January reading
"The filming, not the film."
Having a go on here, as an alternative to IG, where I’ve been posting book reviews for years. The plan is to post monthly reading updates, in the form of mini-reviews. Jan-Feb-March backlog will go up first, then I’ll continue with regular posts once I’m caught up. Maybe some longer reviews as well, if I feel like it. If you’re interested in reading my long-form reviews, have a look through my books column at Xtra.
Here’s January:
A strong showing for the year’s beginning(s) 🐍🐍
Recognizing the Stranger: I highly recommend listening to Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s episode of the Between the Covers podcast, as a companion to this speech (written slightly before Oct 7, 2023) and its afterward (written slightly after Oct 7, 2023). On reaching a turning point in her consideration of turning points. On the need to move away from the humanist framework towards something that does not require colonized, resisting subjects to persuade others of their humanity. What can make a literary or personal epiphany outside of that limiting framework?
Black Hearts in Battersea, by the very English, very prolific Joan Aiken, was one of my favourite books as a child, and still holds up so well. Full of vim and vigour, it introduces one of my most loved queer (IMO) children’s characters, the irrepressible Dido Twite. I don’t often ascribe queerness to childhood things, preferring to let my preferences back then simply be my preferences, but this particular literary creation really screams scrappy melancholic gay to me in so many ways.
Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas floored me, each letter in this blazing memoir more tender and eviscerating than the last. Reading it, I felt I could hear Gentili’s voice so clearly; I can only imagine how much all of her friends and loved ones must miss her.
Modern Nature accompanied me throughout January, and when I got to its last pages, which record heavy, disoriented days of illness, I found myself crying uncontrollably. More than just the January blues. Derek Jarman’s journals are so immediate, convey his cantankerous romanticism so tangibly that I really did trick myself into thinking of him as my friend. It’s about garden time, queer time, sick time, film time. “The filming, not the film.”
I read Edgar Gomez’s previous memoir in essays, High-Risk Homosexual, in preparation to review their more recent memoir in essays, Alligator Tears. Aria Aber’s Good Girl is an exhilarating debut novel. You can find my full-length reviews of these titles in Xtra: Alligator Tears, Good Girl.
