Freedom and Future Library

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings – Performed by Andy Serkis
In another online community, we recently talked about the new Andy Serkis Lord of the Rings recordings. Well, it turns out that the pull of The Ring is still mighty strong, for however much it may have been destroyed in Mount Doom. I had barely gotten my hands on these audios and I found I […]
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Vita Sackville-West: All Passion Spent
The lovely, understated and gently ironic story of a woman who has had to lead a life opposite to the one that she wanted to live — that of an artist — for over 60 years, and who is at last liberated from the forces of social and family convention by the death of her […]
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Isabel Wilkerson: Caste
Blurb: The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down […]
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William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
Blurb: When William Kamkwamba was just 14 years old, his family told him that he must leave school and come home to work on the farm – they could no longer afford his fees. This is his story of how he found a way to make a difference, how he brought light to his family […]
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James Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room
Blurb: When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend’s return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened – while Giovanni’s life descends into tragedy. Intense. Groundbreaking. Heartbreaking. What more is there to say?
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Zora Neale Hurston: Dust Tracks on a Road
Definitely the best book I read during the first week of the new year; the New Yorker pretty much nailed it when calling the book “warm, witty, imaginative” and adding “This is a rich and winning book.” I’d (finally) read Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God last year; having now read her autobiography, I recongnize […]
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Attica Locke: Bluebird, Bluebird
Blurb: When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules — a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as […]
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Michael Connelly: The Dark Hours
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE Festive Tasks, Door 3 — Light(s): Read a book with the sun, or festive lights on the cover, or a book that’s set somewhere sunny. Connelly’s (to date) most recent book of the Harry Bosch universe takes us back almost exactly a year, to NYE and early January […]
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Nancy Mitford: Wigs on the Green
Festive Tasks Master Update Post HERE What a great read! It’s easy to see how Nancy Mitford’s witty and merciless skewering of her brother in law Oswald Moseley’s fascist movement (along with the Victorian attitudes of parts of 1930s British aristocracy) would have infuriated parts of her family and driven a lasting wedge between […]
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June 2021 and Mid-Year Reading Recap
Sigh. Well, I think posting a monthly (and even half-year) reading recap a full three weeks into the next month has to be some sort of record, even for me, but here we are. And I admit that at this point I’d even been contemplating holding off another week so as to combine this with […]
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun completely bowled me over when I read it a few years ago. Purple Hibiscus, too, took me in, though never as absolutely, when I read it the following year; for a first novel, it’s very impressive indeed. I seem to be doing somewhat less well with Adichie’s […]
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John Steinbeck: The Moon Is Down
My final venture into John Steinbeck’s oeuvre in the context of the (Dead) Authors in Residence challenge, and once more I found confirmation of everything that made me a fan of Steinbeck’s all the way back in my teens: vision and prescience of judgment, exquisitely fine characterization and, perhaps most of all, infinitely great humanity. […]
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Marcie R. Rendon: Murder on the Red River
When I took a look at Native American authors whose work I might want to explore, next to Joy Harjo (whose memoir Crazy Brave I read last month), Marcie R. Rendon quickly stood out as another obvious candidate. A member of the (Ojibwe / Minnesota Chippewa) White Earth Band, she is a resident of Minneapolis; […]
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Marcie R. Rendon: Girl Gone Missing
Given how much I liked Rendon’s debut novel, reading her second book, too, was pretty much a given for me. Again she writes from the heart; in this instance, about the trafficking of young girls and women for sex purposes, the victims of which trade formed a large part of her day job before becoming […]
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John Steinbeck: The Winter of Our Discontent
John Steinbeck’s final novel was one I had never gotten around to in my Steinbeck fangirl binges of yore — I knew it was reputed to be “bleak”, and after I’d seen what Steinbeck can do along those lines in The Grapes of Wrath (never mind that that actually is one of my favorite novels […]
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Ursula K. Le Guin: No Time to Spare
Ursula K. Le Guin is an author I’ve only started to discover very recently. I knew that she fought hard against the qualification as a genre (sci-fi / fantasy / speculative fiction) author; and she has always had all my support to the extent that “genre” is used as synonymous with “less worthy” (or, as […]
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