FAVORITE BOOKS By Black Authors This Year!

[Music] jacket me hello and welcome back to my channel i am jordan and i am so excited y'all for the third year in a row we are back at it from my top 10 books written by black authors for this year 2020. 2020 has been a ride y'all but we made it and we're here and i'm just so thankful because y'all know my channel it's always been founded on highlighting the art and the voices of those most marginalized specifically black people so the fact that year after year y'all make this the biggest video and y'all come back every time it speaks volumes and i just love y'all for it um but off the sappy let's get into this list let's get into the books that i liked and those that i loved ah let's crack this top ten we're gonna start right now with number 10 riot baby by toshi anyabuchi y'all this is a science fiction dystopian novella say that three times a mouthful but this book is crazy so i don't know how toshi was able to compact all this in a novella but somehow he was able to and it was chef's kiss so this book follows two siblings who are kev and ella and their lives are pretty much altered you can say on the trajectory that it would have gone if they weren't in america which they have to deal with the effects of black maternal health or the lack thereof um mass incarceration police brutality and all this other stuff but in the midst of all of this there's also magic involved i loved the dystopian take of this because it was very eerily similar kevin himself was actually born during the rodney king riots um in watts and this book follows between south central watts um harlem rockers it's back and forth and it touches on a lot of true historical elements but again it's dystopian and science fiction embedded in it but the dialogue is so easy and so just perfect there was points was i was actually laughing out loud i can't believe this was tochi's first writing of adult you know adult fiction blown away highly recommended coming in at number nine y'all is alyssa cole how to catch a queen ah i don't wanna hear it y'all know this is alyssa cole full blown stan channel um so y'all knew there was gonna be a list of cola on here really the hard part was leaving some of the list alyssa cole books that i read this year off the list um i chose how to catch a queen i may be biased but i just freaking love shanti like let me talk about the books the book is follows two main characters but really we invested in shanti who is a girl who or a woman who grew up always wanting to be a queen i loved it because she's just very ambitious her whole goal of being a queen was never to get swept away by prince charming not that anything's wrong with that hello this is romance but she really wanted to become a queen because she wants to change the world like she wanted to have the power to really make this impact and she's very focused she knows what she wants and she's not really phased by much immediately when she gets on the pages you're like what is up with shanti um but this is book one of the runaway royals series and if you're familiar with alyssa cole she wrote the reluctant royal series and what i loved is that the reluctant royals some of the characters are within this it doesn't mean you had to read the reluctant royal series but it's nice now that that series has ended that we are getting to see some of those characters still i told y'all shanti always wanted to be a queen but what happens when you finally get this dream goal of yours and you're married to someone who doesn't even want the crown let alone doesn't seem to want to be bothered by you you're dealing with blatant disrespect across the board you're in a misogynistic country a country that is just doesn't allow women to have any voice and it's just like this thing what you signed up for even though it is and seeing her navigate that was just so interesting even though this was a romance i would say the romance is actually not that hot and heavy like i think they have great chemistry but you're really focused on the characters themselves some of these characters there's points where you literally want to fight them maybe not y'all but there was a point where i had to put the book down and i was like i'm gonna drink water and i don't like this book because this dude's making me mad not the main guy but another character anyways i'm giving away too much already i really like the book um i finished it in a day i couldn't put it down but there were points that frustrated me to no ends so take that with what you will if you haven't read alessa cole pick up a book from her i shameless plug over coming in at number eight is the city we became by n.k jemisin this is science fiction means fantasy meets n.k jemisin's brilliant unmatched mind so the premise of this is the cities series and it's that every city has a soul this book particularly focuses on new york and is honestly like a love letter to new york where the city literally becomes alive and how it becomes alive is these human avatars become the city new york is interesting in the fact where unlike the other cities that were mentioned in here like sao paulo port-au-prince i.t.a crib um or new orleans new york has five different boroughs so not only does the city of new york come alive the five different boroughs come alive to save the city so the city doesn't fall so you have someone literally become manhattan you have someone come the bronx someone become brooklyn someone becomes staten island like it's just so cool to get all those different flavors and all those different things that make up new york it has the good and the bad and within it so you have all these different cultures all these different identities all these different stuff but you also have all of the