BBAW: Forgotten Treasure

Today’s Topic:  Sure we’ve all read about Freedom and Mockingjay but we likely have a book we wish would get more attention by book bloggers, whether it’s a forgotten classic or under marketed contemporary fiction.  This is your chance to tell the community why they should consider reading this book!

I sat and stared at my computer screen for a long time after coming across today's topic. At first I thought it would be easy to come up with a title (or an author? maybe even a genre?) that I thought was woefully under-read and in need of some blogger-loving, but I had a terrible time narrowing down my ideas. There are so many books I've loved that seem 'out of fashion' in today's reading community. I often feel lost reading other blogs because I'm fairly out of touch with the contemporary/YA lit world-- I love visiting and maybe adding other blogger's favorites to my TBR pile, but I never quite get over the feeling of being a tourist in a strange land... 

Anyway-- here are my final picks for forgotten treasures!

The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. I think Hughes, in general, is horribly under-read at the moment. Sure we usually get a couple of his poems in school (usually in the month of February when teachers are instructed to celebrate African American History month...) and during President Obama's inauguration Hughes quotes were tossed around all over the place... but actually reading his collected works? Or his short stories? His plays? His non-fiction work? Not so much! I was actually guilty of 'forgetting' Hughes (or of never really knowing him...) until fairly recently. A dear friend of mine in grad school is a Hughes scholar (one of the few, the proud) and he basically tied me to a chair and refused to let me up until I'd worked through a couple collections. It was an eye-opening experience. I'd never realized quite how long Hughes's career was-- he was a major voice not only in the Harlem Renaissance, but also throughout the Second World War, the Red Scare of McCarthyism, and the early Civil Rights Movement. He traveled extensively in the US, the Carribbean, Western and Eastern Europe, West Africa, and Japan, and wrote about his experiences every step of the way. He wrote in almost every genre imaginable (even opera!) and was a huge American presence-- artistically, politically and socially-- for over 4 decades.

I would really encourage anyone to dive right into Hughes's work, but if you're only going to read one thing of his cover-to-cover, I would suggest checking out the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea. It's a fabulously lyrical account of his childhood (in the US and Mexico) and his growing awareness of both racial identity and the power of the written word. It follows him on his journeys as a young writer in Harlem, on book tours deep into the American South of the 1940s, and over to the artistic community in 1950s Paris. It's a beautifully written, emotionally powerful narrative that gives you an insight into one of the most prolific and influential writers of the first half of the 1900s. I can't shout enough praises...

AND (because I love this one too much to leave out...)

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead. I know this book got some flack(!!) for being 'overly literary' and Whitehead's complicated prose and kaleidescope of images, scenes, time periods, genres and voices can be messy and confusing, but if you let yourself get lost in the story/stories the experience is really magical. It's a haunting book. It's an ambitious look at the history/development/modern applications of the John Henry myth (a former slave working as a pile driver for the railroads who engages in a man vs machine contest to save his livelihood). The novel playfully, yet dramatically, explores stereotypes and race relations over the course of the past hundred years. It also engages with modern commodity culture-- where history, myth, and tensions have been turned into purchasable 'things' so that we can buy (and own) little bits of the past (a 'John Henry action figure,' 'black face lawn jockeys for the front yard,' 'stereotyped Aunt Jemima syrup bottles' etc.) You may not love the book for its language (though I actually do..) or for it's wildly spinning construction, but the messages and characters will stay with you!