Amazon.com description: Product Description: In "BookMarks", Karla FC Holloway explores the public side of reading, and specifically how books and booklists form a public image of African Americans. Revealing her own love of books and her quirky passion for their locations in libraries and on bookshelves, she takes us on a personal and candid journey through children's reading rooms, prison libraries, and "Negro" libraries of the early twentieth century.Holloway also calls our attention to a remarkable trend among many prominent African American writers - including Maya Angelou, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, Malcolm X, and Zora Neale Hurston. Their autobiographies and memoirs are consistently marked with booklists - records of their own habits of reading. She examines these lists, along with the trends of selection in Oprah Winfrey's popular book club, raising the questions: What does it mean for prominent African Americans to associate themselves with European learning and culture? How do books by black authors fare in the inevitable hierarchy of a booklist?This compelling rumination on reading will urge you to reflect upon your own reading habits, what books are important to you, and why.