Rodman Public Library

Spotlight: National Library Week

Selections from our copy of Using Your Library. 32 Posters for Classroom and Library. Danville, N.Y.: F. A. Owen Publishing Company, 1965.

When you’re not sure where the plot of your book is going.

Lemonade. You’d be hard pressed to find anything but people talking about Lemonade. But we ain’t talking about summer beverages, we’re talking about Beyoncé. Lemonade, Beyoncé’s visual album that aired on HBO, is a delight to the senses and a fierce ode to black womanhood. Beyond the discussions of infidelity and Beckys and the fears of white women that they’re missing something (spoiler: you are), Lemonade is an accomplishment in its own right. That deserves a reading list, doesn’t it? Damn straight.

So check out the reading list below featuring amazing books by black women authors (goes great with my “Formation” reading list). And check out other reading lists for Lemonade on instagram and Twitter at the hashtag #lemonadesyllabus.

I think that not throwing someone out of a story by confusing the reader is as important as any other part of writing. And all grammar is, really, is clarity, and using language the way it’s commonly and most clearly used.

What helped me most with grammar, as a young writer worried I would mess up, were books that are now out of print. Fowler’s MODERN ENGLISH USAGE was funny, interesting, and I learned things from it. It was written in 1926, revised in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. (I’ve never read the 1990s edition, but the 1960s version was an enormous help.)

Hugh Sykes Davies’ GRAMMAR WITHOUT TEARS was a delight – it’s a book about the English Language, written in 1953, and the best thing about it was that by the time I got to the end of it I was much less intimidated by grammar and I knew lots of useful language trivia things which have come in handy during conversational lulls. It’s out of print now, and I don’t know how easy it would be to find now.

There are other books I’ve used and consulted over the years, but those two were the most important.