24in48 Hour Twelve: Audiobook Story

It's hour 12 of the 48 hours of reading time this weekend, and I'm 6 hours into my (hopefully) 24 hours of reading. Now I'm alternating between two books, one print, one audio, to rest my eyes and keep my body moving. I didn't plan it this way, but Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and Stephen Markley's Ohio are a good match. Both are fiction crafted in an immediate response to violence and poverty in America. One is focused on police violence against Black people and features a young girl becoming an activist. The other about the Iraq war and the opioid epidemic, and at least partly concerns a young man becoming an activist. Both also describe drug use and drug dealing as a product of poverty and despair, and both address how larger conflicts interrupt and clarify friendships among young people.  And because of where I am in each book, I wound up reading and listening to two different descriptions of high school proms in the same two hour period this afternoon. I'm only a little ways into Ohio, but it seems to take racism seriously as part of its story line from the perspective of a white man who is increasingly critical of the casual racism and patriotic illusions in his small town in Ohio, while The Hate U Give comes from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Here's Tupac's Thug Life, which I think works for both books, even though it's most obviously connected to the Hate U Give, which takes its title from Tupac's explanation of the T.H.U.G L.I.F.E (The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody).