X

X: A Novel by Ilyasah Shabazz and Kekla Magoon  348 pp.

This is an award winning novelized biography of the man who would become Malcolm X. Written by one of his daughters and based on Malcolm Little/El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz's diaries and interviews with friends and family. The book covers his childhood through the teen years to his imprisonment for burglary at age 21 where he converted to Islam and studied the works of men like Marcus Garvey who his parents followed. Appended material expands on his life after prison and his work with the Nation of Islam which he left to create the Organization for African-American Unity. This YA novel is interesting and I learned much about Malcolm X that I did not know. And it fulfilled the last title I needed for the 2019 A to Z Book Challenge. I downloaded the book via Overdrive.

The Damascus Road

The Damascus Road: a Novel of Saint Paul / Jay Parini, 347 p.

A convincing imagining of the life of Paul, told in alternating passages narrated by Paul himself and his companion, the author of Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.  Unlike Peter, or Judas, or Jesus himself, scriptural Paul always seems distant, a disembodied voice exhorting the faithful.  Parini fleshes him out in a way that makes him seem real, if still not always likeable.  Parini is an academic as well as a poet and novelist, and he manages to straddle the line between a novelistic presentation of scholarship and an actual work of the imagination.  A nice exploration of the tensions between the Greek/Gentile followers of Jesus and the Jewish apostles who knew him in life.