What we're reading: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: Stories by ZZ Packer

Sometimes I judge books by their covers.

I was checking out the new DeWitt Community Library. It's lighter and airier, a lot more space now. Wandering the aisles, I came across this book, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Drinking coffee elsewhere, I thought, it's kind of what I do.

And the cover had a photo of an old-fashioned empty booze bottle (capped) on an empty street, under a gray sky with a haze of blurred-out buildings in the back.

Have I said the word bleak lately around these parts?

I totally missed the word "Stories," and so was surprised when I opened up the book. I didn't read the jacket, didn't notice the author's photo.

I don't look like an "other." This has its advantages. Middle class white maleness is the norm in the U.S. (even if it's not the majority, or even plurality, probably). I have to go pretty far out of my way to have people look at me funny.

This also has what some might consider its disadvantages. I don't look like an "other," but being Jewish, I am definitely an "other." I was at a hockey game with a couple of friends not too long ago, a husband-and-wife couple. I'd known the husband well, and gradually got to know his wife.

Anyway, knowing that my family and I live in different places, she asked what I was doing for Easter. I tend to forget that not everyone knows I'm Jewish, so when I looked at her blankly and said, "uh, nothing?" and she looked back at me blankly, I realized we had a little disconnect there.

I explained. She was embarrassed. We're over it. I'm going over there for Easter dinner. It gets me out of the house, and it gives them an excuse not to drive four hours for a family affair. Everybody wins.

Ummm, Josh, tangent much?

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is very much about black experiences. I had to get all the way through the opening story, "Brownies," before I felt like I was welcome to read the book. As I started the book, I felt like I was intruding on something. On someone else's world. And I didn't know if they wanted me there.

I learned a lot from the book, I think. I don't care, really, whether these stories are entirely fictional, based in fact, or at all autobiographical. Packer's writing connects what we'd like to think are abstractions – race, gender, sexuality, religion – with tangible, real-world experiences. She describes her characters as, say, having the complexion of "a good scotch," rather than describing a light-skinned black woman.

Have I gained any actual knowledge, any true insight, into the experience of someone who looks like an "other"? I don't know. It's something I've been conscious of for several years, but I still don't really know how people think I see them. Have I been given some new insights into perspective? I hope so.

This book, by the way, is the first in a very long time that's made me want to read anything about the author. Here's an in-depth interview she did with indentitytheory.com after the release of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.