At the end of January, I found a connection between all the books that I read. Click here to read or watch how I linked each book with the one I read before and after it.
In February, I read 13 books so naturally, I tried Booklinks again. These are the books as well the segue from one to another:
The Color Purple / Alice Walker
Both books contain a story of a young girl who is raped and becomes pregnant due to incestous abuse
The Bluest Eye /Toni Morrison
Both books feature children who are raised by people other than their parents
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Both main characters are born on farms – Douglass on a slave plantation in Maryland, Annie on a maple farm in Vermont. Also, both have characters named Ann – Fred’s wife’s name is Anna and Annie is the main character in Family Tree.
Family Tree / Susan Wiggs
Both about married couples who start off working together – Annie and her husband collaborated on a TV show and Paul and Mia met and worked together at an ad agency
Best Day Ever /Kaira Rouda
Both thrillers including domestic violence – a man who may have killed his parents, and a man who may or may not have shot his wife and child
The Dry /Jane Harper
The Dry features a man who leaves his town and returns to solve a solve a murder while The Humans features an alien who leaves his planet to murder a man
The aliens all experience immortality in their utopian planet while there is a character in one of the short stories who tries to achieve immortality and instead is cursed for a 1000 years.
The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic
Both books address finding the future in the trails of the past – Joaquin writes about the god Janus who has two faces, one looking back and one looking ahead and Hurston does the same thing, starting a book of her life experience book by recounting the history of her town.
Dust Tracks on a Road /Zora Neale Hurston
Both feature a successful individual crediting their mother with being a big part of their early lessons
Rise and Grind /Daymond John & Daniel Paisner
Both look at how a man’s friends react to his success
The Sellout /Paul Beatty
Both books have a setting in Washington, DC
Both of these are books that contain reactions to multiple murders
I Am Not Your Negro /James Baldwin
Finally, to link this back to The Color Purple, both books use letters to tell the story.
Those are the books I read. Overall, I read 13 books which included 7 books written by women and 6 written by men. 4 of the books were Non Fiction – Memoirs and Business /Self Help and everything else was a fictional story. The longest book was The Woman Who Had Two Navels (432 pages) and the shortest was Baldwins’ 109 page collection of letters, I Am Not Your Negro – total pages read in February was 3700. I gave The Color Purple my highest rating and my least favorite read was Fatal Chaos but I gave that 3 stars so that’s not bad.
Click below to check out any of these books on Amazon. Affiliate links are included so you can help support my book buying tendencies.
Or, click here to order a Runwright Reads Book Box. It would be my pleasure to curate a book box for you that includes a new copy of one of these (or another favorite) books, plus themed gifts and artwork to enhance the reading experience.
What about you? What was your (least) favorite book in February?
