2017 Books for the Holidays: Diverse Books Reading List

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published inThe Atlantic along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development. He explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the most recent presidential election.

When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Instead, even when faced with a harrowing and brutal journey, Garrard found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.

After a fight with Alex’s father, Ma takes Alex on a pilgrimage of self-discovery through her own enthralling past. Slowly, Alex begins to realizes that the road trip is not a string of arbitrary stops, but a journey whose destination is perhaps Ma’s biggest secret of all. Told from the perspective of Alex, a teenager who equates gender identification with unwillingly choosing a side in a war, and written with a stunningly assured lyricism, The Lauras is a fearless study of identity.

Ernest Young, a half-Chinese orphan, is astounded to learn he will be raffled off at the World’s Fair. The winning ticket belongs to the flamboyant madam of a high-class brothel, famous for educating her girls. But as the grande dame succumbs to an occupational hazard and their world of finery begins to crumble, all three must grapple with hope, ambition, and first love. Fifty years later, in the shadow of Seattle’s second World’s Fair, Ernest struggles to help his ailing wife reconcile who she once was with who she wanted to be, while trying to keep family secrets hidden from their grown-up daughters.

Taipei, February 28, 1947: As an uprising rocks Taiwan, a young doctor is taken from his newborn daughter by Chinese Nationalists, on charges of speaking out against the government. Although he eventually returns to his family, his arrival is marked by alienation. Years later, this troubled past follows his youngest daughter to America, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family. A stunningly lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival.

This debut story collection  conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City.  Jenny Zhang’s stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.

On July 7, 2016, protesters marched in the streets of Dallas to demonstrate against the killings of unarmed black men by the police. As the peaceful event drew to a close, a sniper opened fire, targeting white cops and killing five of them. Into this charged situation stepped Dallas police chief David O. Brown, who, with a historic new tactical approach, quickly ended the gunman’s siege and calmed his community and the nation. Called to Rise explores the keys to that dialogue that have made Brown a leader on the front lines of social change.