The Book 100
In Chapter after Chapter, Heather Sellers recommends reading 100 books in the genre you are writing in, as a “strength-training program” to support your writing. I took her advice and started keeping count of the books I have read that in some way inform my novel. Most are fiction; some are nonfiction, reference texts.
In January, 2021, I reached my goal of 100 books!
(Confession: I'm still working through some of the nonfiction texts!)
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
Browngirl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Kindred, Octavia Butler
A Place for Us, Fatima Farheen Mirza
Dear Martin, Nic Stone
All American Boys, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika Sánchez
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Brothers and Keepers, John Edgar Wideman
Long Way Down, Jason Reynolds
Assata, Assata Shakur
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
You Bring the Distant Near, Mitali Perkins
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
What Doesn't Kill you Makes you Blacker, Damon Young
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Internment, Samira Ahmed
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
Behold the Dreamers, Imbolo Mbue
Dream Country, Shannon Gibney
This Promise of Change, Jo Ann Allen Boyce and Debbie Levy
Betty Before X, Ilyasah Shabazz and Renée Watson
Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson
The Water Dancer, Ta Nehisi Coates
March (trilogy), John Lewis
A Particular Kind of Black Man, Tope Folarin
The Moor's Account, Laila Lalami
New Kid, Jerry Craft
One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
White Rose, Kip Wilson
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ahimsa, Supriya Kelkar
Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of your Fist, Sunil Yapa
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Sixteenth of June, Maya Lang
Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens
Countdown, Deborah Wiles
Kent State, Deborah Wiles
Revolution, Deborah Wiles
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein
The War that Saved My Life, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Punching the Air, Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam
Childtimes, Eloise Greenfield
Glory field, Walter Dean Meyers
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
American Street, Ibi Zoboi
Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison
For Black Girls Like Me, Mariama J. Lockington
Far from the Tree, Robin Benway
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
With the Fire on High, Elizabeth Acevedo
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo
Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires
We Are Not From Here, Jenni Sanchez
Some Places More Than Others, Renée Watson
Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai
Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid
The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
The Great Believers
This is My America
The Black Kids
The Awakening of Malcolm X
Autobiography of My Mother
When You Were Everything
Don't Ask Me Where I'm From
Concrete Rose
The Hundred-Year House
The Namesake
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
From the Desk of Zoe Washington
Slay
Research/ nonfiction
The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972, Ibram H. Rogers
The Black Revolution on Campus, Martha Biondi
Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Student Power in the Late 1960s, Stefan M. Bradley
A Time to Stir: Columbia '68, Paul Cronin (editor)
The Black Power Revolt, Floyd B. Barbour
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
Is Anybody Listening to Black America? Eric C. Lincoln
Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
The Making of Black Revolutionaries, James Forman
Black Bourgeoisie, Franklin Frazier
Integrating Delmar: The Story of a Friendship, by Margaret B. Cunningham and Arlen R. Westbrook
The Last Negroes at Harvard: The Class of 1963 and the 18 Young Men Who Changed Harvard Forever, Kent Garrett and Jeanne Allsworth
A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, Clay Risen
Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi
Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
The Mis-Education of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid