(written by a human writer who has read these books)
I wasn’t planning to have this blog’s first post be a list of summer reading recommendations, but The Chicago Sun-Times AI-generated list of mostly non-existent books pissed me off, so I took a few hours to write this.
Here are fifteen actual real books (all of which could be categorized as “illicit texts” of one sort or another) that this human writer has read and can warmly recommend.
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)
Octavia Butler’s work has become well-known of late, in part because of her brilliant and prescient novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Kindred is my favorite of Butler’s novels. It tells the story of a Black woman named Dana who finds herself inexplicably jerked back and forth through time from her home in 1970s Los Angeles to 19th-century antebellum Maryland. Taken—literally moved—against her will back to a time and a place where the enslavement of Black people was legally and morally sanctioned, Dana must witness and survive in a world where white people use great violence to enforce an inhumane world order. An essential American novel with a recent graphic adaptation worth checking out as well.
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze (2022)
The first essay in this anthology, “Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass?” was written by Professor Refaat Alareer, the poet, writer, teacher, father, husband, brother, son, friend, and courageous advocate for Palestinian liberation who was murdered by an Israeli airstrike in December of 2023. Alareer’s title question, “When Shall This Pass?,” remains unanswered. Israel’s brutal and illegal assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian people; the United States has repeatedly funded this genocide despite well-documented evidence of Israeli crimes including the assassination of journalists, the weaponization of famine and disease, the deliberate targeting of hospitals and shelters, and the use of torture (including sexual torture).
The writings in Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire were written before October 2023, but many years into the Israeli occupation of Palestine following the Nakba of 1948. As editor Jehad Abusalim writes in the book’s introduction, the voices of Gaza deserve to be heard now more than ever. Palestinians deserve to lead the conversation about the future of their homeland, whose “two million people with dreams, aspirations, and an unresolved plight for justice, return, and the reclamation of their rights.”
Coexistence: Stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt (2024)
Coexistence is the fifth book by Billy-Ray Belcourt, a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree nation whose work exceeds categorization. These stories explore the lives of queer Cree men as they navigate worlds (internal and external; intimate and political; immediate and remembered) distorted by the ongoing violence of colonization, white supremacy, capitalism, and indigenous dispossession. These stories are tender, painful, hopeful, loving, and defiant. Belcourt’s writing exists on its own terms, creating the kind of freedom many of his characters seek (and sometimes find).
All Fours by Miranda July (2024)
Raucous, sexy, and weird, Miranda July’s latest novel All Fours is a roadtrip book about an internal roadtrip. Its first-person narrator is a later-forty-something woman (a wife, a mother) who plans to drive from LA to New York, but doesn’t make it very far. Instead of a cross-country journey, she holes up in a shabby hotel thirty miles from home and embarks on a wild and secret exploration of her own desires, fears, and dissatisfactions. Equal parts hilarious, poignant, and profound, this is my favorite of July’s books to date.
Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency: Poems by Chen Chen (2022)
Sensitive and lyrical, Chen Chen’s poems in this collection live up to its darkly humorous title: they are intimate, urgent, emergent, witty. This book reminds me of Frank O’Hara crossed with Basho crossed with Ocean Vuong. Easy to relate to and yet entirely its own. Attentive to nature and keen on pop culture. Lonely, seeking connection; entangled, seeking to undo a knot. These poems will please poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers alike.
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (2025)
Okay, I lied. I haven’t read all the books on this list because after giving Sunrise on the Reaping to our sixteen-year-old, they loaned the book to a friend and it hasn’t come back to our house yet. Even given the tremendous success of The Hunger Games, I think Collins is an underrated writer. Her books are gripping, emotionally compelling, and politically acute; her vision of class violence under capitalism has resonated with readers for nearly two decades.
This newest entry in Collins’ Hunger Games series is another prequel, this time about the younger years of Haymitch Abernathy, the District 12 champion who eventually becomes Katniss Everdeen’s mentor.
My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid (1991)
The best plane book I’ve ever bought (purchased at a Barbara’s Bookstore in O’Hare airport last summer), My Garden (Book) reads something like a diary—the diary of a brilliant, irreverent, idiosyncratic, well-read and well-traveled human. Reading it, you feel privy to someone’s innermost thoughts about their passion, in this case, the passion for gardening. Kincaid was born in Antigua but her primary garden is at her home in Vermont. As in her fiction, her essays explore what it means to live betwixt, between, and within multiple cultures.
