11 notable Chicago reads of 2019

Books we read this year about our city

Nonfiction “Move on Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power” by Aaron Cohen (University of Chicago, 254 pages, $20)

Spanning the late 1950s to the 1980s, “Move on Up” is a meticulously reported and illuminating social history that has more on its mind than simply replaying Chicago soul and R&B’s greatest hits. Aaron Cohen explores how the city’s black musicians acted as “change agents” in times of social and political tumult and how “these meetings of music and hope,” along with “mass movements and localized efforts for dynamic change helped create R&B in Chicago.” “Move on Up” vividly chronicles several benchmarks in the evolution of Chicago soul and R&B, beginning with the recording of The Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love,” which marked a departure from doo-wop and is widely considered to be the first urban soul song.

“White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation” by Lauren Michele Jackson (Beacon, 184 pages, $25.95)

Cultural appropriation isn’t a new concept, but the debate rages on in 2019. With her highly anticipated debut book, “White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation,” Chicagobased writer Lauren Michele Jackson deepens the conversation. Jackson, who recently completed a doctorate in English language and literature at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about race and digital culture for outlets such as Complex, Vulture and the Atlantic. But in “White Negroes,” she casts a wider net, examining fashion, music, food, memes, activism, the art world and beyond to analyze the implications of “black aesthetics without black people.” While freedom and choice often dominate conversations about cultural appropriation, largely missing, Jackson writes, is talk of power: “When the powerful appropriate from the oppressed, society’s imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged.” Whether dissecting viral videos, Paula Deen’s empire or the burgeoning weed industry, Jackson writes with urgency and acerbic wit, balancing impassioned critiques with snark-infused footnotes and wry asides. Rather than provide easy answers, “White Negroes” issues a call to awareness, alertness and care.

“Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos” by Lucy Knisley (First Second, 256 pages, $19.99)

Lucy Knisley’s witty and intimate graphic memoir “Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos,” offers the refreshingly frank, utterly un-sugar-coated account of her struggles with infertility and a highrisk pregnancy, blended with a lively and not undisturbing exploration of the history of gynecology and reproductive health. It’s packed with “plenty of drama and comedy and bodily fluids” and such under-reported facts as “about one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage.” Born in New York City and now a resident of Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, Knisley earned her bachelor of fine arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and her master of fine arts at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Hartford, Vermont. Her debut, “French Milk,” came out in 2008 when she was 23, and she has been prolifically productive ever since; her second book, the food memoir “Relish,” became a New York Times bestseller.

“An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago” by Alex Kotlowitz (Talese, 304 pages, $27.95)

Alex Kotlowitz doesn’t write about splashes; he writes about ripples — echos of violence and despair, and love, that radiate outward after a tragedy. That approach reaches a culmination in “An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago,” Kotlowitz’s latest book (and his first in 15 years). Kotlowitz is perhaps best known for his 1991 book, “There Are No Children Here,” chronicling life in the Henry Horner Homes. “American Summer” is more expansive than anything he’s written about Chicago, as it documents the effects of violence from the summer of 2013. But rather than one narrative, it’s a carefully assembled patchwork, of aging gang members, victims in recovery, traumatized witnesses, beat cops and crime reporters and grieving parents.

“Horror Stories: A Memoir” by Liz Phair (Random House, 272 pages, $28)

Liz Phair has written a lively, insightful memoir, “Horror Stories.” You may assume this is the book in which Phair walks us through her surprising rise to stardom, tells us the back story of each of those beloved songs, shares juicy tales of hanging out with sometime-muse Nash Kato of Urge Overkill and others on the early ’90s Chicago scene, and conveys how she faced performing in public for the first time ever after her debut album’s release. But no. “Horror Stories” is Phair’s portrait of the artist as an older woman who has accumulated much perspective and wisdom yet remains frustrated that even after one marriage and other ill-fated relationships, she still wants a boyfriend. The book’s subtitle could be “Tales of Empathy,” as Phair wrestles with memories that linger and haunt. She still is speaking her truth, with a generosity of spirit and willingness to dig into the thorniest aspects of what it means to be human right now.

“Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal” by Yuval Taylor (Norton, 302 pages, $27.95)

For Langston Hughes, his falling out with Zora Neale Hurston marked the “end of the Harlem Renaissance.” Henry Louis Gates Jr. deemed it “the most notorious literary quarrel in African American cultural history.” In “Zora and Langston,” Yuval Taylor traces the exhilarating intellectual and emotional connection between the two beloved authors, unspooling the story of a six-year friendship that ended in a searing conflict sparked by the play “Mule Bone.” Taylor offers a vivid account of an impromptu 1927 road trip in Hurston’s Nash coupe through the rural South and goes on to sift through the wreckage of their bitter falling out, attempting to make sense of the feud that evolved out of their attempt to collaborate on a play. Throughout, Taylor, former senior editor for Chicago Review Press, incisively sketches in key supporting players and offers critical context for evolving ideas about race. Ultimately, in fewer than 250 pages, Taylor offers a snapshot of a cultural moment, illuminating two essential voices in American literature.

