My Year of Reading X

SUMMER SIGNALS FREEDOM. If you are anything like me, two words in particular shimmer with the season’s promise of boundlessness: Summer reading.

At the beginning of Black History Month back in February, however, I decided to restrict my reading for this year. Some friends and I embarked on what I christened a “Year of Reading X”—a year of reading only, or mostly, books by black, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous, and other authors of color.

While recent discussions around the whiteness of the publishing industry and Western canon have motivated many to make racially aware reading commitments, exclusively reading black authors or authors of color is not novel. People of color have long been aware of the whiteness of the conventional literary world and have negotiated it accordingly, finding and creating our own spaces. What sparks my year of reading, then?

I started this Year of Reading X, and invited friends to join me, after hearing several otherwise unconnected black voices raise the often unspoken assumption that reading only books by black authors is difficult, ultimately depressing, and inevitably populated by slave narratives and other accounts of trauma, struggle, and pain. In other words, relegating ourselves to our own literature yields overwhelmingly sad stories with no happy endings.

My lifelong experience reading black-authored books refutes this assumption and reframes its notion of happy ending with a more profound sense of joy and meaning. Recent favorites include antebellum autobiography ( My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass), post-apocalyptic fantasy (Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor), theological memoir ( Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian, by James Cone), and romance novel (anything by Beverly Jenkins). The deeper questions the assumption raises, though, tug at me: What kinds of stories are told about black people such that our lives are equated with pain and suffering? What truths and untruths do we use to imagine ourselves?

This year, I seek to address these questions, which are spiritual and not just literary, intimating beliefs about God, humans, and possibility. I also seek to engage stories of our traumas past and present, finding new ways to hold them with strength and freedom. Given the far-reaching realities of racism and colonialism, these questions apply to people of color broadly. As an avid reader with favorite authors of color across genre, I intend this year to find more.

The “X” in my name for this year of reading with friends does double work. It represents our individual determinations of effort and ethnicity. “X” also signifies, in the sense of Malcolm, a rejection of white-centered ways of naming and seeing that persist in internalized ways. Intentionally establishing boundaries to read solely authors of color uncovers a deeper boundlessness, one that resists the limitations of imagination set by society, economy, or ourselves.

Despite the assumption of narrowed horizons, in reading black books the world opens up. With this summer’s reading, I am living into freedom of a different sort.