Our Hobbies Our Shelves: Carmen Keeps Books Stacked By Her Bed as a Comfort Blanket

Hello and Welcome Back to Our Hobbies Our Shelves, a new A+ series where we take you on a tour of our home libraries. There’s photos, and stories, and thoughts about what goes behind the books we love — there’s also a detailed spreadsheet, crafted and organized like we are the librarians of our own lives. A damned delight!

So let’s get to it, shall we?

Notes on Organization Scheme

Once upon a time, I organized books by logic. There was a shelf for each subsection (Black fiction before before the 2000s, Black fiction after the 2000s, feminist theory was broken down by wave, all the things). This was especially true when I was a PhD student, but my how times have changed!

Now my books are organized by what I can best describe as… feeling? Books on the Nightstand (more on that in a second) tend to be ones that make me smile when I see the titles. Books on the window sill mean I’m perpetually re-reading them and don’t want to lose my place. Books on the bookshelf still have a vague schema of organization from a past life, but have now been peppered with family photos, cookbooks, some coloring books. Things are borrowed by friends and put back in the wrong place. Books go on “vacation” to the living room and never return.

This is a collection that’s used and loved, out of place and a little mismanaged — not for lack of care, but quite the opposite, due to an abundance of it.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Books on the Nightstand Mean I Love You

1. A Song For You // 2. Looking for Lorraine // 3. Passion Planners // 4. Such a Fun Age // 5. A World Between // 6. The Stars and the Blackness Between Them // 7. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde // 8. Everybody (Else) is Perfect // 9. Sing Unburied Sing // 10. We Were Eight Years in Power

I keep books by the stacks, not lined in neat shelves. Books toppled on top of each other makes everything feel warm to me — like home, not a library (not that libraries can’t also feel like home if that’s your thing! But each has a purpose, you know what I mean).

Next to my bed I keep old planners from past years. On top of them, closest to me, I keep two of my favorite books — Imani Perry’s straight up brilliant biography of lesbian great Lorraine Hansberry, given to me a few holigays ago by my best friend, and Robyn Crawford’s loving memoir of her life with Whitney Houston. I first received A Song For You as an ARC (advanced reading copy) for review, but instead when I read it I ended up crying for an entire week, and could never find the right words to say.

I still re-read it, fingertips tracing passages, on days I feel a little soft, emotional, and stay in bed.

(*it’s worth noting that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book is only one that I don’t have serious feelings about, but it’s big and has a bright red color, and… ummm it looks great against my blue walls?)

Window Sill Books, on Vacation from the Bookshelf, Have a View

1. Black Futures // 2. Sounds from the Other Side // 3. Surpassing Certainty // 4. The Afro-Latin@ Reader // 5. Crossfire // 6. The Practice of Diaspora // 7. With the Fire on High // 8. Black Against Empire // 9. The Hate U Give

Windowsill books serve two purposes — first, practically, I keep a lot of thick books (“baby got back..”) by my desk so that I can turn them into a zoom stand and second, personally, much like the nightstand, these are books I find myself re-reading. These piles rotate more than the nightstand; whereas nightstand books have a shelf life of 1-2 years, windowsill books only live for a few months.

Windowsill books are also usually when we first see some academic books from my past life creeping in around the edges. Before Autostraddle, I spent a literal 10 years studying Black and Latine/x political history and theory. I spent so much time reading books and writing theory that I forgot to do… well… pretty much anything else — which is something for me and my therapist to figure out! It’s rare, and I mean so rare, that I read academic books anymore, but there are still some that I revisit, like catching up with old friends over drinks.

Speaking of friends!! The bestie who gave me Imani Perry’s Lorraine Hansberry biography on my nightstand? He’s Dr. Elliott Hunter Powell — I’m telling you this because his book, Sounds from the Other Side, a queer study of Black and South Asian music, hasn’t left my windowsill for a full year. It’s not everyday when the smartest and kindest, most loyal person you know is also a well-respected, up-and-coming rockstar in queer studies, but that’s the kind of lucky girl I am!

A Bookshelf with Stacks on Stacks on Stacks

1. Black and Latine/x Feminist Theory // 2. Fiction // 3. Dissertation Books // 4. More Fiction // 5. Leftover Dissertation Books // 6. Oversized Books, Playbills, and Vogues

After I put the majority of my dissertation books into storage (all 80 lbs of them, and yes I had to get them weighed), I saved what was most essential for this bookshelf. That largely takes up shelves 1, 3, and 5. What’s been most interesting to me over the last few years is the life that has sprung up around them.

Reading books as research for work really broke my brain for a while; it took me a lot of years to get back into reading for pure fun. I was surprised when it was YA that helped me get lost in a good time again, but maybe I shouldn’t have been! I’ve mentioned before how much I love Leah Johnson (I don’t call just anyone “the Toni Morrison of queer YA”), but You Should See Me in a Crown and Rise to the Sun are hands down the best time I’ve had reading in the last few years. Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X is part poetry/part YA and a personal favorite that also helped me get closer with my teen step-niece. I couldn’t have asked for a better entryway to get to know her.

I have two favorite shelves!

