November was a hard month. On the first day of November, shortly after 5 o clock in the morning, I held my grandfather’s hand as he took and let out his last breath. That last sigh ended a chapter of my life. The chapter was filled with love, with memories, with embarrassment over my grandfather’s…
Author: cheerstothebookends
Cane River
Somewhere, back in time, a little light-skinned (but still Black) girl finished the last page of Alex Haley’s epic Roots and thought to herself….”I wonder what my light-skinned roots are?” And Cane River was born. Just as Roots was an exploration of how we as a family, a people, a force, maintained even the smallest…
October Bookend
I’m slowly getting back on track with keeping y’all up to date on my reading life (yes, I know it’s almost the end of November…shut up). October was actually a pretty interesting (and wildly varied) month of reading for me. It’s only fitting too, because I was travelling to some extremely diverse places in October….
Erotic Stories!!!
Listen, Linda. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal. This book right here was one of my favorite things. Let me just give you the premise: Punjabi widows living in a Sikh neighborhood in London join what they thought was an adult literacy class taught by a “modern” young Sikh woman named Nikki….
White Teeth
Here’s a pic of me cheesing, because my white teeth are better than this book… Y’all, I’ve tried. I really have. I have tried SO hard to like Zadie Smith. I first heard about her when she released her book Swing Time, which I bought off the strength of her reputation. Boy, did I not…
The Girl with Seven Names
I’ve noticed a pattern amongst the stories of oppressed people I have read (and the ones I’ve lived/seen firsthand): family is everything. When you have nothing else, you have your family. When your family is stripped or severed, you have the memory and the drive to reconnect with them or build anew. Reading a work…
September Bookend
As fast as the other months in this year have gone by, I shouldn’t be shocked by this at all, but somehow, someway, I’m still shooketh that Halloween has come and gone—and I still hadn’t written this bookend! How, Sway?! What happened to September?! OCTOBER?!?! Not that I need the time to come back, because…
The Hate They Gave Us in the Box Office
I know. I have been TERRIBLE with my blog over the last few weeks. There are only so many excuses that I can give y’all. But I’m back—for real this time. Mostly, I couldn’t contain myself after seeing the film, The Hate U Give, based on the novel of the same name by Angie Thomas…
August Bookend
Yes, I am back to being derelict with my monthly Bookends. But this time, I have a good excuse! … Not really. Wow, I’m so trash. It’s embarrassing that it took me this long to get this monthly bookend up, but here it goes. Plus, August was a month of trials (lawyer joke!) and tribulations,…
A Place for Us
I have a friend who doesn’t like sad movies. Once, he and I had a debate about the acting-driven film Fences, which I thought was a masterpiece that surely should have won the Oscar for Best Picture that year…but he didn’t like, because it was sad. Well, it sure as fuck wasn’t a happy movie. But…
