Volume 3, No. 24: A Randomized Look at My Reading Life

Greetings, book people! It has been so grey and rainy and cold here in the hill towns of Western MA, and no, I will not stop being delighted by it, even if my basil plants are a little sad. I also have a new favorite bird song, the veery, which is so magical and musical it hardly seems real. The shimmering reverberations! I love it.

The June Books for Trans Rights Fundraiser is still live, so please check it out if you haven’t already! There are still some great books available.

We’re about halfway through the year, so I thought I’d do something fun and different today. I read a lot of books—way more than I can write about in the newsletter. I was thinking last week about what my reading life looks like in reality vs. what it might look like to you. I usually write about the books I absolutely love, the ones that make me think a lot, or challenge me, or that feel especially meaningful. But I also read a lot of fun fluff! I reread my favorite romance books over and over, often on audio for 10-15 minutes before I fall asleep. I read some books I like a lot or even love that still don’t make it into the newsletter. I read some books that are fine. I occasionally read books I don’t like at all. Sometimes I read a book and I just don’t have a lot to say about it, even if it’s a great book.

So here’s a randomized list of 15 books I’ve read this year that actually reflects my reading life in all its mess and glory. I used a random number generator to pick 15 numbers between 1 and 224 (the number of books I’ve read this year). I did this twice, and made a list of the 30 books (thanks, reading spreadsheet). I deleted any books I’d already reviewed in the newsletter, and used the random number generator to pick new ones. Then I went through that initial list of 30 and cut it in half.

This final list includes books in the many genres I read—romance, fantasy, memoir, contemporary fiction, and even a mystery! It includes books I absolutely love, books I like, and books I feel meh about; comfort reads and new favorites; fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

I had a lot of fun making this list. It reminded me how much I value mediocrity. Not every book is my favorite book, and not every book has to be. My reading life is better for it.

XOXY by Kimberly Zieselman

This is a fairly straightforward memoir about Zieselman’s life, first about her childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood, and then about her journey to becoming an intersex activist. As a child, her own medical history was kept from her by her doctors and parents, and she didn’t learn she was intersex until she was an adult. All of this was so enraging to read. She writes poignantly and directly about the unbelievable violence intersex people have faced (and continue to face) from the medical establishment. I especially appreciated her thoughts on queer and LGBTQ+ communities and activism, her feelings of being isolated in LGBTQ+ spaces, and her assertion that queer movement building requires solidarity.

The Hellion's Waltz by Olivia Waite

I loved both of Olivia Waite’s earlier sapphic historicals, The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics and The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows. I did not love this one. It did not feel like a romance; it felt like two interesting but separate stories about women dealing with stuff in their lives. Every once in a while they got together to flirt and have sex. They didn't spend much time together but they were in love by the end? It wasn't even that there was no conflict or angst (my favorite), it was that they didn't seem to have a substantial relationship at all.

Olivia by Dorothy Strachey

This was published in 1949, though Strachey wrote the manuscript years earlier. It’s about sixteen-year-old Olivia, who arrives at a finishing school in France and immediately falls into intense lust/love/infatuation with her teacher, Mlle. Julie. Julie was/is in love with her co-teacher Mlle. Cara. She’s also clearly slept with students before. She has extremely questionable boundaries. There is so much lesbian drama. Everybody makes terrible choices.This book captures teenage sapphic desire so brilliantly. Julie isn’t really a person here; Olivia’s love for her has nothing to do with who she is. It’s about Olivia becoming aware of herself, her body, her needs. There are so many passages that express this, passages that felt like they were taken directly from the journal I kept when I was 16. It all felt so true to how I experienced coming into self as a queer teenager. Desire in the context of self-discovery is rarely safe or neat.

Garlic and the Vampire by Bree Paulsen

I read this perfect middle grade graphic novel, along with its sequel Garlic and the Witch, in one sitting. I cannot recommend them both highly enough. Joy, joy, joy. They are both perfect books. Warm and cozy. Funny and whimsical. Beautifully illustrated.

Birdgirl by Mya-Rose Craig

I was excited about this memoir about birding, written by a young environmental activist. I am always happy when teenagers and people in their early 20s write books. Like, yeah! Go for it! But the thing is I just don’t understand this kind of birding. The book is basically a birding travelogue, a record of all the places Craig and her parents visit all over the world, in search of new species for their life lists. A lot of these trips happen when Craig is a child. It’s obvious she loves birds, but extreme birding makes me feel weird and I don’t really care about when she saw her 1000th species or what it was. People who are not me might like this one a lot! I did appreciate her reflections on being a non-white birder in the UK and the racism that exists in nature/environmental organizations and spaces.

Freedom House by KB Brookins

What a beautiful, wrenching, haunting, playful, loving rage song of a book. These poems are about being Black and trans in America, so they’re about state violence and fear, about death and grief and white entitlement and misogyny and racism and exhaustion and the boxes Black boys get shoved into. But. They are also about little (and not so little) pockets of joy, about building moments and lives of freedom, about queer love, about coming home to the body, about pleasure—in food, in places known, in jokes, in trans embodiment, in imaginings of a free and beautiful future.There are so many experimental forms, including a CV and an erasure of an abortion ban bill. The language is alive and surprising, the imagery sometimes cutting and sometimes opening. Everything about this book feels visceral and sharp, soft and immediate. It’s loud and tender, full of breaking, and full of uncontainable Black trans and queer love.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

I loved this sad, warm, haunting book about going home, about land-love and belonging and the stories woven in and of place. It’s about grief and sisterhood and Cree kinship and aunties and how one Cree family holds each other and breaks apart and stitches themselves back together despite ongoing colonial violence. The way Johns writes about going home is so vivid and poignant. So is the way she writes about laugher, and cooking, and being gathered together around a big table, and driving on rural Alberta roads, and water, and dreams, and fear. There is so much pain and loss and reckoning in this novel, but it’s also soft, tender, loving. There is also a lot of quiet, celebrated queerness.

