WHATCHA READING?

HELLO FAMILY! I hope that each of you are doing well. I know that this year has added immense amounts of stress to our lives. With the global pandemic, soaring unemployment, social unrest and the onset of hurricane and tornado seasons, I believe that we could all use some healthy therapy right now. READING just happens to be one of the most therapeutic activities that we can engage in. It is also far less expensive than visiting a shrink. So with this post we would like to encourage each of you to share a title or link to what you are currently reading or one of your favorite reads. This will give us a leg up on some good books and expand our growing libraries. On top of that, it serves to strengthen our Q2 community bonds. Silence may be a good fit for some groups, but definitely not this one! We implore you to each read, share, and encourage others in this community. We are constructing a "NO HATE ZONE" here. With that being said, I will start the sharing with one of my favorite books along with the one I am currently reading. Again . . . please COMMENT with a TITLE or LINK to the book you are currently reading or one of your favorite books. LET'S GO . . .

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."

-James Baldwin

* One of my favorite books is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison.

The book's nameless narrator describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", before retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  

Originally published in 1952 as the first novel by a then unknown author, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

* Currently I am reading "Nubian Pharoahs and Meroitic Kings: The Kingdom of Kush"by Necia Desiree Harkless. A description and link can also be found in RECOMMENDED BOOKS.

Harkless has completed her odyssey of 24 years initiated by a poem that emerged in the odd moments of early morning and her studies as a Donovan Scholar at the University of Kentucky with Dr. William Y. Adams, the leading Nubiologist of the world. The awesome result is her attempt to map the cultural, social, political history of Nubia "as a single people as actors on the world stage as they act out their destinies in the cradle of civilization". The underlying purpose of her book "is to reconstruct the collective efforts of the past and present Nubian campaigns and their collaborative scholarship so that the African American as well as all Americans can begin to understand the contributions of the civilization of Africa and Asia as a continuous historical entity". The history of the Kingdom of Kush begins with its earliest kingdom of Kerma in 2500 BC. It continues with the conquest of Egypt by the Nubian Pharaohs in 750 BC, reluctantly recognized as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs. They ruled as black pharaohs from their Kingdom at Napatan until they were forced one hundred years later to retreat to Napata by the Assyrians who assumed control of the Egyptians. It was at Meroe, the last empire of the Kush, that forty generations of Meroitic kings and queens continued the Kingdom of Kush reaching monumental and dynastic heights. Their symbiotic relationship with Egypt was over, allowing them to develop their own indigenous culture with a language and script of their own. Their architecture, arts , politics , material and spiritual culture in the minds of many scholars surpassed that of Egypt. Over two hundred pyramids have been investigated. It is an epic that will be long remembered. The dawn of Christianity in the Kingdom of Kush has been found in the treasure cove of the Frescoes of Faras.

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