Book #100 |
Book: I Am Not Sidney Poitier | Author: Percival Everett | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Audiobook |
Pages: 247 | Duration: 10/29/25 – 10/29/25 (1 day) | |
| Rating: ★★★★★ | Genres: literary fiction, humor, race, African American, satire | ||
| 📕10-word summary: The wild adventures of a rich, shrewd Sidney Poitier doppelgänger. 🖌6-word review: Funny, clever, and highly entertaining writing. |
|||
| 💭A favorite quote: “My penis hung there, unimpressive and unimpressed. Beatrice dropped to her knees and took me in her mouth. Hormones got the better of me, and I began to swell, at least my penis did. But before I could get completely hard, she’d start in with her teeth, and my organ would retreat. It went like that for a bit — back-and-forth, pleasure and pain, arousal and repulsion, erection and reflation. She sucked away like a maniacal vacuum.” | |||
| 🎓A new-to-me word: deleterious | |||
| Description:* Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age 11, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: This is a funny story about a serious subject: a social hierarchy that scrambles to balance a person’s skin color with their mind-numbing wealth. I thought of The Blind Side story at one point, but I liked how this author overtly commented on the trope of the “white savior narrative,” which critics of The Blind Side cited. I did a lot of chuckling, and a little laughing out loud, reading this book. The simple comedic device of the main character’s name being “Not Sidney Poitier” (i.e., his “first” name is “Not Sidney” and his surname is “Poitier”) lead to a lot of misunderstandings that “never got old,” at least to me. I also loved how the main character (“Not Sidney”) takes a class from a Professor Percival Everett, making the author of this book also a character in it. One thing I didn’t particularly care for was that there were 3 dream sequences, which I don’t like in books — because it’s usually not clear to me if they’re just supposed to show how absurd dreams can be, or if there’s something allegorical or metaphorical in them to advance the plot — and one of them in this story was super, super long. I still liked the book enough overall to not subtract a star from the rating because of it, though. This is my 3rd Percival Everett book, having read both James and The Trees in 2024, and he’s a writer a highly recommend. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
