James Version to be 1851 compliant. I read the New Testament in chronological order in sync with Books 15-20 of Josephus’s “Antiquities”. Makes more sense and seems more real that way.
– Abagond, 2022.
See also:
- books
- Books I wish I had read sooner
- How to find a good book: the 15 Year Rule
- 1851 media diet
- Black American writing, early 1800s
- The Black counter-frame – shared by Douglass and Delany
- minstrelese
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Abagond 
Abagond, you should read “Bitter Harvest”/“The Great Betrayal” by Ian Douglas Smith, may his memory be a blessing.
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Updated to the end of the 2022.
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