I fell in love with Russian literature as a teenager, which led me to majoring in Russian history in college, but somehow I missed out on reading Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). I very much enjoyed the first part of his autobiography, My Childhood.

The story begins with Maxim’s father dying of cholera and, from there, does not get happier. My biggest warning to readers is this: Steer clear if you do not want to read about a child being beaten, repeatedly. Other people too.

If you have the stomach for reading about violence and poverty, I recommend this one. Gorky is a hell of a storyteller. I came to care about the characters—young Alexei (Maxim’s name before his adopted nom de plume), his troubled mother, his saint of a grandmother. I found Gorky to be more accessible to the modern reader than most of the classic Russian writers.

I enjoyed the audiobook as narrated by Nicholas Boulton, who did a great job with the voices, even if their accents were English rather than Russian. That took some getting used to.

Besides the plot and the characters, I loved Gorky’s way with words.

“Much later, I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow, to play at it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy. Amidst their endless weekdays, grief makes a holiday.”

Though The Gospel of Loki is only my second time reading Joanne M. Harris, I feel comfortable extrapolating: She never disappoints.

I love her care with the language and her inventive storytelling. Here we get Norse mythology from the perspective of Loki, everyone’s favorite lying trickster liar. It is true that he is a philandering sociopath with dubious paternal instincts and a penchant for sowing discord, but he’s funny and charming and he can shift back and forth between his fire aspect and his human form.

If you’re familiar with Norse myths, you will recognize these stories, but Harris delivers them in a fresh way, so you won’t be bored. I enjoyed the audiobook narration Allan Corduner, who reads Loki with the charm and suaveness he deserves.

I read one of the most important nonfiction books of the modern era, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, still relevant fifteen years after its 2010 publication.

Though drug use and distribution is consistent across races, law enforcement polices Black communities at starkly disproportional rates. And ever since Reagan launched the War on Drugs, the penalties for drug use are draconian. Drug offensives that would result in a few months or a year turn become years and decades in the United States.

Even if the sentence is light, the punishment stays with the offender forever. Former felons may be denied the right to vote and the right to serve on juries…and more importantly in terms of basic survival, they may be denied housing, public benefits, and employment.

The American criminal justice system prosecutes Black people for drug crimes at far higher rates than other races, leading to a form of social control that is the descendent of Jim Crow laws, in turn descended from chattel slavery. And like Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of Black people, especially Black men, is on the surface race neutral. Under Jim Crow, anyone could vote if they could pass a literacy test, regardless of color; but since the tests were only administered to Black people, illiterate whites still maintained civil rights not afforded to illiterate people of other races.

“Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: A new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness,” writes Alexander. In one of the more heartbreaking passages in a book filled with sorrow, she describes how this is true even among Black people, who are often ashamed to share with their neighbors that a loved one has been incarcerated. Slavery and Jim Crow were visible, while the mass incarceration of Black men is not.

Of books about Black people in the United States written in the twentieth century, I rank The New Jim Crows as essential reading. If you read in Black Studies at all, you will have heard of it, but if you have not personally read it, I encourage you to move it to the top of your TBR.