negative also that you just deal with such as xenophobia homophobia you have racism clearly gentrification all sorts of stuff that's impacted in this but they're trying to save their city and it's literally action-packed midway through the book is really kind of when it really becomes action-packed and it's crazy because it's humans but it's actually the girls that are fighting and your mind is trying to wrap around this other world that nk jefferson created but you're warped and another one is all i can say for n.k jemisin coming in at number seven is the first non-fiction on the list surprise no it's a memoir and this one is by george m johnson all boys aren't blue i thought it was a beautiful take um on the beauty of being yourself and the beauty of being who you are it is heartbreaking at times reading how george had to suppress some of the best parts literally to survive but hopefully this helps someone else coming in at number six is memorial drive by natasha trethway this is another memoir guys um a back-to-back another memoir now this one a lot of y'all this one is heart wrenching so this one follows natasha's life of course it's a memoir but a pivotal point in her life is when at age 19 her mother was murdered by her stepfather so that already is you know a touchy subject and on top of that a heartbreaking subject especially when it appears it could have been completely preventable it talks about how the system really failed her and by doing that she's telling her life story from beginning to where she's at today and also the story of her mother and kind of how she experienced her mother and her parents as a child to now as an adult seeing it and it's interesting because it's it talks in a way where of course you know well not of course but she's a poet so it's very poetic at times even though it's not poetry but it really has you reflective on the way that you process information as a kid you see something a certain way but as adult her learning the true facts of all what her mother was juggling it's like she's not only discovering herself but discovering her mother in the process this memoir was just raw um i loved it and it's probably one of the books if not the book on my top 10 that touched me the most i got five on it hey we in the top five y'all we made it oh now y'all gonna start seeing me get physical copies out because i think all of these books i don't bought so coming in at number five y'all is legend born by tracy dion now this book shame on me i had this for a while y'all i saw a few people saying it was good but i was like oh okay ciao why did i wait so long this book is phenomenal okay so tracy dion how is this her debut novel number one number two it's fantasy black girl extraordinaire magic amazingness they say it's a king author retelling it's really not there's like influences of it but it's so much more than that it follows brie who is a teenager who it got recently got accepted to this like college program while she's in high school and she's going off to it but in the midst of this her mother passes away or dies in a car accident and the crash actually leaves more questions than answers and she's trying to uncover a lot of that and in the process she discovers her own magic her own ether her own root her own so much stuff and some of these terms may not make sense to you but they will when you read the book look at this cover and you'll know you'll you'll you already know it's about to be intense there's action in it there's feelings in it and there's layers in this book i tell you every probably quarter of the book that you get through when you think you know how the pieces are tying out tracy dion cleverly adds another layer to the mix that takes the book up a notch this was fantastic writing fantastic plot i'm in love and i can't wait for book number two coming in at number four y'all this book this another one i own y'all y'all can't see it because i actually own it on audio it's the meaning of mariah carey the book itself is phenomenal but the audiobook she literally is singing and by she i mean mariah carey the legend that she is the icon that she is one of the greatest voices of all time one of the best song writers of all time it's just perfect she literally has 19 number one hits and 18 of those she wrote herself so you already know we're getting the the meaning behind those lyrics ever since reading it mariah carey has been on non-stop for me because i'm listening to these songs that were already beautiful but with new meaning and new ears um her memoir was surprisingly way more than i could have imagined i was a fan you know i was a fan i'm a lamb now y'all i'm a lamb now mariah carey has gone through so much y'all more than i could have imagined her retelling her childhood to where she's at today to her relationships to what she went through in the music industry to all of that it was a fascinating story this is another one that might be adapted and i would love to watch this like in a mini series or something because i did not realize how fascinating and remarkable her life was all right y'all i got book number three in my hands right now what do y'all think it is okay coming in at number three is cass by isabel wilkerson this comes 10 years after the warmth of other suns y'all should already known if i'm talking about isabelle wilkerson i'ma mention this this book over here one of the best that i've read in the last decade but 10 years later she follows it up with this masterpiece cass cass is basically isabel wilkerson telling the origins of our discontents no pun intended she felt racism is just not a strong enough word to describe the structure in the foundation of what we are truly operating under within america in the real foundation of our country she literally