Shelf 1 has my collection of queer Black and Latine/x feminist books, the books I used to read in college from Angela Davis and Cherrie Moraga that still have so many passages highlighted, underlined, and dog-eared. There’s newer favorites from Janet Mock and Roxane Gay. It also has my Audre Lorde inspired vision board (which I wrote about in 2019!) and my graduation present from my God Sister — an out-of-print copy of The Black Unicorn signed by Audre Lorde herself, which I honestly still have to pinch myself to believe is real?

Shelf 6 is where I keep all my old Playbills (a habit I started as a theatre kid in high school) pressed in between old Vogues to stay flat. I started collecting Vogues in 2008, with the first All Black Issue of Italian Vogue — it came out when I first moved to New York after college. My then-roommate and I literally tracked back and forth across Manhattan, checking every magazine stand, for weeks looking for it.

It’s honestly a miracle that we got the Naomi cover. We kept it in plastic and used it as a fancy “coffee table book” for the next two years on our cardboard Ikea coffee table (you know the one, with the screw on legs? Everyone has one at some point).

Other Areas

I have stacks of books, in some shape or form, on nearly every surface of my house. There’s a stack on the kitchen table where I do a lot of my Autostraddle work (these are usually ARCs or press books, books related to projects I’m working on — for example right now I have a copy of Nella Larson’s Passing in prep for Tessa Thompson’s movie release next month); there’s a stack on the living room table (these are bulky books primarily used as another impromptu “zoom stand” for calls); small stacks next to the television and on the hallway table by the door (IDK, just because).

I mentioned this earlier, but I also have roughly 81.56 lbs of books in storage! Those were not catalogued for the purposes of this article — but they are largely old books from my previous life, which means even more theory books and history books than what’s shown above.

If you are interested in some HIGHL LEVEL NERD CONTENT GET READYYYY — I found one of my old PhD exam book lists, totaling about 87 titles, and I turned it into a PDF that we’re now hosting on this very web site. I try incredibly hard to keep my dissertation (“Breaking Nation: Refiguring Black-Latino Politics in Histories of 20th Century U.S. Empire”) under lock-and-key, but I have also taken the bibliography from that and turned it into a PDF as well, for those of you who are interested in how I used to spend my time.

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This also brings up something that I waffled a great deal about while I was creating this little tour into my bookshelves for you — it’s a weird time, to say the least, to say that I’m trained in Critical Race Theory, because CRT has turned into the latest right wing buzzword to mean “I don’t want to be made to feel bad about my privilege”! White parents are getting their news from Fox and storming local school boards to demand that CRT be taken out of schools (in and of itself puzzling, because graduate level “theory” isn’t taught in elementary schools to begin with) and last week a white parent even tried to get Toni Morrison’s Beloved banned from her son’s AP English class because the depiction of slavery gave him nightmares. All of this is a distraction wedge issue, but it has rendered the words “Critical,” “Race,” and “Theory” pretty useless in anything even close to normal conversation.

I started (and deleted!) at least three rants on this, but all of them got a little too far in the weeds for what’s supposed to be a fun ‘lil A+ post! That said, there’s no real way to talk about the books that taught me the most and were a great part of my life for well over an entire decade, without talking about Critical Race Theory.

In real actual life, not right wing Fox News doom cycle life, Critical Race Theory is a working body of analysis that examines the ways that race and racism have become embedded into the fabric of law and society. Its central framework is that racial inequity is the result of complex, interlocking, changing institutional dynamics, as opposed to the individual prejudices of any one bigoted person. Basically, if you’re white, it’s the difference between your grandma who said that fucked up thing at Thanksgiving and the ongoing legal disruption of Black and Brown people having the right to vote or equal access to healthcare — for just one example. That’s a bit reductionist, but gives a solid picture, and if you want to learn more, let me know.

For now, expect that if you read the PDFs above you’re going to see a lot of it.

And Now: The (Curated) Spreadsheet of Carmen’s Library

This is not my entire library.

BUT! I did curate, just for you from my own warm beating heart, a collection of the 60+ books that I absolutely love most in this world — lest you think that I took the easy way out, pairing my list down to 60 still took three days! Did I mention that I also love you?

While I tried by best to organize these books in a fashion that would make sense to people who don’t live in my brain, the truth is that I’m wired to see overlaps and connections — and not always neat, pretty boxes. So in this list you will see that the books are broken into three sections: Window Sill, Nightstand, and Bookshelf.

For each book there is a section named “overlapping categories.” These are color coded bubbles that will give you a sense of what the book is about, like queer memoir, Black theory, feminist theory, Afro-Latinx’s, QTPOC, so on and so forth. This is the closest I could get to organization while still making room for the ways that life doesn’t always allow for narrow terms, especially when it comes to queer people and queer people of color. Plus, I think all the colors are calming to look at!

A general disclaimer that a book existing in my home does not mean a book is unproblematic — this is especially true for books that are older, come from a different time, etc etc etc. I trust that we can all assume that finding value in a work doesn’t mean that we agree with everything the writer wrote.

OK And here it is: Carmen’s Library.To access the base, you need to enter a password: “readafuckingbook.”

I hope you do just that. Read a Fucking Book. It’s fun :)