These themes will vary! It could be based off of some book mail I just received, pop culture, something personal to me, a headline from the news, a trend I noticed when I was buying books for my library system, etc. I hope you stick around to see all the themes and book recs I come up with!
This Week’s Theme: Black Music Appreciation Month
June is one of my favorite months. Not only is it the beginning of my favorite season, but it’s also Audiobook Month as well as Black Music Appreciation Month! Black Music has always been used in so many different ways. From celebration to religious praise, to resistance. AND, like we’re living in the time of Lizzo telling us “we can’t outdress her Labubu“, Beyonce winning the last REAL Country grammy, the EPIC Black music appreciation scene in Sinners, Cardi informing us who’s in her DM, and we can’t forget about GloRilla introducing the rest of the world to Xavier Legette lol So for today’s Two for Tuesday I wanted to pay homage to books that show and appreciate Black Music! So my first pick for today features an R&B singer! Angel had me out here telling my husband, “HE WROTE SONGS ABOUT HER!” and everything else. I WISHED I could have heard some of them sung the way he intended because I just know he had Iris emotional every time she heard it lol
This one is about some teens that found friendship and family as they found music. And this one is even better because its an audiobook original that comes with some amazing additions like instrument sounds and other added sound effects that make this more of an experience than an audiobook. And the plot itself is also so good! By the end of it I was boo-hoo crying. Nothing prepared me for the amazing that this book was. I mean it’s Jason Reynolds so I should have guessed, but still. If you haven’t read it yet, do it now!
Well, there you go! Here I’m just going to talk about why I grouped these two books together. I hope you enjoyed a look at this small part of the books. For a full synopsis of the book or to add it to your TBR, click the picture and it will take you to their Storygraph. The link on the caption will take you to it’s Goodreads.
More Books to Read During Black Music Appreciation Month!
I tried to incorporate all the things I talked about for the first two books in this post. THere’s a female rapper, the girlfriend or wife of a rapper, a look at Black country music, another pop/R&B singer, and a book about Robert Johnson, the dude who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil at the Crossroads for his talent. I also wanted to shine the light again on the opera singer that I learned more about this year, the Black Swan.
What about you? What books about Black Music have you read? Have you read either of these? Let me know in the comments!