The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

[m_oonmoon]

I didn't think I'd be finishing anything else this year, me being swamped with work on top of being a slow reader. I managed to sneak in this book before the year ends and I'm kind of bummed about it. I already listed my top 5 books of 2022 so this book didn't make the cut. Not because it's not amazing but because I finished it too late. At the same time, you know how the books that started your year barely makes the cut for year-ender lists just because you read them "too long ago"? I suspect this book won't make next year's cut, either, because I read it too early. Dilemmas, dilemmas. Am I even making sense or is this a problem that only I have? (Speaking of top 5 books, it would have made more sense to post it here rather than instagram, I just realized. Oh well. I didn't have much to say anyway other than one short paragraph. To be honest, even though I read more this year, I feel like the quality of the books I read last year were better.)

Anyway, if you haven't already guessed, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was so long but at no point did it feel like a chore to get through. The story spans generations so I suppose that's one reason why it never got boring. I just realized how much I actually enjoy family sagas. There is something so satisfying about piecing together different lives and seeing how it all connects. I honestly couldn't tell you an accurate summary of this book because I feel like it contains so much. Central to the story is history. Ailey traces back her family's history and, in doing so, we feel her anger and her sadness, but we also feel her pride. Her family's history is of course closely intertwined with America's racist history and it was painful to read at times.

Another thing that I thought was interesting about this book was its depiction of the casual misogyny in the family. Even the men in Ailey's lives who we see are honorable casually dismiss her when she brings up the fact that women are being excluded from the conversation.

I don't really have much to say other than I enjoyed reading this a lot. Sometimes I find that I have more to say about books that I don't like compared to books that I did enjoy. If you are intimidated by the sheer size of this book, don't be. It honestly didn't even feel like 800 pages. The prose has a certain lyricism to it that makes it easy to just glide through.