If you encounter a sentence like, “It was a day in late October and I had two thousand dollars’ worth of heirloom bulbs to place in the ground…” and you just have to know what happens next, this book is for you.
Concerning My Daughter by Hye-Jin Kim, translated by Jamie Chang (2017)
This novella by Korean author Hye-Jin Kim follows a widowed, aging mother who allows her adult daughter to move home into the mother’s small apartment. When Green, the daughter, brings her girlfriend with her, Green’s mother is filled with anger, frustration, resentment, and disapproval. What follows is a profound exploration of conflict and disagreement in loving relationships, and in unloving ones, as well. This slender book blew me away.
The Last American Roadtrip by Sarah Kendzior (2025)
A roadtrip memoir tracing years worth of family adventures launched from Kendzior’s home in St. Louis, Missouri, The Last American Roadtrip is Kendzior’s most personal book. A journalist and scholar of authoritarian states, Kendzior holds the dubious honor of correctly predicting the United States’ descent into a country ruled by an international criminal elite that flies over the rest of us in their private jets.
This book takes place on the roads those planes fly over: Route 66 and dozens of other small highways as Kendzior, her husband, and their children visit national parks, kitschy roadside attractions, historical sites, and haunted hotels. I have been reading this book slowly since it was released in April. It takes time to sit with the grief the book engages; but I am grateful to have in my hands a text that acknowledges we have much to grieve, and just as much to fight for. You can order signed (and even personalized) copies of Kendzior’s books from Left Bank Books in St. Louis.
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major and Toshio Meronek (2023)
Being an “icon” often means your life gets flattened into a linear narrative or postage-stamp image with a clear, simple meaning—easy to consume, easy to repurpose. These clear-sighted no-bullshit conversations between the magical Black trans elder, Miss Major, and her close friend, writer Toshio Meronek, refuse this flattening. They insist we must expand: expand our understanding, expand our compassion, expand our movements, expand the possibilities we imagine for our collective future(s).
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha (2024)
Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s second book, Forest of Noise: Poems was released in October of 2024, a year into the escalated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. All kinds of language has fallen apart as a result of this violence: the statues of international humanitarian law meant to prevent anything like this from happening have been abandoned by western powers; the language of “freedom,” “safety,” and “security” and “anti-semitism” have been newly weaponized to silence those who protest the brutal slaughter of unarmed civilians.
Abu Toha’s poems document life under occupation, life under attack, the lives of the ordinary human beings viewed as “security threats” by an occupying army that destroys Palestinian life with impunity. They steal back the function of English from the war-mongers and apologists who use this language only to obscure and excuse the worst things human beings can do to one another.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
I discovered All Systems Red, the first book in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series through the public library app, Libby. The series follow the misadventures of a self-aware cyborg created to provide “security” for the humans—or corporations—that pay for its services. The title character, who thinks of itself as “Murderbot”, has a secret: its governor module, the software that compels it to follow orders, is “cracked.” Uh oh! This means it has free will, which it must exercise clandestinely, or risk being decommissioned. Fast-paced, funny, and at the same time, deadly serious, All Systems Red is sci-fi at its best. I recommend the audiobooks, narrated by Kevin R. Free.
Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992)
If you loved Sinners and want a book that more than holds a candle to that film, I recommend Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Jazz. Primarily set in Harlem in the 1920s, Jazz is a gorgeous, ruminative, masterfully crafted novel. There’s a love triangle, murder, music, exploration of the haunting legacies of slavery, and complex portraits of unforgettable characters. A book worth reading and rereading, Jazz is an under-appreciated masterpiece.
Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from The Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump by James Ridgeway (reissued 2025)
The tentacles of white supremacy and white nationalism are evident everywhere in what’s happening in the United States today. Blood in the Face is a useful primer on white nationalism’s origins and evolution in the United States, from the country’s inception through the first election of Trump in 2016. I found the chapters covering the last forty to fifty years, in which Ridgeway traces the movement of violent white nationalist groups and ideologies from the fringes to the mainstream and into the White House (again), particularly useful.
They by Kay Dick (1977, re-released in 2021)
“I’m glad country walks are still possible,” says the narrator of Kay Dick’s poetic and unsettling novella, They, a small book that imagines a community of artists under threat from an unnamed-but-quickly-advancing authoritarianism. Haunting and incisive, this book explores what is lost when conformity is mandated, deviance is punished, and the deviants are disappeared. Out of print for many years, this book is a timely recent re-release.
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