Welcome to Litsy!

Impressively bounces from insightful and poignant to fucking hilarious and back again all within a single page. So many powerful perspectives on white supremacy, being black in America, and rape culture. Learned a lot and would def recommend.

A memoir in essays but the essays are so interconnected it could be just called a memoir.
I always find it difficult to rate memoirs, especially ones where I can never understand their life. There R some great moments here, told w/passion
The writing is a bit rambling, often I was not sure the point of an individual essay (maybe the reason I think I should just be called a memoir). The misogyny/misogynoir was heavy as was the use of the N word.

Impressively bounces from insightful and poignant to fucking hilarious and back again all within a single page. So many powerful perspectives on white supremacy, being black in America, and rape culture. Learned a lot and would def recommend.

Excellent essay collection/memoir from Damon Young of The Root/Very Smart Brothas blog. Young writes about growing up in Pittsburgh and the ways racism and white power structures formed him and his reaction to a variety of issues. Sobering yet also sharply funny and insightful. https://cannonballread.com/2021/03/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-blacker-elcicc...

Currently in the middle of a blizzard so takeout and a book it is!

#BlitsyHistoryMonth Questionnaire
1. Campfire Coffee (@welovecampfire on IG), Mahogany Books, Maya‘s Vegan Cookies
2. Magnets, coffee mugs, stickers
3. Coffee!
4. Musician: FKA twigs; Artist: A.O. Hamer
5. Chadwick Boseman or Prince. I admire both for how much dedication the showed for their craft, as well as the way they approached being black celebrities, and used their fame and platform to help create opportunities.
#BHMS #BlitsySwap

I‘ve been waiting for this swap... well, ever since the last one! 😄 #BHMS #BlitsySwap #BlitsyHistoryMonth Sign ups through Dec 19: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd_XCt46uJLwvKacw_HOrlfnEBKJZuJQEPiHrax...

Im glad i grabbed this from BN instead of waiting for BOTM to have a pick i like! Plus it was $8.00 and there was a coupon too!

This was one of the the books i was going to grab from BOTM but im glad i waited because Barnes & Noble has the hardcover online for $8 AND theres a 15% off coupon for cyber monday!

Damon Young's essays are funny, sad and honest. He starts with memories from his school years, talks about his family, wife, career. It's his honesty and vulnerability that pulled me in. The essays center around injustice, inequality and what it is like for a black man to live in the US. I loved 'Street Cred', one of the best essays in the book.

This is an ode to being a black man. A memoir in essays, Damon takes you from his childhood in East Liberty, Pittsburgh to his adulthood in Eastside (same neighborhood, gentrified). From playing ball as a kid to first jobs to now being a husband and father.

There is very little of the meta political commentary that creeps into so many first-person essays. The book just flows in a natural rhythm, & I‘m glad I finally got around to reading it. 4⭐️

1. Not much. I wish my dad weren‘t working and going to what few community events are left for work, but I can‘t force him to stay home. He‘s definitely a stir-crazy type.
2. I think so. As long as I don‘t have a celiac attack!
3. I don‘t think I‘ve had any since I quit drinking 14 years ago! 😂
4. Tagged and starting something else too. Not sure what yet.
5. The Inventor, the HBO Theranos documentary

#randosurvey

#currentlyreading on this sunny but cold #springforward Saturday in Kentucky!

I thought it was funny to be reading a #BOTM choice from March 2019 and 2020!

Enjoying Open Mic on audio and as an ebook. 👍🏻🎧

After sleeping or 🤢 most all of Thursday afternoon to early this morning, I am thankful to be awake and well! 😂😂

Shipped your #BlitsyHistoryMonthSwap package this morning @GreenGrl87 I hope you like everything. Not much time to wait now! @Chelleo

Fantastic memoir! Sparkling writing, often super funny, and much compelling commentary/analyses about identity, systemic racism, masculinity, and more. The book also has a notably strong sense of place and taught me lots about Pittsburgh. I admire Young‘s honesty about his own missteps and uncertainties. (Loved his audiobook narration, though I bet it would be equally great in print.)

I‘ve been meaning to read this essay collection, and I figured #nfnov was as good a time as any! Maybe another documentary, too, tonight. Thanks for running this @rsteve388 and @Clwojick

#newin #essaysareawesome

I‘m so glad I read this. I appreciate the mind-twist of reading words from someone with such different experiences and identities than mine, yet someone whose thoughts and examinations of identity feel familiar to me.

