Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

Here's a sure way to make me broke: release a Zadie Smith book every week. It took me a while to snag this bad boy off the shelf, but I did and I can't wait to digest. Thus far, I've read her debut White Teeth (phenomenal) and her follow-up The Autograph Man (meh). Still haven't touch On Beauty, which I hear is Smith at her most comfortable.

Anyway, Smith says that she didn't know she was writing Changing My Mind because the collection is a motley crew of essays that several editors have requested over a period of a few years. I took a sneak peak at Zadie's Zora Neale Hurston essay and I was reeled in. She writes how at first she resisted the notion of Hurston being a great writer. "I lost many literary battles the day I read Their Eyes Were Watching God," she writes. "I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power...I had to admit that mythic language is startling when it's good."