takes us from the country's inception all the way to where we are now currently literally in the middle of a pandemic to break down the structural nature of cast and not only how we operate here but how we have influenced some other caste systems that we know throughout the world she goes throughout the world she studies other caste systems and she draws those parallels to our country now from how things are embedded in the laws to how we operate to how even if you remove all of the motion from it because we're based on this hierarchy system how it impacts each and every one of our lives who are currently alive today she writes in narrative nonfiction but i feel like that doesn't even describe the way she writes because her nonfiction is more than just palatable it's engrossing engaging it's storytelling at its finest and it's the only book on my list that i read twice um or the only book this year that i've read twice which says a lot given 2020 and i was trying to avoid this book because i didn't want to fail nothing but it's worth it y'all yeah y'all we're almost there i'm at number two and i'm conflicted because this was hard for me to put this at number two um i'm surprised it's not number one but not really when y'all see number one y'all understand but this was the vanishing half by brett bennett this book was so freaking good y'all i usually am scared to read books when they're hyped and i hope i'm not over hyping this for y'all but it was just that freaking good to me so the finish in half it follows two sisters who are identical twin sisters who come from this light-skinned town where pretty much almost everybody in the town can pass for white outside of that that's what one of the sisters does one of the twin sisters decides to pass for white while the other sister goes on to live as a black woman and it follows the trajectory of their lives and the decisions that they made and how that impacts their children so they both end up having daughters one of them has a daughter who grows up white she's a white girl it shows what that looks like and the other one ends up having a daughter who is dark-skinned growing up in this light-skinned town so it touches on colorism it touches of course on racism it touches on relationships on love on so much all within this almost saga have you um and you're introduced into these others supporting characters that you literally want a whole book just for those characters this book is character development at its finest um what i find so interesting also i know we just talked about cass but a lot of times on reviews i'll see people paint stella as this villain almost like how could she be so disgusting to you know abandon her race and it's like how could a country for someone to have to do that just so they could literally get a job so they could literally you know have a nice house for basic things so it's really an interesting study on what is really you know the culprit in the situation but i just love this book and i love the romance in this book all right y'all read this if you have it and comment below if you have so we can keep fangirling over this this is another one that is being adapted they got the rights for it and i'll be one of the first people watching it child love this y'all we're at number one all right we came to the end what do y'all think it is my favorite book of 2020 that i read octavia butler's parable of the sower i read this at the beginning of the year y'all and my goodness i'm so glad i did read it before march because this came out all those came out in the 90s i read it in this good year and the story let me tell y'all about the story it's set in the 2020s and the series is based around you know a president that kind of uprises to make america great again and written in the 90s y'all airy airy airy so prophetic um and it starts off with you know they're in this community it's dangerous to go outside everybody's inside the world's pretty much falling apart around them and all sorts of stuff it follows lauren who is the main protagonist who is the daughter of a preacher and when her community comes crumbling down you know she's basically rebuilding her own community and her own religion from the ground up it touches on a lot of stuff such as climate change and just you know society what happens when you take away all of these resources and all these different stuff like what happens and it's just fascinating like i feel like octavia butler clearly was ahead of her time writing this but not only that she was basically like prophetic in a lot of the things like it was crazy reading it i i just loved it it was like perfection to me well guys that wraps up my top 10 of 2020 i would love to know if y'all read any of these books what your thoughts are on them were there any other like what what i made your list or any of them like you're like yes um i would love to know and what were some of your favorite books of this year i hope you guys got at least one or two recommendations to take with you into 2021 and you know what i'm gonna leave it there love and light and i'll see you guys in the next one happy new year

Channel: LEFT ON READ

Views: 13,094

Rating: 4.9770117 out of 5

Keywords: Best Books 2020, favorite books 2020, Black Booktuber, Books By Black Authors, Fiction, Romance, Library, BookTube, End of the year goals, Books you have to read, Must Read Books 2020, New York Times Best Seller, NY Times best Sellers, Book Review, Book Recommendations, Black Books, Oprah's Book Club, Favorite Books, Celebrity Books, Good fictions, book haul, tbr, reading lists, book wrap up, non fiction, YA Fiction, young adult fiction, National Book Award, Goodreads, wrap up

Id: K_00orjVvLA

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 27 2020