Against my better judgement, I'm giving this #24in48 thing a shot. Got my first hour logged reading a couple of chapters of Young. Think I'll go to sleep now and pick it back up in the morning.

Damon Young‘s memoir in essays works more or less chronologically through his life while incorporating themes of poverty, race, and racism. He also writes with terrific good humor which may have caused me to snort in places. This is a great read. #botm

I never knew I would read such a fabulous description of a bad buffet. 😂

Fascinating, hilarious, harrowing, and made me very uncomfortable as I‘d hope it would. Always really good for me to read books Very Much not written with white readers in mind and spending time inside this guy‘s head was a great experience. He combined heartbreaking stuff about his mums lost battle with cancer and his relationship with her with laugh out loud funny stuff about his attempts to make girls like him at college, I loved every minute.

Damon just referred to Trump as “the world‘s rapiest vat of Cheez Wiz.” I think he‘s my new favorite person.

👏🏼🙌🏼👍🏼😆

This book is really good.

There are some FANTASTIC sections of this book. Chapter three about “Love & Basketball” & his own sad-ass poetry days; the chapter about his mother dying too young; the final chapter about his daughter. Some fantastic writing. The chapter about his ill-advised post blaming women for their own rapes shows that he hasn‘t QUITE figured that out yet, which, bummer, but everything else is good to great. #essays #memoir 4⭐️

“She will be taught that while Black people have been victims of oppression, subjugation, bias, and hate—and while we‘ve faced those things, in various forms and in various measures of intensity for the duration of the hundreds of years we‘ve been in America—blackness itself is not the problem. Her blackness is not a problem. It‘s not her skin. It‘s not her hair. It‘s not the way she looks. It‘s not the way she talks.”
I teared right up. YES.

Wow, this essay - the fourteenth essay or chapter in this book - is incredibly painful.
“I think about how Mom might still be here if she‘d decided to stop smoking after twenty years instead of thirty. I wonder if the stress and pressure from existing as our family‘s only stable income for a decade permeated, consumed, and overwhelmed her, and I think about whether that drove her to smoke for thirty years instead of twenty. ⬇️

“We don‘t *hate* hate white people. We watch *Game of Thrones*.” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 #real #essays

“The farce and the tragedy of how obsessed we — the black men and boys who considered ourselves to be straight and wanted said straightness to be conspicuous and foolproof — were with what it‘s supposed to mean to be a straight man enabled a creeping and indiscriminate dehumanization of ourselves that swaddled and permeated us. It lived in the words we said (and currently say), the musk we listened to (and currently listen to), and the way we ⬇️

Oh my god, the third essay - “Bomb-Ass Poetry” has me laughing so hard and with such agonized sympathy for everyone involved that I can hardly stand it. One sentence: “My poems vacillated from strained militancy and artificially extraneous pro-blackness to ballads of barely concealed desperation either enunciating the extravagant and ethereal sex I wasn‘t actually having or convincing women to drink almond milk.” 😂😂😂 DED. #BlameLoveJones

My first #essays read for May. Love this man‘s writing (he‘s the editor of Very Smart Brothas) & am REALLY looking forward to this book. My way is to read one essay each day and just be consistent about it.

The #keepit podcast is always a good source for reading material. Check out the Apr. 3rd episode for their interview with Damon Young.

This was a #botm extra that I picked last month. I was not familiar with Damon Young or Very Smart Brothas but I enjoy biographical essays. So this was a hit for me! I think Young could edit some of his very long paragraphs, but overall this is a good read. I found Young‘s generalized anxiety relatable. I, too, was scared of white people after the 2016 election (I‘m white but LBGT)! Young is funny, smart, and over-sensitive; it‘s a great combo!

Young uses the form of the essay to both tell his own story of growing up black in Pittsburgh AND write about the culture around him. He has a sharp turn of phrase and a dry humor that I really enjoyed. There is a lot to think about here, from ripping culture, to masculinity, to use of the N word in black culture, to his lack of an driver‘s license and how that impacts employment, to his new identity as a parent.

Help! I'm split between these 2 add on books. I don't want to add on 2, just one. I picked Lot as my main selection. #botm