INTRUDER IN THE DUST
William Faulkner
This classic by Faulkner is actually a murder mystery. Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer, has been accused of murdering a white man. Before he is lynched, Lawyer Gavin Stevens and his nephew Chick must prove his innocence. Through reminiscences, a lovely friendship between Chick and Lucas is demonstrated. It's not as prosey and flowery with all the run on sentences one usually encounters in a Faulkner novel but still beautiful classic American literature.....
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
Jonathan Lethem
This is a semi autobiographical novel about Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in a gentrified black neighborhood in Brooklyn, and his black best friend Mingus Rude. Through them, all kinds of histories are explored: funk, hip hop, punk, new wave, cocaine, crack, science fiction, comics, bullying, prison, etc, etc. It captures childhood and puberty as well as the evolution of childhood friendships.
But the stories you told yourself-- which you pretended to recall as if they'd happened every afternoon of an infinite summer-- were really a pocketful of days distorted into legend, another jailhouse exaggeration, like the dimensions of those ballpoint-crosshatched tits or of the purported mountains of blow you once used to enjoy, or how you'd bellowed an avenger's roar when you squeezed the trigger of a pistol you'd actually brandished in self-pissing terror. How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned a few afternoons long, in the end.
FORTUNATE SON
Walter Mosley
This is tear jerker for sure. The tragic tale of Thomas, a bastard child born with a hole in his lung and his stepbrother, a nordic adonis, Eric. Every possible bad thing that can happen to a young black man in America seems to come to poor Thomas while Eric leads a charmed life. The love the brothers have for each other is shines through though. I think this is Mosleys best and it is definitely one of my all time favourite books.....
“I know you must wonder why it’s always me here and never your father," Branwyn said to her son one Thursday evening. “Elton has a lot of good qualities, but bein’ a father is not one of them. He left me for one of my girlfriends less than a month after we found out I was having you. He told me that he’d stay if I decided not to have the baby. But Elton had the choice to be with me or not and you didn’t. I couldn’t ask you if you minded if I didn’t have you and if you didn’t have a life to live. No sunshine or sandy beaches. You don’t even know what a sandy beach is. So I told Elton he could leave if he wanted to but I was havin’ my baby.