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

Oh, this soft little fantasy novella broke me right open. It's set in a Persian-inspired world, an island nation newly independent, and home to a wave of refugees fleeing genocide. Firuz is a healer doing their best to take care of their family—working overtime at an underfunded clinic, stretching the money to make sure their mother and teenage brother have enough to eat. They take in a teenage refugee who has no one to train her in blood magic, and so now they're supporting her, too, and they don't have anyone to lean on, and they are up against so much systemic injustice, and they're so tired.

Mostly this is a story about the ordinary life of a refugee, a person living in a hostile and unfamiliar world, a person who loves their family, who loves their work, who longs for justice, whose back aches, who is pouring themself into a place they want to make into a home. It's about community care and what happens when it fails. And it's about questions that don't have simple answers—Firuz wants to put everyone and everything, including themself, into neat boxes: colonizer, colonized; friend, enemy; right, wrong; home, not-home. But it turns out nothing and no one fits into any of those boxes.

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman

This extraordinary book is a celebration of language. It is full of depth and meaning, and I don’t mean to belittle that by ignoring it, but sometimes I read a book of poetry that reminds me how truly outrageous and incredible it is that we are creatures who make words. The words in this book are whole worlds. The words in this book are beautiful castles, vast woodlands, intricate architecture. I could have read these poems forever, just for the feel of them in my mouth.The book consists of 60 figures. On one page, a pen and ink drawing, made up of lines, shapes, and cursive text, sometimes with splashes of color. On the facing page, a prose poem describing (naming? interpreting? complicating? rebuilding? mapping?) the art. I think there is a lot in these poems about Blackness, art-making, time, legibility. But they also disrupt the idea that in order to be worthwhile, art must be layered, symbolic, willing to be unraveled

The Love That Dares edited by Rachel Smith and Barbara Vesey

This is a collection of letters between queer people throughout history. It’s lacking in scope—it is almost entirely white, and doesn’t include any letters written by trans people. I did enjoy it for what it was, but its biggest gift was the way it made me think about letters, and letter writing, in my own life. I wrote a little essay about it here.

Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy

This is a mystery about a queer nun living in New Orleans. She’s determined to figure out who’s behind a string of arsons at her convent and the attached school. She is fiercely protective of her home and her right to be there. I didn’t care much about the mystery, which I found boring (though I’m not really a mystery reader). I loved Sister Holiday. I was so interested in who she was—how she became a nun, what she was running from, where her faith came from, all of it. But the book doesn’t dig into any of that, it just skims the surface. I’m curious to see if Douaihy writes any sequels that give us more of her character, because this book left me intrigued but wanting.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

There is so much going on in this brilliant 150-page book. Annie is a fierce mess who speaks her mind, who knows herself, who wants and longs and struggles. What excited me most (of course) is the queerness. Annie falls in love with a classmate, Gwen, and later has similar feelings about another girl. There are so many passages in which she imagines a queer future. Dreaming about a girl she has a crush on, she says: “I took her to an island, where we lived together forever, I supposed, and fed on wild pigs and sea grapes.” In a moment with Gwen, she longs to be “sitting in some different atmosphere, with no future full of ridiculous demands, no need for any sustenance save our love for each other, with no hindrance to any of our desires.”The heart of the novel is Annie’s complicated relationship with her mother. It’s about the grief of that relationship breaking and changing. The relationships she has with other girls, for a time, are a site of ease and refuge away from that. These queer relationships and fantasies are one of the ways she begins to see a way into another kind of life. Queerness becomes portal and possibility and invention. In queerness, Annie is free to play and experiment. Her relationships with girls don’t have the same weight and heft that any potential relationship with a boy would have.

Queerness doesn't have to “stick” to be real. It can be loose. Kincaid blurs the lines between queer desire and close friendship between women, and it’s okay, the lines can be blurry. Queerness can be a question, a possibility model, an idyll, a fantasy. It can be forever or it can be a passing moment. It is not ever only one thing.

What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

I liked this collection of stories, set all over the world, and told from the perspectives of different animals. Many of them were are sad, dealing with climate change and the violence humans to do ecosystems and nonhuman communities. But there is also a lot of whimsy and tenderness in this book. I can’t remember the individual stories now, but I enjoyed the experience of reading them.

Friday I’m in Love by Camryn Garrett

This was fun and forgettable. It’s about a queer teenager who decides to throw herself a coming out party. I don’t remember much beyond that. I enjoyed reading it! I did not like it nearly as much as Garrett’s first novel, Full Disclosure.

Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor

This is an incredible collection of poems about the 1991 murder of Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot by the owner of a Korean connivence store in LA. The structure is breathtaking. I wrote a bit about it here.