4:04
Read along with us and join the conversation all month long on our Instagram account -- GMA Book Club and #GMABookClub
See more of our conversation below for some of Pride and Piazza's book recommendations.
Piazza: The last really great fiction book that I read was \"Great Circle\" by Maggie Shipstead. It looks daunting, but it flies by. \"Great Circle\" is this sweeping epic journey -- so good, so good -- of the life story of a female pilot starting early in the 20th century and going essentially for the next hundred years. It taught me so much about what it took to be a female pilot in the early days of aviation. These women were so fierce and I feel like their stories are untold and I am a sucker for the untold stories of women.
Pride: \"Three Girls from Bronzevville\" by Dawn Turner. Speaking of lifelong friendships, it's about her and her younger sister and her best friend who they met when they were eight years old. [It's about] the twists and turns their lives take, which are very shocking and very dramatic. It's about how fate versus personal choice plays out in our lives and how race affects our trajectories and about friendship. It's just -- it's such a wonderful book.
Piazza: I go really far back when people ask me what inspired me to be a writer. And it wasn't one book, but it was just Judy Blume's books, which I read all up when I was little girl and they inspired me because her characters were like me.
Pride: I think for me, reading and a passion for reading starts when you're young and when I was young, there weren't a lot of Black characters starring in fiction. So an early memory I have is reading \"Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,\" which is a beautiful book -- I think of one of the first ones that I can remember that was about a Black girl and that really stuck with me. It just speaks to how powerful that is, and you can see yourself in a story that made such an impact that I can remember how I felt reading that story now.
Piazza: I am very, very excited for Kate Baer's new book.
Pride: She took mine!
Piazza: We just like a lot of the same things, I'm sorry! But Kate Baer -- I'm not a poetry person.
Pride: Me neither.
Piazza: But she is the first poet that just speaks to the experience of being a woman in the world.
Pride: I feel the same. I preordered this book in early August and it comes out in November. Her first book is a book that I just turn to time and time again. [Her poems] are so feminist and so empowering. I just adore her.
Pride: One of the reasons we wanted to write a novel is because we felt like it was an interesting way into the story using fiction and that it wasn't facts and figures and statistics and history about race and racial relations in America, even though all that is important. So if I can recommend a book that is a counterpoint to that, it is \"the sum of us\" by Heather McGhee, which is just a stunning, stunning work of nonfiction and traces race and race relations in America from its beginning until now.
Piazza: I think the first book that I read that made me start thinking about race in a different way was Toni Morrison's \"The Bluest Eye.\" It was the first time I was like, \"Oh my God, like there's so much I don't know and there's so much that I need to know.\" And that novel touched me and I go back to it a lot.
Pride: One of my authors, Maisy Card -- I published her first book, \"These Ghosts Are Family\" last March at Simon and Schuster -- she just debuted as kind of a writer to watch. And so now she's working on her second book, which will come out hopefully in 2023.
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