Fiction “The New Me” By Halle Butler (Penguin, 208 pages, $16)

In her short, satirical and cautionary second novel, “The New Me,” Halle Butler explores self-improvement at its absolute, impractical, soul-crushing worst. An Art Institute of Chicago graduate, Butler published her darkly brilliant feelbad debut novel, “Jillian,” with local publisher Curbside Splendor in 2015. That book examined the disappointments of the American workplace and diminished rewards of the socalled “American dream.” Masterfully cringe-inducing and unsparingly critical, “The New Me” extends Butler’s interrogation of those subjects, making the reader squirm and laugh out loud simultaneously. Butler bases the workplace indignities of the protagonist, 30-yearold Millie, on her own experiences working as a temp. Millie finds almost everything “boring,” yet Butler manages to write a novel that is anything but. Her wit and insight keep the pages turning. When Millie asks of herself “Who cares? Nobody” the reader actually does. Whether Millie is slathering herself in coconut oil in a rare spate of self-care, or vowing to “practice gratitude and acceptance,” the reader sees vividly that self-improvement, at best, treats the symptoms of a sick society and not the disease. “The New Me” is an unapologetic and effulgent bummer of a book.

The closest it comes to hope is to imply that maybe, when one finally has and desires nothing, then one is free to be free. And maybe that’s just as terrible as having had a dream in the first place.

“The Reign of the Kingfisher” by T.J. Martinson (Flatiron, 352 pages, $27.99)

The Kingfisher never liked being called the Kingfisher, but Chicago newspapers gave him the nickname and it stuck. He became a local legend, more myth than man. Then he turned up dead, his body floating in the Chicago River, beaten and mutilated. That was in the early 1980s. In the years after his murder, gun and gang violence in Chicago soared, and the city, to many, appeared lawless. There are those who connect the rise in violent crime to the absence of the Kingfisher, and those who say the CPD is withholding evidence of his death. All of which sounds vaguely familiar, yes? All but the Kingfisher part. That is because he’s a fantasy, a mysterious Chicago crime fighter who may or may not be a superhero. He’s not even the protagonist of “The Reign of the Kingfisher,” the first novel by Kankakee native T.J. Martinson; the book is closer to a crime procedural, with a dead man of steel as its mystery. Certainly, Chicago already has a rich history of superpeople, but it’s never been associated with a single superhero. Which sounds like an overly breezy premise for an often ambitious literary novel, but “Reign of the Kingfisher” — should it make the leap from perfect summer read to perfect summer movie — can be grim and unsettling R-rated stuff. It wonders how uncomfortably a superhero might operate in Chicago, and whether Chicagoans would even know him as one.

“Maggie Brown & Others” by Peter Orner (Little, Brown, 336 pages, $27)

Walt Kaplan, the downon-his-luck furniture salesman in the novella that concludes Peter Orner’s magical story collection, “Maggie Brown & Others,” thinks he has a great concept for a subjective account of Fall River, the historic Massachusetts town in which he lives. “I’m not trying to rewrite the history,” he says. “I’m thinking it. Get it? It disappears as soon as I think about it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. I’m composing something as ethereal as history itself.” In composing stories inspired in part by people he has known and places he has lived, Orner, a Chicago native, writes words that don’t disappear. His characters’ struggles for human connection might be written in boldface: “Shouts in the dark. Maybe that’s the best we can do to reach beyond ourselves.” At the same time, these stories, which are frequently as short as a few lines or paragraphs (the shorter ones may be the best), never seem confined to the pages on which they appear. Writing doesn’t get any better.

“Rusty Brown” by Chris Ware (Pantheon, 356 pages, $35)

Roughly two decades ago, about a week after Chris Ware completed “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” the sprawling graphic novel that cemented the Oak Park artist’s reputation as the most ambitious and virtuosic cartoonist on Earth, he started work on “Rusty Brown.” It was another sprawling and adventurous novel that, like all of his work, is lonesome, rueful, uncertain about human connection, yet also empathetic, dazzling — as committed to depicting the overlooked and anonymous as it is innovative. “Rusty Brown” is so intricately designed that, like many of Ware’s books, the result is an art object. Characters inside spill out across the spine and over end pages; the usual Library of Congress cataloging notice at the front now resembles the check-out page of an elementary school library; and even the dust jacket unfolds into a kind of poster on the themes and places explored inside. You feel protective, anxious about dog-earing anything, worried you’ll blink and miss something. And that’s before you reach the story, which was partly serialized in the Chicago Reader and New City. It’s set on a snowy day in Ware’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, focused on nervous children, bullies, teachers, parents, longings and regrets — Ware’s bleak milieu, which can read a little like “Peanuts” as told by James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson. The book starts in the 1970s, leaps to the future, tells stories within stories, leaves Earth, spans generations. Meanwhile, the least redeemable character in almost 400 pages is Ware himself, cast as a creep of an art teacher. It’s all so vast, yet there’s stillness so evocative and tender you feel like an intruder. Which is the point: a generous act of detailing, and honoring, everyday life.