Everything Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't think there is a more important writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates in America right now. His writing alone -- the sentences that become paragraphs with turn into incisive, biting essays -- is spectacular, and his topic, race (and, in turn, racism), is not talked about more constructively anywhere else. Take this, from his recent book, a section I revisited time and time again:

Any fair consideration of the depth and width of enslavement tempts insanity. First conjure the crime — the generational destruction of human bodies — and all of its related offenses — domestic terrorism, poll taxes, mass incarceration. But then try to imagine being an individual born among the remnants of that crime, among the wronged, among the plundered, and feeling the gravity of that crime all around and seeing it in the sideways glances of the perpetrators of that crime and overhearing it in their whispers and watching these people, at best, denying their power to address this crime and, at worst, denying that any crime had occurred at all, even as their entire lives revolve around the fact of a robbery so large that it is written in our very names.

I read Between the World and Me in a single sitting earlier this year, and had the good fortune to follow it with James Baldwin. I did the same recently, pairing Coates' most recent book, We Were Eight Years in Power with Notes of a Native Son. Needless to say, I've spent hours with both, marking up pages and margins with questions and exclamation points. If, as Taylor Branch argues, there is no more powerful and shaping force in this country than race, then diving into its intricacies and legacies through these books and minds has been the most phenomenal classroom. And so I've been wondering: is there a better literary duo out there?

After I read Coates' book (add it to the list of things I can't shut up about -- I've had some of the most incredible conversations about it, race, and progress as a result), I listened to hours of interviews with him. The one above, with Obama's former Chief Strategist, David Axelrod, was spectacular. (So is this one, and so is this one.)

I've been lucky to have an amazing year with books, and this might be my favorite yet.