Blog / 2020 / Baby Sees Book Club

Over the last few months, as I put together Baby Sees ABCs, I have shared about everything I was reading. Originally, I did it because I’d gotten off social media and I was sad that I wouldn’t be able to share about my favorite reads there. But as I wrote these mini-reviews, I came to enjoy the process of reporting about everything I read—even figuring out how to not be too mean when I thought a book was terrible.

With this post, I am stopping doing these little write-ups. It’s been nine months to the day that I started. Baby Sees ABCs has been published and a bunch of the original artworks—the ones that aren’t already sold—are on display at Wildflowers Too, a gallery on Long Beach Island where I live in New Jersey. There’s even a virtual reception for the show Tuesday July 14^th at 4 PM (New York time) on Facebook!

Of all the excellent books I read over the course of this project, there are three that stand out as especially important and beautiful: Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet, Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and Chanel Miller’s Know My Name.

Below is the full list with links back to the posts where they are discussed in greater detail. Within each category, the books are presented from favorite to least favorite.

Memoir

• Know My Name by Chanel Miller
• Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper
• Maid by Stephanie Land
• Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif
• Shrill by Lindy West
• Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
• Cam Girl by Isa Mazzei
• Good Boy by Jennifer Finney Boylan
• In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
• No Walls and the Recurring Dream by Ani DiFranco
• The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
• Métaphysique des Tubes by Amélie Nothomb
• The Crying Book by Heather Christle
• The Other F Word edited by Angie Manfredi
• Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful by Stephanie Wittels Wachs
• Initiated by Amanda Yates Garcia
• Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

Nonfiction

• How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi
• Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• How to Start a Revolution by Lauren Duncan
• Gaslighting America by Amanda Carpenter
• The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan
• Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
• Broad Band by Claire L Evans
• The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
• The Vagina Bible by Jen Gunter
• She Came to Slay by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
• What It Is by Lynda Barry
• Picture This by Lynda Barry
• Making Comics by Lynda Barry
• Syllabus by Lynda Barry
• No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg
• The Library Book by Susan Orlean
• The Lost Gutenberg by Margaret Leslie Davis
• Vulture: The Private Life of an Unloved Bird by Katie Fallon
• I’m Judging You by Luvvie Ajayi
• The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
• Give and Take by Adam Grant
• The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson

Science Fiction

• Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson
• Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
• The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Long Division by Kiese Laymon
• The City We Became by NK Jemisin
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
• Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
• How Long ’til Black Future Month? by NK Jemisin
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente
• Cinder by Marissa Meyer
• Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
• Severance by Ling Ma
• The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
• Meet Me in the Future by Kameron Hurley
• The Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K Dick
• The Revisionaries by AR Moxon

Fiction

• The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya
• Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• Real Life by Brandon Taylor
• Milkman by Anna Burns
• Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
• The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar
• The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
• The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel
• Weather by Jenny Offill
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
• The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
• Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey
• Still Lives by Maria Hummel
• Un Appartement à Paris by Guillaume Musso

YA Fiction

• The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton
• The Everlasting Rose by Dhonielle Clayton
• I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal
• Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson
• The Summer of Jordi Perez by Amy Spalding
• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L Sánchez
• Puddin’ by Julie Murphy
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett