Happy Birthday to Me
I meant to write about riding a horse. But here are all the books I finished last year.
Happy Birthday to me. Yesterday I turned 53, an astoundingly old age considering that, at various points in time, I was living a lifestyle that did not assure any kind of longevity. Also, I know I am still young, and that said lifestyle may still come to result in a shortened time as this incarnation, an incarnation I am really enjoying. It’s pretty fun to be “Michelle Tea.” I have to say, though, there are plenty of things I have not yet gotten around to doing, as well as things I haven’t wanted or needed to do until more recently, and at some point last year it really hit me that, the time of thinking I will do something in the future is over.
Last month I had the extreme good fortune and absolute delight of getting to have a live conversation with Miranda July about her incredible new book, All Fours. I know I am someone who uses big language really easily – many things are incredible to me, and that’s the truth, they really are. As a teen, my mother would get annoyed when I tried to finagle money for concert tickets off of her – ‘They can’t all be your favorite bands, Michelle!’ Can’t they, though? However, this big love of so many things does nip me in the derriere a bit when I read a book like All Fours and find that I’ve really worn out so many adjectives, and now I need something that means really, really, really super-duper uber incredible! I was very moved by All Fours, and even cried at its denouement, and was almost tongue-tied to speak to the author about it. But one thing Miranda said during the event was that when she was younger she would look forward to the age she is at now. And now she is at that age, and when she looks forward she sees – death! Me, too! Especially cause my grandmother died at the way-too-young age of 59, a fucking tragedy, and if I am to expire in a mere six years I think I will also feel like it’s tragic. Maybe. I will have packed a lot of living into those decades so, not to be morbid but, however it shakes out, no one should feel too bad about it. Least of all me.
But looking forward and seeing mostly only death makes you really step up to all the things you’ve been thinking you’ll get around to someday. This is partly why I started DOPAMINE Books. I’ve always thought I’d publish ‘someday’ and it really hit me. Like, when? When I’m sixty? I mean sure, why not, but also, by 50-whatever you really feel like, here you are. No point in putting anything off, I’m surely not going to be in a better position to do it, right? Same with buckling down into some sort of actual spiritual practice in which I am learning new things in a somewhat guided and traditional manner, rather than DIY-ing it forever. Which has been great, truly. I even have a book coming out in October, Modern Magic, a sort of follow-up to Modern Tarot that is all about my lifelong DIY magical practice. It feels good to have put it all on wax, so to speak, before possibly embarking upon a tradition that’s newer to me, that I have been drawn to for quite a while. More on that later, possibly. It’s not secret, but it might be private? Private! Imagine! Well, if I ever want to see what it’s like to have a part of one’s life be private, I guess now would be the time!
What is not private is my reading list. I swore I would have it all listed here by the end of January, but I needed to post about Gaza, and so it’s been shoved into February. On that tip, I actually had my first war-dream last night. What a privilege, completely unearned and born only of the supreme unknowable chaos of life that this should be so. That I don’t dream of war nightly, because the place it sits in my psyche is, for all my care, somewhat abstract, and distant. That the experience would be a dream, and not what I wake up to. I imagine there is so many dreams of war right now, and I wonder what that means for our collective consciousness. I hope it means there is an awakening, especially among those who have not spoken out in support of Palestine, especially-especially among those who actually have the power to do something solid and concrete to stop the genocide, to make it so that a young person leaving the dubious safety of their shelter is not gunned down in the street while trying to hunt down food to feed their family. I read about this yesterday, this happening to a real human, and I know it was why my consciousness of the war spilled over into my dreams last night, and had me witness someone being shot in front of me, feel a facsimile of fear as I tried to run and hide, to warn others, to try to organize and to help while all around me my world was under siege.
Here are the rest of the books I finished in 2024:
Koreangry by Eunsoo Jeong Fed up with microaggressions, artist Eunsoo Jeong built a wild-ass, crazed with fury puppet of herself, and started making a zine which features her incredible avatar as well as much other thoughtful and funny and poignant art and rants about her experiences. I got this from the artist, at a great women and queer folks pop-up that happened on the patio of Stories Books and Cafes around the holidays, and you can get it from her website.
Bellies by Nicola Dinan is a novel about a relationship and how it shifts as one of the pair transitions. It is also about using your own life as art, and how that affects a community of friends. The Incest Diaries is a very intense, often difficult memoir by an anonymous writer, about her experience of sexual abuse as a child and how that has shaped so much of her life. I learned of it from Laurie Stone’s excellent substack, and was made so curious about it from her talk of it, as well as the sort of skepticism and condemnation the book has received (it also received a thoughtful review in The New Yorker that made me want to read it). I don’t mind reading dangerous and grim writings, and I’m especially interested in how femmes metabolise sexual violence, be it firsthand or the constant threat, into their sexualities. It might sound strange to call such a thing a very good book, but it is - tightly written, fearless, powerful.
I was absolutely delighted to receive and Advance Readers Copy of Jenny Fran Davis’ Dykette, which I loved so much I felt giddy with it. What a complete fucking joy to be in the mind of someone so witty and unflinching and femme as the narrator of this novel, about a trio of queer couples - all with one on the butch-trans masc spectrum, the other femme - who spend a holiday together in wintry upstate New York and slowly, deliciously unravel. Extra props to the novelist for making amazing merch and promos! As a fellow writer and publisher, I took notes!
I fell into a brief but consuming Shakespeare k-hole last year. I got MacBeth, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice from the library. It’s fun reading plays. Shakespeare is overrated- there, I said it! I don’t know, I think I’m too much of a galaxy girl to have patience with the notion that something that felt relevant to mainstream medieval folks needs to still be this important. I do have a soft spot for A Midsummer’s Night Dream, tho, from when I was in eight grade and my closeted (to us) gay male teacher at my shitty Catholic school decided to hell with math and start ed taking us into the auditorium to put on the play. He cast us with a queen’s bitchy eye for the popularity dynamics going on in class, forcing me to actually speak the line ‘Teach me how to be like you’ to the popular girl whose ass I was always up. The production was to have choreography from Cats, which he must have recently seen in Boston. It was quickly shut down by the cunty head nun, Sister Gertrude, who ultimately fired the genius. He now runs a community theater. I hope he runs it while wearing a decorative scarf and smoking a Benson & Hedges 100, which was how he ran us.
My sister gave me Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono. I share a birthday with Yoko Ono! This gives me an immeasurable amount of pleasure. I do feel that there is a piece of our interiors that match up. I also have the same birthday as Matt Dillon, which has caused me to believe - all my life! - that I we will someday know one another. I hope that it is while I am still somewhat cute, because I I would like any meeting to result in, like, making out or something. Whatever version of primarily monogamous my marriage will ever be in, I know that this will be okay, due to the notarized Matt Dillon prenup signed by all parties (except Matt) before the vows were exchanged.
I read the first version of Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller back in the 90s, when my dear friend Peter was like, did you know one of John Water’s actresses has a book out on the same press that did Not Me and it’s so fucking wild and great and you have to read it? And I did and became part of the cult of Cookie Mueller devotees. I actually taught a one day workshop through the Golden Dome School last year, about chosen ancestors, and formalized my choosing of Cookie so much, reaching out to her in a meditation, and the vibe I got was a little bit like, what’s in this for me?, even though she was such a generous soul in life - perhaps because she was such a generous soul in life! She felt like, why are you bothering me??? But I persisted, and I think she is there for me on the cosmic level, at least a little bit. I also felt that she felt sad or upset that she’s been misunderstood by some as a bad mother. She perhaps made some wild choices, and there were causes behind them, but she was not a bad mother! An anecdote I found about her at the New England Aquarium with her young son Max, watching an octopus and overhearing some wretched Massholes talking about how ugly it was made me cry. Cookie doesn’t interact with them, she just starts talking to Max about how beautiful the creature is. And she cries. Jesus. I’m happy to tell you that Great Gerwig, who I’m guessing can do whatever the fuck she wants after Barbie, wants to make this book into a tv show. DO YOU NEED ANYONE FOR THE WRITERS ROOM, GRETA??? Okay. Anyway, this latest edition of this classic text is really incredible, and includes much more writings, so get it.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke. Have you not already read this magnificent, slim volume told from the perspective of a P-22-like mountain lion in Griffith Park, who winds up, briefly, as the pet of the witchy daughter of a Glenn Danzig-like musician? Run, don’t walk your fingers to this link and get it. You’ll read it in a day and it will stay with you for a long time.
Sex Magicians by Michael William West. The Strange World of Willie Seabrook by Marjorie Worthington. Both of these books are about the unconventional sex lives of other people, one of my favorite subjects. Did you know that the magic in sex magic - the energy of it - is raised by specifically having sex that scares or repulses you??? So that was why Aleister Crowley had one of his Scarlet Women fuck a goat! It was supposed to be awful. Got it! You won’t read about that in this book - you’ll have to fall into an internet khole, like I did - but you will learn about others, such as Marjorie Cameron and Genesis P-Orridge. As for Willie Seabrook, much like Crowley he was a writer who explored other cultures, especially occult spiritualities, and wrote about them. He was also an alcoholic and very into BDSM, and this book, penned by a longtime partner who was not into kink, is the story of a woman of a certain era deeply in love with a mercurial genius who drags her all around the world, occasionally abandoning her for weeks to have a massive sadomasochistic bender in their barn. You feel bad for the dude - unable to untangle his cravings for alcohol from his cravings for transgressive sex, he at one point plunges his arms into boiling water to prevent himself from drinking. Marjorie Worthington lived out her end days in Florida, just looking like some whatever basic old white lady, which adds to my understanding that many of the old basic white ladies of life actually have very scandalous and sometimes wonderful skeletons in their closets.
Jean-Michel Basquiat The Notebooks TJ got this for me for I think my birthday last year? I love Basquiat’s notebooks, they are as cryptic as his paintings and made me think a lot about how his mind worked. There’s been so much Basquiat around lately, too - we saw his big show in LA, put on by his estate and featuring a replica of his studio, with many stubbed-out cigarette butts all over the place. I also saw the much-hyped Luna Luna, and my favorite was, of coutse, the baboon butt in the center of his ferris wheel, a ride that was wholly intact (though not ride-able), but managed to feel somehow deconstructed by virtue of his iconic art.
A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings by Will Betke-Brunswick This is a heartrending graphic memoir about the author losing his mom when he was younger - only everyone in it are penguins. Which makes it hurt both less and more to read. I read this sitting in bed with my kid while he read Wings of Fire, and as he loves penguins he got super interested in it, and then when I explained the concept he got super into it - just this idea that you can tell a hard story, you can tell it with pictures, you can make people animals. It’s a great book, which shows a family dealing with death and grief - and the author’s transition - with flawed grace. Relatedly, I also read Invincible Summer #27: Finding Frogs at the End of the World with Liz Prince + Nicole J. Georges. This ongoing diary comic is always so fucking good - adorable but also unafraid to get very, very real. And I believe Will is a former student of Nicole, a frequent teacher of graphic novels and memoirs. In fact, as I type this she is changing lives in Maine! Which sucks for me, frankly, because I am out one very dynamic and beloved karaoke comrade until she returns. But wait - I also read Nicole’s gigantic and deeply satisfying collection of one-offs and other bits and bobs she was saving for us, Dog’s Breakfast. Being in her world makes me feel giddy and excited! here, let’s look at a picture!
Emer Martin - a fantastic author herself, as well as a passionate advocate for Palestine - gave me a copy of Fairytales for Lost Children by Diriye Osman, a queer British-Somali writer and artist. It’s filled with magic and queerness, struggle and transcendence, and won the Polari First Book Prize - the first person of color to win the honor. Kate over at the Jamaica Plain bookstore Papercuts (where we’ll be doing an event for the SLUTS book this August!) passed me a copy of Ducks by Kate Beaton, a graphic memoir about struggle and sexual violence on the oil fields of Nova Scotia. It’s won a bunch of awards - it is so honest about the dailyness of misogyny, and the things people do to cope with abuse, as well as the limited options of so many low-income people. It’s also really beautiful. I found The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson in a free box on 18th street in San Francisco, and wow, I fucking love her smart, creepy, slyly radical storytelling, the way she reveals heterosexuality and racism as the horrors they are. This whole book should be a limited series on Netflix, produced by A24. You’re welcome.
Speaking of San Francisco, I love SF Native Rachel Kushner’s nonfiction pieces about the city, and there are many such pieces in her really fantastic essay collection The Hard Crowd. I especially loved the pieces about riding in a batshit crazy motorcycle race, and the time she spent bartending in the Tenderloin in the 90s. I wish our paths had crossed, but I didn’t talk to straight people in the 90s aside from my sister.
Luke Dani Blue’s short story collection Pretend it’s My Body is another collection that would make a great A24 project - it;s full of the uncanny, the edging towards sci-fi, in a Kelly Link / Black Mirror manner, using these imaginative tropes as ways to get deep about our queer lives today. There’s also a less magical or futuristic piece about a wayward queer sort lost in the USA on a series of scammed Greyhound tickets that felt very punk and relatable. Must read.
Speaking of punk, queer and relatable, one of my favorite reads last year was Griffin Hansbury’s novel Some Strange Music Draws Me In. Hansbury captures the pure townieness of Massachusetts just exquisitely in this story about a canceled trans professor flashing back on a youthful summer wherein he begins a life-changing friendship with an extremely cool trans woman back home from her life in New York City. Ugh! I fucking LOVE this book!
Yes Plants Do Feel is a little chapbook by Cortney Cassidy was given to me by Vera Blossom. We were both really, really freaked out and fascinated by 2023’s scientific reports of plants screaming in pain and dehydration. But that is not what this tender little zine-length poem is about.
Feral City: In Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York by Jeremiah Moss is a tremendous book, and refutes the idea that ‘we’ are not ready to read/think/look at media about Covid. You know how after the apocalypse kills off humans the earth will be returned to nature? This is sort of like that, only it’s Covid scaring away the gentrifiers and the city being returned to artists, activists, stone-cold freaks, you name it. Moss is a therapist and a trans man and very political-minded, and he writes thoughtfully and with real emotion about all of it - the pandemic, the terrifying losses, the fragile cultural gains of the streets.
In Sensorium: Notes for My People by perfumer Tanias is so many things - a love letter, a lust letter, and, most of all, a pained and gorgeous story of the resistance of Bangladeshi people - especially Bangladeshi femmes. It is about scent, deeply, and it is also about colonialism and that violence, historically and how it plays out today in India. Another one of my favorite books this year, in part for the ways it illuminated my ignorance and had me reading with my google open, so that I could source various histories that backgrounded the story of her impeccable memoir. I know so little about the world and am so fucking grateful for books like this one, and writers like Tanias who write with elegance and grit and passion and truth.
Every year Eileen Myles puts out a book is a really great year. Fight me. A “Working Life” is really stunning - it somehow made me feel the way I felt reading Not Me for the first time, the thrumming of life inside the poems is palpable, so much humor and true love for the world. It’s classic Eileen and yet all new, and seeing them read from it at Stories this year was a real highlight. Brought the house down, per usual. It was so mobbed my dear pal Bucky Sinister was not even able to get in, but had to stand sort of outside in the back by the parking lot, listening and carrying a book he’d brought for me - Katherine Dunn’s One Ring Circus (out of print?), a collection of the Geek Love author’s boxing journalism. Yes, boxing journalism! I don’t follow boxing, per se, but I do like violence, so I was interested, plus will read absolutely anything Katherine Dunn has ever written. I’ll also read anything Bucky will ever write, and it’s a good time for that - I read Selfie Tacos last year, poems, and it was full of his unmistakable voice, wry humor and deep heart and a sharp eye on everything, an anchor in the truth regardless of how surreal the world becomes. And he’s just a memoir, To Fear and Love Bambi Lake, a memoir about the notorious trans poet, writer, singer and personality Bambi Lake. Along with my bestie Tara Jepsen, we’ll be in in conversation with Bucky about it this Wednesday, February 21st at North Figueroa Books in LA.
Onward: I found While They Slept on the street while walking around Silverlake. I love Kathryn Harrison - Thicker Than Water blew my mind in the early 90s, when I was dealing with abuse and family secrets. This one is a true crime story, one in which she engages closely with a surviving victim of fatal family violence. Heavy, duh, but I really liked it. I also read Cults by Max Cutler and Kevin Conley.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante Of course I have an unquenchable appetite for all of Ferrante’s stories of precocious Italian girls coming of age in another era. I do have a soul. Because I have a soul I also really liked I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, a poetry collection from Candace Williams that delves into racism misognyny, queerphobia, as well as the superb Mrs. S by K Patrick, about a butch/masc queer working at an obscure girl’s school in the woods of England who has an affair with the headmaster’s wife. YES it is hot - I have a soul and a body. Love Me Tender by Constance Debre is another European (French) is good for people with bodies and souls; in tight, spare prose it documents the author’s free-fall into life as she comes out and queer losing her child and old life while discovering a pained yet liberated new one. Catherine the Great had a body and a soul, and it is all wonderfully documented by biographer Robert K. Massie. I bought this book while binge watching The Great on pain pills after having a kidney stone sonically destroyed. No regrets.
You guys, I’m afraid. I’ve been doing this FOR HOURS. My horoscope today read ‘see the value in a hard day’s work’ and I do, but I am worried - like, I need to edit Vera Blossom’s book and also send off Clement Goldberg’s to the Faye Orlove, DOPAMINE’s incredible book designer, and I also have to do my own copy edits on my next book plus my agent is waiting for my book proposal. And here I am trying to have a BIRTHDAY WEEK. I don’t want to give any books less love and attention because writers an their books need ALL THE ATTENTION. Also - how many parts can this be? I can’t STILL be recalling all my reads come spring, and spring is almost here! Eh gads okay going to do a speed round:
I Thought You Loved Me by Mari Naomi - a multimedia exploration of a broken friendship by the beloved and acclaimed graphic novelist
My War by Matt L Roar - on of my faves of the year, a poetic memoir that gets deep into punk/skater boyhood and is both tender and not, unflinching all the way
The History of Magic Volume One by Joseph Ennenoser - Out of print! NOT the history of magic - how bold! Really awful and boring. Spent too much on it to celebrate selling my own book on magic, in hopes it would be inspiring and helpful. Obviously should have taken my money to a storefront psychic instead.
Adult Drama By Nat Beach - Holy moly! LOVED these essays, so very much. Full of heart and snark, with a great class consciousness and a voice like she’s already your best friend.
Aligning Your Planets by Alice Sparkly Cat - the beloved astrologer has created a JOURNAL-this is a journal, but it has so much astro info in it I read it like a book!
Trash by Dorothy Alison - Dorothy Alison deserves all the re-reads. Will hold up forever.
Holy Terror by Steve Abbott - One of many perks of being friends with Brooke Palmieri of underground queer pop-up Camp Books is getting to borrow their books! This memoir of wild queer sex, drugs and occulting is fantastic. Out of print. Check out Brooke’s excellent Substack, Low Camp, here! Also loved reading Brooke’s Replica/Relic for Red Jordan Arobateau, a riff on the underground / groundbreaking trans author. Also read their Fabulous Stains: Messy Meditations on Archives - so smart and oozy and queer!!!
When the World Didn’t End by Guinevere Turner - like everyone, I’d been waiting to read this memoir by screenwriter Guin Turner (American Psycho, Charlie’s Girls) ever since reading her essay in The New Yorker. It’s gorgeous and harrowing and complex, the story of a girl who grows up in a shady cult, only to find life on the outside is even worse.
My Child, The Algorithm by Hannah Silva - written somewhat in collaboration with AI, I really, really loved this memoir about a newish queer mom who finds herself single after her divorce. A fave. Isabel Waidner said it raises the stakes for the rest of us writers, and I felt that, too.
Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor - found this out of print book on the dollar rack at the great Phoenix used bookstore in San Luis Obispo. TJ and I had spun a wheel to see where we should go next and it landed on Greece and I was inspired, but I wonder - will we ever get there???? Book was cool. Wait! Not out of print after all! New York Review of Books brought it back around.
I’m a Fan by Sheila Patel - a woman falls down a rabbit hole of obsession over a loser, cheating white guy way less cool than she is. A tale as old as time!
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills by Charles Bukowski - speaking of losers, gave this goblin a re-read. Does not stand the test of time. Can’t believe I ever liked this shit. An annoying read.
People are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings by Veronica de Jesus - I fucking loved de Jesus’ memorial drawings, done in pen and hung in the window at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco, where she once worked. I was so thrilled when I came across a whole book of them at the Printed Matter Art Book Fair, I dug into my wallet, found a Spectrum refund on a Visa gift card and got it! Beautiful.
My Perfect Life by Lynda Barry - A Lynda Barry book I somehow didn’t read???? What a joy! As fucking perfect as you would expect it to be.
Love and Money, Sex and Death by McKenzie Wark - a great memoir, so much stuff about aging, which I very much appreciate, and coming out later in life, plus so much about queer and trans culture, love and sex, motherhood, the goddess - really great thinking and writing, AS PER USUAL.
You guys. the sun has gone down. I’m still here. Are you? Is anyone out there???
Civil: The Story of Bayard Rustin by Anna Bergman and Alan Saint Clark - I appreciated this self-published comic about Bayard Rustin. Relatedly, this was Colman Domingo’s year, was it not? OBSESSED WITH HIM.
The Space of Death by Michael Ragon - Grabbed this out of print (unless NYRB reprinted it???) French book about all things DEATH in New Orleans. What else do you buy in a such a place? Well I also bought another book about sex magic, at a different store, and embarrased myself by nagging TJ about it, like, LISTEN I’M ONLY GOING TO GET IT IF WE ACTUALLY DO SEX MAGIC. WILL WE THOUGH? WILL WE? YOU SWEAR? etc. Damn just saw this book goes for like $125 on Amazon. It’s my Death Beanie baby!
Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom - a very gentle, almost ephemeral, but strongly rooted reckoning with humanity, how disappointing and violent - and big-hearted and moving they can be.
A Walk Through the Forest of Souls by Rachel Pollack - another crucial tarot book by our beloved and dearly missed high priestess
Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein - a friend recommended this while we were moaning about how much we love disgusting cigarettes, and then I read a lot of it sitting on the floor at Penn Station while I had time to kill on the way to a retreat, stepping outside periodically to smoke, I didn’t go to college so I didn’t know that sublime is not just rapturous beauty or pleasure, but such rapturous beauty and pleasure that carries a whiff of death, so cigarettes really are sublime! Loved learning about French cigarettes with poetry written into the paper, or love letters, and the existence of the ‘cigarette dandy’ - some proto-punk that said fuck off to productivity and yes to deliberately wasting one’s life looking fabulous and smoking. #goals
The Treadwell’s Book of Plant Magic by Christina Oakley Harrington - classic resource for those who make magic with plants. But, I ask, what of those of who make magic with trash? Perhaps this will be my next-next book proposal!
Your Love is Not Good by Johanna Hedva - a story of an artist of color who gets obsessed with a white girl muse and her life fucking crashes. Very compulsively readable and insidery about the art world.
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton - I really loved this book, a sort of femme counterpart to Jeremy Atherton Lin’s incredible Gay Bar. Burton has an ease and brightness that makes you feel like you’re her friend, alongside her on an epic bar crawl. She’s very relatable, and I missed her when I was done!
Dinner on Monster Island by Tania de Rozario - great essays about identifying with monsters, amongst other things de Rozario considers about growing up fat, brown and queer in Singapore. Smart and engaging.
Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz - my friend Clement gave me this fascinating book in which the photographer Peter Hujar tells his friend Linda all about his day, while she asks questions and transcribes. It’s fucking phenomenal, especially how deeply underwhelmed he was about photographing Allen Ginsberg. Very LOL-y. Oh!v And I re-read Howl and Other Poems, too, and it was wonderful as it always is. So fucking inspired.
Brown Neon by Raquel Gutierrez - I was so thirsty for this book I was looking for iy forever and getting pissed that bookstores we’re crying it and then realized it wasn’t even out yet! Worth the wait, great essays about Browness and Mexican-American culture and thinking, punk and Gen X too, and queer - duh - and so, so much art. And Los Angeles! This book is epic!
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan - I did it! I finished The Candy House! Not that that is so hard, it was great, I fucking love Jennifer Egan, I just feel like, I’ve really closed the door on an era of life with those people. But who knows? maybe she’ll bring them back.
The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi - Dudes. Just read it.
London-Rose by Fanny Howe - Riveting, subtly profound musings on lonliness, failure, the horrors of work, by an American poet moving through the UK while working a job-job.
The Hero with the Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell - Why not?
Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn - I fucking loved this book about a train wreck gay girl writer who is snarky and alcoholic and gets in a toxic relationship with a maniac while subconsciously falling in love with the older, caftan-wearing Stevie Nicksian lez-next-door. And I’m not saying that just because I’m in it. I’m in it! Like a character! A cameo! What a thrill! But seriously, I liked it so much before that even happened.
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing - I don’t even care about gardening and I love this book, mostly because Olivia Laing is one of humanity’s treasures and I can’t imagine not loving anything she sics her intellect on. Now, if you’re actually someone who also loves to read about gardens and plants and whatnot, you’re going to lose your mind!
You guys, TJ just came in to turn my light on because I’m just here writing in the dark, not having moved from this chair in quite some time.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell - Everyone knows time is a flat circle. Here Odell gets brainy about time and productivity, capitalist time and earthly time. Also, a very Bay Area book, which I liked.
Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrozic - Oh my god, this book! So harrowing and beautiful. And queer! A girl estranged from her trans male lover has a horrible car crash and is left with locked-in syndrome, unable to move or communicate, cared for by her problematic mom. It’s not a horror story! It’s very human, and sad, and poetic, and also Croatian.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel - Is this a memoir about being stuck away from your family whilst on a book tour during Covid, disguised as a novel about moon colonization, time travel and the simulation????? Whatever it might be, I freaking loved it, of course. Another banger from ESJM!
The Bittersweet Review 02: I Started a Joke - Sometimes I’m asked to contribute to things and then get sent the journal and it’s chock full of freaky interesting queers! Very good.
I Love Chris Kraus by Norah Benarrosh Orsni - a zine in which queer who reads Chris Kraus’ classic I Love Dick is inspired to write about their life in the form of letters to the author.
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin - What a sausage party! Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil all tripping and fighting with each other, from their Harvard days until the bitter end. Great tea, great goss, great history.
The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell - I felt slightly called out by this brainy book that applies various psychological phenomena to the hows and whys of our unhinged beliefs, but I managed to both love it, and continue to call upon the spirit of Cookie Mueller to help me read tarot cards. Also, I just fucking love Amanda Montell, whose Sounds Like a Cult podcast is one of the best.
The Tricking Hour and My Pleasure by Irene Silt - Who is Irene Silt, the brilliant genius anti-capitalist anarchistic, radical-minded sex working poet and writer and hedonist???? One of these books are essays and the other is poetry and they are like the right and left brain of this elusive icon. Loved this, and love Deluge Books, the avant-fucking-garde small press that put them out.
and, last but not least,
Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq - A memoir about insomnia, that dives deep into the cultural and psychic sources of the torment. One great thing about collaborating with Semiotext(e) for DOPAMINE is getting to read their unendingly smart, fascinating and gorgeously written books, and this is one of them.
Okay I’m going to smoke a sublime cigarette on my back porch and then like get out of the pajamas I am still in at 6pm. And then what? I don’t know! It’s still my Birthday Week!
What an amazing list!
Thank you!! Ordered a few of these selections before I'd even finished the list. I also laughed out loud at TJ coming to turn the light on for you. Your hard work is appreciated!