Welcome to Jazzy Reads! My name is Alysha Butler also know as Indigo Jazz and this site will serve as a point of reference and an inviting digital community for both the bibliophile and occasional reader looking for reviews and recommendations on the latest literary works with a multicultural, international , and historical flare. Literature, art, and music usually go hand and hand. Therefore this site will also include the occasional review of a local art exhibit, independent film, or music publication. I hope you enjoy!
I also wanted to say I love that you are inspired to show your students history rather than tell them and that you were inspired by your own family stories that aren’t in the history books.
I read a lot of translated and foreign fiction, because I feel like we hear the same voices all the time, see the same authors on the book displays and in the review sections. It’s really hard to avoid the lure of that same demographic that gets published, unless we are aware of it and actively pursue something and somewhere else.
My favourite stories come from women writer’s of the Caribbean, and I think it is because there is a strong ancestral connection, and a desire to understand it, an authenticity.
A few years ago Maryse Condé was nominated for the International Booker Prize, back when it was a prize awarded every two years for a lifetime’s work. I wasn’t interested in the winner, I looked at the longlist and immediately knew it was her work I wanted to read and I’ve been reading them ever since, starting with the book she recommended we begin with if we haven’t read her before Tales From the Heart, True Stories From My Childhood. If you haven’t read it, I do hope you’ll track it down, I think you’ll love it, and her. She also wrote an equally wonderful book about her grandmother whom she never met, Victoire: My Mother’s Mother.
I could go on, but I don’t wish to write an essay of my reading on your About page, I just wanted to say I’d love to read more about the literature that inspires you and also I hope that you might write some of those stories of your own ancestors one day, because they deserve to be preserved and shared.
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