The Great "Black" Read--100 Books by African American Authors You Need To Read Before You Die

The Great American Read List is cute but if I had my choice--these are the books I would have put on it. All of these writers are African American. This a list generated based solely off of my opinion. If there are other books by African American authors you feel should be on this list. DO NOT hesitate to share them, the more the merrier! They are in no particular order.

1. Native Son Richard Wright

2. True to the Game Teri Woods

3. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou

4. Not Without Laughter Langston Hughes

5.Invisible Man Ralph Ellison

6.Between The World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates

7. Manchild in The Promised Land Claude Brown

8. Americanah Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

9. Breath Eyes Memory Edwidge Danticat

10. The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois

11. Kindred Octavia E. Butler

12. The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander

13. Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston

14. The Warmth of Other Suns Isabel Wilkerson

15. Black Boy Richard Wright

16. Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime J. California Cooper

17. Flyy Girl Omar Tyree

18. Devil in A Blue Dress Walter Mosley

19. Push Saphire

20. Tyler Johnson Was Here Jay Coles

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21. Long Way Down Jason Reynolds

22. If Beale Street Could Talk James Baldwin

23. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison

24. Dutch Teri Woods

25. Midnight Sister Souljah

26.Redefining Diva: Life Lessons from the Original Dream Girl Sheryl Lee Ralph

27. You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have To Explain Phoebe Robinson

28. Up From Slavery Booker T. Washington

29. Ghost Boys Jewell Parker Rhodes

30. Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass

31. Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson

32. Monster Walter Dean Myers

33. The Color Purple Alice Walker

34. The Sellout Paul Beatty

35. Monday's Not Coming Tiffany D. Jackson

36. Calling My Name Liara Tamani

37. The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man James Weldon Johnson

38. A Mercy Toni Morrison

39. Coffee Will Make You Black April Sinclair

40. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Danielle Evans

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41.The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl Issa Rae

42.Waiting To Exhale Terry McMillan

43.Little Leaders Bold Women in Black History Vashti Harrison

44. Sing Unburied Sing Jesmyn Ward

45.The Mis-Education of the Negro Carter G. Woodson

46. Born A Crime Trevor Noah

47. The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead

48. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

49. American Street Ibi Zoboi

50. The Skin I'm In Sharon G. Flake

51. All American Boys Jason Reynolds

52. Roots Alex Haley

53. God Don't Like Ugly Mary Morrison

54. Piecing Me Together Renee Watson

55. Homegoing Yaa Gyasi

56. A Piece of Cake Cupcake Brown

57. The Coldest Winter Ever Sister Souljah

58. Your Blues Ain't Like Mine Bebe Moore Campell

59. Year of Yes Shonda Rhimes

60. Sister Sister Eric Jerome Dickey

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61. Invisible Life E. Lynn Harris

62. Letter To My Daughter Maya Angelou

63. Sula Toni Morrison

64. Ghost Jason Reynolds

65. Nappily Ever After Trisha Thomas

66. Silver Sparrow Tayari Jones

67. Electric Arches Eve L. Ewing

68. The Man in 3B Carl Weber

69. The Cutting Season Attica Locke

70. The Women of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor

71. Second House From the Corner Sadeqa Johnson

72. Around The Way Girls La Jill Hunt

73. Bronx Masquerade Nikki Grimes

74. A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry

75. We are Only Taking what We Need Stephanie Powell Watts

76. A Lesson before Dying Ernest J. Gaines

77. Happy To Be Nappy Bell Hooks

78. Woman, Thou Art Loosed T.D. Jakes

79. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe

80. How To Be Black Baratunde R. Thurston

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81. Salvage The Bones Jesmyn Ward

82. Mina's Joint Keisha Ervin

83. The Naked Truth Chunichi Knott

84. American Marriage Tayari Jones

85. Dreams From My Father Barack Obama

86. Zora and Me Victoria Bond, T.R. Smith

87. White Teeth Zadie Smith

88.The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm X

89. Sister Betty God's Calling You Pat G'orge Walker

90.Love Honor or Stray E.N. Joy

91. A Hero Ain't Nothin' But A Sandwich Alice Childress

92. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered suicide/when the rainbow is Enuf Ntozake Shange

93. Dear Martin Nic Stone

94. Hunger Roxanne Gay

95. Land of Shadows Rachell Howzell Hall

96. The Collected Poetry Nikki Giovanni

97. A Street in Bronzeville Gwendolyn Brooks

98.Noughts and Crosses Malorie Blackman

99.Dirty Red Vickie M. Stringer

100.Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ZZ Packer

10 Novels Written by African American Authors To Fill Your Pre-Halloween Weekend

1. How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend--Linda Addison
Who doesn't need to know How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend? From the first African-American to receive the HWA Bram Stoker award, this collection of both horror and science fiction short stories and poetry reveals demons in the most likely people (like a jealous ghost across the street) or in unlikely places (like the dimension-shifting dreams of an American Indian). Recognition is the first step, what you do with your friends/demons after that is up to you.

2. Moonshine--Alaya Johnson 
Imagining vampires at the heart of the social struggles of 1920s, Moonshine blends a tempestuous romance with dramatic historical fiction, populated by a lively mythology inhabiting the gritty New York City streets.
Zephyr Hollis is an underfed, overzealous social activist who teaches night school to the underprivileged of the Lower East Side. Strapped for cash, Zephyr agrees to help a student, the mysterious Amir, who proposes she use her charity worker cover to bring down a notorious vampire mob boss. 

What he doesn’t tell her is why. Soon enough she’s tutoring a child criminal with an angelic voice, dodging vampires high on a new blood-based street drug, and trying to determine the real reason behind Amir’s request — not to mention attempting to resist (often unsuccessfully) his dark, inhuman charm.

3. Fledgling--Octavia Butler 
Fledgling, Octavia Butler's new novel after a seven year break, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly inhuman needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted - and still wants - to destroy her and those she cares for and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of "otherness" and questions what it means to be truly human. 

4. Minion (Vampire Huntress series)--LA Banks

Sasha Trudeau knows all about working beneath the shadows, back-alley deals, and things that go bump in the night. She also knows that the world is unaware of the existence of the paranormal—and that the government would like to keep it that way.

As a highly trained Special Ops soldier, Sasha and her team are an elite group of individuals who are survivors of werewolf attacks, now trained to be loyal to only to each other and their government. But when she returns from a solo mission, she finds that her team has mysteriously gone missing. Shocking government conspiracies, double-dealing vampires, and a host of stunning revelations about who—and what—she really is are only just the beginning…

5. My Soul To Keep--Tananarive Due 
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever. Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keeptraps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans. 

6. Brown Girl in The Ring--Nalo Hopkinson
The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways--farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.

She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

7. The Ballad of Black Tom Victor La Valle
People move to New York looking for magic and nothing will convince them it isn't there.

Charles Thomas Tester hustles to put food on the table, keep the roof over his father's head, from Harlem to Flushing Meadows to Red Hook. He knows what magic a suit can cast, the invisibility a guitar case can provide, and the curse written on his skin that attracts the eye of wealthy white folks and their cops. But when he delivers an occult tome to a reclusive sorceress in the heart of Queens, Tom opens a door to a deeper realm of magic, and earns the attention of things best left sleeping.

A storm that might swallow the world is building in Brooklyn. Will Black Tom live to see it break?

8. Zone One Colson Whitehead 
In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril­liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century. 

9. The Resurrectionist Wrath James White
Dale has the miraculous ability to heal and raise the recent dead. But he's also insane. When he uses his power to brutally kill the woman next door, night after night, no one will believe her impossible story, so it's up to her to find a way to end the living nightmare.


10. Within The Shadows Brandon Massey 
Be Careful What You Wish For 

At just thirty-one, Andrew Wilson has it all: close friends, a great house in an Atlanta suburb, and a successful career as a mystery writer. Only one thing is missing—a special person to share it with. Then one day he meets someone new, a woman who seems almost too good to be true. 

Beautiful, smart, and sophisticated, Mika Woods is everything that Andrew has ever wanted and more—at first. After one night of passion, Andrew soon discovers that Mika isn't quite who she appears to be. Or even what she appears to be.

