The library now has Bilingual Mask Craft Kits, for the children to make their own masks!

Then and Now

.By Ruby Long, a neighbor whose work has appeared in local and national publications.

The Library’s Storytime will not take place this year but the Friends of PAL will have a craft table and information table at Key Route Plaza from 11am to 2pm. Visit us there to learn more about how you can support our library and to make scary buttons and beautiful bookmarks. 

friendly, just too many features to list here. Take a look at www.oaklandlibrary.org

Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle

At times I read to educate myself; other times I read to travel to places I’ve never been and meet people I’ve never met. Increasingly as I enter my eighth decade I have a bucket list of books I want to read. This year I’ve been immersed in dense, at times overblown, histories about class, the environment and power. And, along with my dear wife and my friend Bob Wells, we’re taking on James Joyce’s Ulysses.

But consistently, despite my love of history and high literature, I need to go somewhere else, read something that has a clear narrative arc and is a real ‘page-turner.’ There’s pleasure in reading something that doesn’t require you to constantly repair to a dictionary or seek additional information on-line or go to other reference books. Sometimes, page-turners beat books that are while perhaps more edifying usually are not so much fun to read.

So I threw myself, last week, into Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle. Whitehead is a serious writer. He’s won two Pulitzer prizes over the last few years.  He says he likes to lighten up every other book, as a rule. After The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys both sobering and provocative works, Whitehead wrote this fast paced tale of a Harlem heist at the dawn of the sixties. Ray Carney is the novel’s protagonist and he’s a good guy with whom we can identify. He had a rocky start in life, his mother died when he was young and his dad, among other trades, was a stone-cold gangster. But Carney is upwardly mobile, owns a furniture store on 125^th Street and among other side hustles, occasionally fences ‘found’ radios and TVs.

Freddie, Carney’s cousin and lifelong friend, cajoles him into a job that immerses both of them waist deep into a world of hoods, killers, crooked cops and enforcers and flunkies of New York City’s uptown and downtown elites. Therein lies the tale as our hero tries to rise up from the mean streets, take care of his family and do right and fear not. It’s a good tale, an easy read, and along the way it is, if you will, a historical ethnography. We learn a lot about Harlem’s diverse peoples, and the Hotel Theresa, restaurants and dive bars, streets and tenements where they live.

Whitehead’s artistry reminds me of Tony Hillerman, Walter Mosley, James McBride, and early Leonardo Padura, who write books that open windows on the lives of a lot of folks whose voices many of us have not heard.  Whitehead also reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Michael Chabon, Clancy Sigal, all skilled -and some great- writers who can’t resist the siren call of Hollywood. Both Whitehead and Chabon’s recent books read like screen treatments, designed with an eye on Big Money. This seduction might be good for Hollywood but it bodes ill for the future of some of our important first-class imaginative novelists. Still Harlem Shuffle is riveting and well worth the read.

OPL Advocates Holiday Mixer hosted by the Friends of the Oakland Public Library and the City of Oakland Library Advisory Commission, December 5th, is sure to be full of learning and laughter!

The Friends of the Piedmont Avenue Library is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Our tax ID is 84-4203055.

All contributions are tax deductible.