Happy New Year!

I hope you all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2019. Don't forget to read plenty of books in the new year. Also, please support independent bookstores.

My 2019 Reading List

The following are a baker's dozen of books I have never got around to reading or books I have never finished reading and plan to return to. I'm putting them on my reading list for the new year.

1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
4. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
5. Paris Noir by Tyler Stovall (nonfiction about black American expatriates.)
6. Lush Life by David Hajdu (biography of composer/pianist/Duke Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn.)
7. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterley (re: black female mathematicians at NASA in the 1960s; I enjoyed the movie.)
8. Baldwin's Harlem by Herb Boyd (a biography)
9. In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (the basis for the movie and subsequent TV series.)
10. Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
11. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (the classic murder mystery.)
12. Tinseltown by William J. Mann (nonfiction book about the 1922 murder of film director William Desmond Taylor. This will be the third book that I will have read about this subject. It still fascinates me.)
13. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years by Sarah L. and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth (a memoir of two African American sisters who lived past the century mark;their nephew is the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany;the memoir was made into a TV movie starring Ruby Dee and Diahann Carroll and was broadcast in 1999.)

Are You A Dogophile Or A Caninophile?

In his 2003 Time magazine essay, "Of Dogs and Men," later reprinted in Things That Matter (Crown Forum, 2013), his essay collection, the late syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer used the word "dogophilia" to describe the close relationship that humans have to their dogs.

A better, more elegant word would have been "caninophilia," the love of dogs. One website calls the word "a bastard mix of Latin and Greek," but it sounds much better than "dogophilia," a word that sounds ugly to my ears and robs such a passion for dogs of its beauty, mutuality, and elevated status. It would be like calling a person who has a deep passion for books a bookaholic or a bookophile instead of a bibliophile or, to use the name of this blog, a book maven.These latter terms are more elegant, celebratory, and respectful.

Some people might say that I'm nitpicking but to me words matter. How they are used conveys one's attitude and view of the world. To me, "dogophilia" trivializes a very important, deeply felt relationship.

As for me, although I've had many dogs in my life, I'm partial to cats. You can call me a felinophile or a cat lover, not a catophile.


Note: Merry Christmas, everyone!

Whose Harlem Is It?

"Around 123rd Street, an enormous luxury high-rise is going up. The people of the neighborhood have scrawled, in white paint, on the walls of the construction site: Where will we live? For Harlem is an exceedingly valuable chunk of real estate and the state and the city and the real-estate interests are reclaiming the land and urban renewalizing--or gentrifying--the niggers out of it."--James Baldwin, "Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?" (1986), published in Essence magazine (November 1996), quoted in Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era by Shannon King (New York University Press, 2015), page 1 (Introduction).

Now that gentrification has firmly taken root in Harlem, Baldwin's comments are still timely and relevant in the 21st century.

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Note: Today is Pearl Harbor Day, a day to commemorate the 1941 Japanese air attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii. The attack led to the United States entering the Second World War.

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Note: I'm getting ready to put together a list of books I hope to read in the new year.

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World AIDS Day, 2018

Today is World AIDS Day, a time to remember friends and family members who succumbed to this disease as well as to reflect on the progress made thus far by medical science in fighting and possibly eradicating it.

Looking back, the AIDS epidemic made the 1980s and 1990s a scary time. Especially because so many people were dropping like flies and a cure seemed a million years away.

But it was also a great time for AIDS activism and artistic expression, particularly among black gay men. So whenever I look through one of my scrapbooks or manuscript folders containing articles that I've written, I'm reminded that, as a journalist, I was privileged to have had the opportunity to witness and document what went on within the gay community during a frightening time.