Their Eyes Were Watching God
I listened to this book on audio, mostly while walking around Queen Anne in Seattle. Ruby Dee does an amazing job with the reading. There were moments that stopped me in my tracks, one of them being:
“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.”
Hurston writes with a double vision that feels so incredibly rare. She can make vast, declarative cuts through human existence and hand you a character’s entire cosmology in a single sentence. On the other hand, she’s so delicately attuned to the smallest changes in expression. A glance or a joke can carry as much truth as a storm.