But it's too late to turn back. Mika has been waiting a lifetime for a man like Andrew. And what she wants, what she desires, she will have—no matter who has to die…

The Exene Chronicles by Camille A. Collins

The Exene Chronicles by Camille A. Collins
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Blurb:

Lia is one of only a handful of black kids in Coronado, her San Diego suburb. The only person she feels she can talk to is punk rock high priestess and frontwoman to a legendary LA band, Exene Cervenka. Reeling from Ryan’s disappearance, Lia writes letters and poems to Exene every day. She can relate to Exene—but if they were to ever meet, would Exene be able to relate to her? With Exene and her band’s searing soundtrack as her chief inspiration, Lia dives head-first into a dark and spiky counterculture rife with confrontation, shifting alliances, and unsettling insights into what Ryan was doing and what might have happened to her. 

Set against the backdrop of the 1980s heyday of LA punk rock, The Exene Chronicles sings of the coming of a new age for all girls in America who have been disenfranchised by the spaces they identified as their own. With lyrical prose and an unrelenting moral center, Camille A. Collins liberates the punk in all of us.

Review 
3 out of 5 stars

This is hard to review simply because my criticism of it is the very thing I liked about it--and that I like about most books. 

It was beautifully written. It was poetic and lyrical--but because of the nature of the book and the ages of the main characters, I found that it weighed down the story with its flowery prose. 

It was almost too beautiful if that makes sense?!

The characters are barely teens--and one of them is missing caught up in the onslaught of fast approaching adulthood in the body of someone too mature for her own age. A precocious young girl who finds love sooner than she's ready for.

As a whole I thought, the book was interesting and again wonderfully written--but I found some of it was lost in its beauty. Some of the raw truth covered in a language to beautiful for its ugliness.

The author is obviously a gifted writer, with a knack for telling an interesting story--but it was a bit too much. 

I appreciated its grapple with racism, though mild--it was effective and realistic. I also appreciated the way it dealt with two girls growing up at the same age but dealing with all of the things that came with it, with care.

I'd like to see what else this author comes up with, possibly something lighter--or something heavy with a raw tone. 

Home and Away by Candice Montgomery Release Day Review

Home and Away by Candice Montgomery
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Blurb:

Tasia Quirk is young, Black, and fabulous. She's a senior, she's got great friends, and a supportive and wealthy family. She even plays football as the only girl on her private high school's team.

But when she catches her mamma trying to stuff a mysterious box in the closet, her identity is suddenly called into question. Now Tasia’s determined to unravel the lies that have overtaken her life. Along the way, she discovers what family and forgiveness really mean, and that her answers don’t come without a fee. An artsy bisexual boy from the Valley could help her find them—but only if she stops fighting who she is, beyond the color of her skin.

Review 
3 out of 5 stars

I often get caught up in stories and covers that reflect so many of the faces and stories of people I know, people that look like me. I can’t say that Home and Away was any different. The cover featured a black girl and the first line of the synopsis described her as “young, fabulous and black.” I was in. But I have some disappointments/dislikes along with some likes. Tasia Quirk’s character reminded me a lot of Starr in T.H.U.G. Seemingly balancing their blackness between two worlds. Dangling between the part of them that calls to be black and this new part of this MC, that might not be. They shared the same careful approach towards blackness—afraid to bask in its hardships and in my opinion in its power. They seemed more comfortable questioning it, but the author used the characters to portray a sense of black empowerment in places I found hard to believe and not true to the characters current struggles with their race. For instance, there was a scene in which two friends discovered their distaste for each other was due to colorism and jealousy of blackness. I didn’t get it and I think it was mostly due to the fact of its timing and the fact that the character just didn’t come off that way, neither of them did. Also, the kneeling scene came out of left field. It felt forced and it took away the importance and significance of what kneeling stands for. Not to nitpick but these two scenes rubbed me the wrong way and it took something away from the story for me. Aside from that, however, the writing is absolutely stellar. Easy to follow, clear, concise and a clear indication of the author's innate talent. The characters are pretty well fleshed out. The pacing is also pretty well done, though I found it lengthy for a contemporary—at close to 400 pages. It felt long. I wanted a little more and a little less in some areas, but for a debut, it’s clear there’s more for this author to tell. She has the talent and I’m sure we will be hearing more from her and I’d support it.

