Regardless of whether you curl up with a nice paperback, enjoy the feel of a serious hardback or like to do your reading on a Kindle, you’ll find plenty of great new books to keep your attention this year. Sheltering-at-home means finding activities to keep you busy. Most people have Internet access so online casinos and online streaming services provide an endless stream of entertainment. But when you’re ready for something else, SlotoCash online casino suggests that a good book can be just what the doctor ordered.
Everyone has their favorite type of book – fiction, non-fiction, comedy, drama, suspense and other options and there are many new publications in all categories to give reading aficionados exactly what they want.
Some of the best new publications for 2020 include:
The Vanishing Half
Our decisions in life send us down a specific path but there’s always another path – the “road not taken.” That’s the theme of The Vanishing Half which explores the Vignes sisters, two identical twins who grow up in a small, southern black community. The story follows the girls from the ‘50s through the ‘90s, from the South to California as they run away together and then head off to very disparate life experiences. One sister ends up passing for white and living with a husband and daughter who knows nothing of her history while the other returns to her hometown to raise her daughter within the black community.
The twins’ fate remains intertwined and the reader is left waiting for the daughters in the 2nd generation to meet and try to make sense of their mothers’ shared past as it shapes their own decisions, expectations and desires.
Rodham: A Novel
Most Americans know the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a brilliant woman who linked her future with the equally brilliant and captivating Bill Clinton and accompanied him to the White House when he was elected president in 1992. Hillary was full of promise in her own right when she graduated from Yale Law School and anticipated a career as a lawyer.
In the powerful Rodham: A Novel, Hillary’s life is reimagined to consider what might have happened if she and Bill never married. In the book Hillary breaks up with Bill and sets out on her own to blaze her own trail. Eventually, the two meet but not before each must consider the price that must be paid to achieve political power and Hillary faces the price that she was willing to pay to achieve success in a “man’s world.”
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Poet Natasha Trethewey explores the role that her mother’s brutal murder had in her poetry. Trethewey’s mother was killed by her former stepfather when Natasha was only 19 years old. Through her trauma daughter Natasha must navigate the grieving process which shapes her poetry. The combination of pain, loss and suffering leads her on a mission to examine her mother’s girlhood in the segregated South and through her own childhood in Mississippi to explore how the enduring ripple effects of domestic abuse and racism informed her mother’s eventual murder.
If I Had Your Face
Four young women in South Korea navigate through their culture’s impossibly high standards of beauty in this look into South Korea’s “room salons” that cater to wealthy men. The book weaves the stories of Kyuri, who works at a room salon where she is expected to entertain the gentlemen while she navigates the strict social hierarchies so as to not lose herself in the process, newlywed Wonna who is trying to get pregnant and trying not to think about how she will afford to raise a child, Miho, an artist who has just returned home from New York and Ara, a hair stylist who is obsessed with boy-band pop stars.
The women slowly develop the friendships that, one hopes, will help each one to save herself.
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
One of the biggest criticisms that the women’s movement has always faced is that it’s a movement that focuses on a specific demographic. Author Mikki Kendall argues that, if the movement wants to attract women from all backgrounds, it should be worrying about the issues that affect women from lower economic strata of society – food insecurity, safety, medical care, quality education and a living wage. Kendall says that the movement should put aside the goal of increasing privilege for the few in favor of advocating for basic survival of the masses.
In Hood Feminism, Kendall puts forth the argument that, by refusing to prioritize the basic issues, the problem of internecine discord is exacerbated and the feminists who come from the upper classes don’t consider how things like class, intersection with gender, sexual orientation and race prevent the movement from advancing forward.
Feminism is a movement in flux and in her Hood Feminism, Kendall calls out for feminists to focus on both thought and deed in order to put forward the true mandate of the movement.
