Books In the Bookroom!

If you read this blog often, you know that I believe in the value of teaching novels, short stories, and poems by and about people of color. We’ve got to get away from ‘The Single Story.'

One of my colleagues and friend proposed that we start a voluntary bookclub with the English department where we will read a diverse novel each month in order to share ideas and to have books in mind when it is time to order new books at the end of the year. We even thought about the idea of going through our own bookroom and perhaps reading diverse novels from our bookroom that may or may not have been read in our classes.

So, I went to do a careful look at the books in our bookroom, and my heart started racing as if I had just been told that I had won the lottery; our bookroom is completely awesome.....

Yes, we have lots of the classics, but we also have many contemporary titles like Funny in Farsi, Under the Feet of Jesus, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Mountain Echoed, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, Black Boy, The Color of Water, Cooper Sun, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Cuba 15, Dreaming in Cuba, Sold, and we also have class sets of books by Gabriel Garcia, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and on and on and on..... You see why my heart was uncontrollably beating as I perused the book room??? (Click on the highlighted books to read the reviews by me.)

I wanted to faint when I saw a few class sets of one of my favorite reads from my summer reading list: Losing My Cool! And, we selected it to be the first book that we will read and discuss at our first departmental bookclub meeting. (Winning!)

I can't wait to have discussions about Losing My Cool and other books that we already own. My People, a change is coming.....

Team Work Makes The Dream Work.

My People, I am grateful to work with people who are willing to try new things!

Check back to read about our departmental bookclub meetings.

Grateful is my Attitude Today.