What I Read in September

Melissa Firman
6 min readOct 3, 2021
Image by Gosia K. from Pixabay; all book images below from Goodreads

You can tell we’re getting into spookytimes based on my September reads. ’Tis the season for R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) and finishing up challenge prompts. September was a good reading month with a total of 7 books completed — 2 novels, 2 poetry collections, 1 memoir, 1 nonfiction and 1 short story collection. Three of these were audiobooks.

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead, 2021)
Akwaeke Emezi gets a lot of Booktube love, it seems, so I thought I’d give this a try. I’m somewhat conflicted about this one.

What I liked: the memoir-in-letters format, their raw honesty about being trans, the concept of bending the world to achieve one’s goals, and their candor about the writing process. Regarding the latter, I haven’t read Emezi’s other books (and am on the fence about doing so) but while it’s not necessary before reading Dear Senthuran, I could see where that would be helpful. The writing is powerful and resonant and there are some gorgeous passages.

What I struggled with: the repetition (somewhat expected with this format, I suppose), the un-chronological nature (I kept thinking, wait, did this happen before or after this or that?) and Emezi’s frequent references to themselves as being a god. The latter point, I know, sounds odd in the context of our Western culture, and I appreciated…

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Melissa Firman

Writes about books, GenX, politics, life. Currently working on a memoir. www.melissafirman.com