Essays
Paired Reading: An Enhanced Experience
Content creator Ta’Kijah Bryant highlights the benefits of paired literature and shares her favorite paired recommendations.
Ta’Kijah Bryant is a Bay Area, CA native and an aspiring archivist of Black art, literature, and culture. When she’s not reading across genres, she is working as a Project Manager in STEM (yay Black Women in STEM!). Her past work experience includes staffing (now Mayor of Los Angeles) Karen Bass and managing strategy and accounts at an LA-based digital media agency. Her love for reading has ballooned into self-discovery and a love of knowledge. It is Ta’Kijah’s ultimate goal to unearth hidden gems within the Black canon. Whether it be literature, art, film, or nature, Ta’Kijah wants to amplify the works of Black people and have them canonized as societal “standards”. When not preaching about the importance of raising the literacy rates in America, Ta’Kijah is likely collecting seashells, tracking flights to random countries, or FaceTiming her niece. She currently resides in San Diego, CA, where life is literally perfect. You can find Ta’Kijah on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Isn’t it funny that you spend your childhood and young adult years in school loathing mandatory reading assignments, only to one day in your 20s and 30s, pick up a book and feel the need to go on a literary deep dive?
This has been the year of the paired read for me. I describe ‘paired reading’ (or paired literature) as texts that have similar themes or throughlines that (when read back-to-back) ultimately enhance your reading experience, knowledge of a certain subject, or expand your worldview.
I love when I find synchronicities between texts. When I began reading as a hobby, I was simply trying to strengthen my brain. Now, I want to learn more about the people and world around me. Paired reading allows me to ingest literature that is in conversation with each other. It’s a cool feeling, “connecting the dots”, picking up on shared symbolism or even connecting story layouts from one book to the next.
Below are some of my favorite paired readings and what you can expect when journeying through their stories.
Sisterhood, Friendship, and Platonic Love
Each novel expands on the beauty, intimacy, and intricacies of (Black) female relationships. In either book, you will find themes of platonic enduring love among friends who become sisters. At the same time, the characters of each novel find themselves in situations where all they have is their sistergirl to turn to. Love is not only romantic; some of the purest love you’ll experience is amongst friends.
New York Times Bestseller & Oprah’s Book Club Pick
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.
A modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women.
Sugar brings a Southern African-American town vividly to life, with its flowering magnolia trees, lingering scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, and white picket fences that keep strangers out — but ignorance and superstition in. To read this novel is to take a journey through loss and suffering to a place of forgiveness, understanding, and grace.
We Are All Philosophers
In both texts, the characters spend a lot of time questioning God’s role in not only their lives, but also the universe. In The Color Purple, Celie is constantly questioning God’s intentions for her life, while her sister Nettie wants to know why God allows certain things (good or bad) to happen in society. In Confessions, Saint Augustine is asking life’s most rudimentary questions (Who am I? Where did I come from?) while gradually building to questions about humanity and human nature. Both works are philosophy in its purest form: asking questions. In reading these titles back-to-back, you will find Celie, Nettie, and Augustine asking the same questions, hundreds of years apart. I was reminded that at the end of the day, we are all philosophers by nature, and wanting to know the answers to the existential side of life is what makes us human.
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence.
Removed by time and place but not by spiritual relevance, Augustine’s Confessions continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Wills brings his superb gifts of analysis and insight to this ambitious translation of the entire book.
Paired reading isn’t mandatory, but it will open your mind’s eye to see just how connected we all are. If you read any of my suggestions, let me know which dots you were able to connect.
Sincerely,
Ta’Kijah