Lawson by Diana Gardin

Lawson by Diana Gardin
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Blurb:

When a fake relationship turns real, this Navy SEAL learns that love can be deadly in this thrilling, fast-paced novel that proves "no one does romantic suspense like Diana Gardin" (Susan Stoker, New York Times bestselling author).

I'm a natural protector, whether I'm guarding political big shots or celebrity VIPs. It's true that I failed - once. When I was a SEAL, when it mattered most. But that's never going to happen again. Especially not during my first op with Night Eagle Security. So if there's one thing my new partner, Indigo Stone, should know, it's that she's safe in my hands....

Not that she wants my help. With amber eyes full of intelligence and a body covered in ink, Indigo is one of the toughest people I've ever met. But this job has us deep undercover, playing car thieves and lovers, and we'll have to become pros at faking it. But when feelings turn real, I'm reminded that emotions are dangerous... especially when one wrong move can be deadly.

Review 
4 out of 5 stars

Lawson and Indigo will be one of your favorite couples from this year. Lawson a trained, former-seal, turned FBI-esque level security does everything a certain way. He's calculated, and assessing--but nothing could have prepared him for Indigo.

Neither of them is looking to date--not looking to drag anyone into their troubled, complicated lives. But a mission helps them discover, they both want to be loved.

Lawson's character really appealed to my tastes. He was strong and hard-headed. He was aggressively passionate but tender-hearted. He was also fiercely protective--which I'm totally into!

I admired his ability to overcome his past. I appreciated that though he was closed off to relationships his heart wasn't. Indigo was pretty much the same.

She also was hardened by life but I liked the fact that she persevered. I admired that she allowed love and friendship to soften her heart. There was no unnecessary drama--and stupid arguments between the two.

I just loved these two and how quickly they came together without being insta-lovey.

A great solid read with sexy passionate moments. I mean the sex between these two--fan they self beforehand and after. Better yet grab a glass of water.

A nice addition to my slowly building repertoire of black romance. I might actually come back to this one when I'm in the mood.  

In Tune by JN Welsh

In Tune by JN Welsh
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Blurb:

A tour manager determined to revitalize her career.

The client she can’t stop thinking about.

Workplace romance hits the road in this enemies-to-lovers romance from JN Welsh.

Luke Anderson needs a manager—fast. His last one quit, leaving his tour and his future in jeopardy. Now instead of focusing on his career, he’s forced to concentrate on damage control. Powerhouse manager Leona Sable is the full package—smart and talented, not to mention sexy as hell—but her past makes her impossible to trust.

When opportunity knocks in the form of talented EDM DJ Luke “The Musical Prophet” Anderson, Leona is ready to answer. But salvation doesn’t come cheap. Luke won’t sign until Leona agrees to his outrageous terms—including a no-sex-while-on-tour clause.

Dictating what she does in her personal life crosses a line. But Leona’s never been one to back down from a challenge.

One thing is for sure: if she has to suffer, so will he.

Let the tour begin...

Review 
5 out of 5 stars

In Tune totally enraptured this reader with its romance that seared every single page, the music that felt like a beat in my blood--and the writing that kept me engaged enough to almost miss my train stop twice--on two different occasions.

I'm not much of a music novel fan. They tend to lack the pizazz needed to really pull it off. It's often so heavy laden with lackluster romance, clinging to the normal new adult ideals, and music that does little to pull me in.

In Tune was NONE of that. It was well written. The pacing was torturingly sweet--and so perfectly timed. The only times I found myself rushing it along--was in my own greedy impatience.

The characters practically leaped off the page and grabbed me in a chokehold until they were done with me.

Luke is this dream music GOD--and as someone who is not much of a house music fan, I'd pay dollars to see him perform if he were real.

His love of music--his lofty goals, his oversized heart--all made him a character I easily fell in love with. Leona was no different. I admired her hard work, dedication and the sass she brought to the novel.

I admired her fight--and the dedication she had to her craft. Passion always makes me a happy reader--even in the many forms, it comes in.

This novel is absolutely outstanding, in romance, in content, in writing style--and in overall goodness.

I'm impressed and aching for more.