Tom's 2016 Unread Reading List
The books he wished he had gotten to this year, and still hopes he will.
In the Darkroom
by Susan Faludi
Despite fantastic reviews, despite Ann Patchett telling a packed house at Benaroya Hall that it's a masterpiece, and despite being named one of the New York Times's 10 Best of 2016, almost no one (in our store at least) has picked up Faludi's memoir of her discovery that her tyrannical, estranged father had sex-reassignment surgery in his 70s. And neither have I—yet!
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America
by Patrick Phillips
Phillips, a National Book Award-nominated poet, looks back at the violent removal, a hundred years ago, of the entire black population from Forsyth County, Georgia, which continued to be enforced for decades after, up to his own childhood there.
Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White
by Michael Tisserand
Oh, boy. Herriman's cryptic, elemental, hilarious comic Krazy Kat is one of the great achievements of American culture, but Herriman himself has largely been a cipher, so I'm hungry to read this first major biography, just out this month.