What I Read in 2023, cont.

Part II

Okay, okay, hello again, just scarfing down some Tuscan Bean Soup from The Clean Food Cookbook and working to get this next installment of my 2023 books jotted down before my child tires of watching Beyblade videos on YouTube and wants to play them with me IRL. Which I am very excited to do! I said next installment, BTW, not final installment. This is going to take a few trips, I think.

Queer Beyond London by Matt Cook and Alison Oram. Okay so, when I went on my UK book tour in September 2023 I was lucky enough to have my visit to Leeds synch up with The Bookish Type’s second birthday, and my reading became part of their celebration – but they gave me presents! Including this great book, which talks about the challenges, struggles and communities of queer folks in hamlet outside of London. There were SO MANY CUTE QUEERS IN LEEDS. Throughout the whole UK, actually. And I loved London, a lot, but everywhere I went everyone complained about how impossible it is to live there (very New York City, or San Francisco a decade ago, when people were still actually trying to live there). They were moving to spots such as lovely, working-class Leeds, or Brighton (which is also becoming unlivable, according to my sources), and Hastings (which would SO be my spot) - like Charlie, the charming chap who, finished with struggling to get by in a London studio, found a full house with a commercial space on the ground floor for the same price, and opened the darling Hastings Bookshop. If you’re looking to run away from America, I think this queer little town which Aleister Crowley cursed before dying there, would be a perfect spot. In think the curse is that anyone who lives in Hastings is condemned to never leave, though, so be certain of your decision before you go.

Normporm by Karen Tongson. I actually didn’t watch a lot of the shows covered in this smart book – shows like Thirtysomething and This is Us. But I have always noted their sort of hazy, gentle aesthetic, as well as their popularity, and it’s fascinating to read such a thoughtful and humorous intake of their value to beleaguered queer viewers. As for me, I’ve been watching The Crown, slowly, sporadically, with my phone beside me so that I can google many things and finally learn something about the world before I die. Like, Ceylon is Sri Lanka. The colonization of Africa. The fucking massive extent of European colonialism, how the entire world has been misshaped by it. And of course it is easy and helpful to link all of this to Palestine and the massacres in Gaza, how it was that UK that arranged Israel with the Balfour Declaration, and how that name, Balfour, just popped up in a book I about the gene I’ve been reading; how in the chapter on eugenics, while talking about what a mad rage the phony, racist science was among the English, it mentioned Arthur Balfour in attendance at a big eugenics conference in London. And in the episode of The Crown exploring attempts to cover up King George’s Nazi affiliations and his palling around with Hitler, it shows the actual photos of him at the end, the writers being like, hey, we’re not making this shit up. I thought about how the Israel project had such a racist beginning, not only in that the white people driving the brown people off their land, but in anti-Semitic Europeans’ efforts to rid their countries of Jewish people. Ugh. History. Makes it hard to breathe. Makes sense to take some numbing refuge in a tender, American family drama.

Deep Care: How Radical Abortion Activists Transformed the Struggle for Health Justice by Angela Hume. I loved this book, chock full of feminist oral history which winds its way all the way to the feminist activists of today, in particular the folks fighting for accessible, feminist health care. The book mostly focuses on the work at one abortion-providing DIY women’s health clinic in Oakland, and documents the amazing dedication of feminists laboring to create a new model for care. Having lived for a long time in the Bay Area, I feel like I benefited from this work, not at this particular clinic but by getting such quality care at the free clinics there. The Haight Street Free Clinic, Lyon-Martin, the Castro-Mission clinic – I miss these spots all the time, here in Glendale where my LA Care gets me seen at the Adventists Health Center where I have been waiting since summer to be seen by a gynecologist who can talk to me about perimenopause. I won’t bore you with the many bullshit glitches and fuck-ups that has me currently waiting for my third or fourth referral (it’s been about a month; I think they forgot) but I will tell you that one women’s health clinic told me there was no one there who could discuss menopause with me. I was fucking SHOOK. And You’re A Women’s Health Clinic? I clarified. Yes. And You Have No One To Talk About Menopause. That’s right. I feel there is an organ comprised completely of rage that has formed inside my body and at some point, it’s going to rupture like an infected appendix and send me to the hospital (please Goddexx, not Adventist). Til then, it lets me live, just absorbing rage and heartbreak all day long so my life can happen.

Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford. I spotted this book being raved about in O Magazine (Why was I reading O? Don’t judge me!), and grabbed a copy. It’s harrowing, and real, and tender. I really felt so much love for this child and then young woman, navigating this shitty world. Memoirs are so intense, how they dip you into someone’s trauma, but that same someone is actually holding you through it, with their language and strength, and you know they’re ‘okay’ or whatever – they made it out another side, which makes it all possible, the writing of it, the reading of it.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morten, Eds. You guys, I finished it! An atlas. That’s a big book! I loved every page of it. It took me back to childhood, when I loved learning about the world’s oddball corners through media like Real People, That’s Incredible, and the ultimately racist Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! I feel like these white people put in a real effort to talk about obscure corners of the entire world with a real eye towards racism, white and American bias, allowing it to be a true expression of love for all people and our cultures and this world. Not a radical book, just not, like, offensive. Anyway, it is a BIG DREAM to do an Atlas Obscura trip one day. Fingers crossed! They are not cheap, but I know it would be a trip of a lifetime, any one of them.

Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney. A great piece of theory-strung life-writing that wrestles with family and legacy, gender and dads, men, tornados, storm chasers, and evolving, perhaps, from boy to daddy. If you loved Whitney’s Heaven, you’ll love this work, which is a sort of dad/masculine/yang to the mom/feminine/yin of the earlier book.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson. This fucking fantastic book was thrust into my hands by a book seller at the London Review of Books Bookstore, and I am SO HAPPY I bought it. It is a dazzling, truly deep dive into a single recipe for a simple tomato sauce that manages to get into gender and patriarchy and sex and desire and being embodied and legitimacy and mess, it is a magnificent book and now I have a dream of somehow being cooked for by Johnson, but that being unlikely I should at the very least pay my respects by cooking the holy recipe myself.

Whosoever Has Let a Minotaur Enter Them, or, a Sonnet by Emily Carr. I got to read with Emily when she brought me to The New College in Sarasota, Florida. HOLY SHIT I JUST TRIED ONE OG MY KID’S CHRISTMAS FLAVORED DOTS AND IT RIPPED AN IMPLANT RIGHT OUT OF MY MOUTH. It’s gonna be okay. Dentist can see me tomorrow. I don’t even like Dots, I was 100% humoring my child, who insisted I try one. Anyway – Emily! She’s a witch! A sea witch, a fitness witch, a tarot witch and a poetry witch. You know, you never really know what the hell is going on in a poem, but it felt so good and lush and sly to let these words wash over me and funnel themselves through my mind. Love, sex, having a body, being female (witch) – these are the vibes that rang through me reading these poems. Bonus points for a gorgeous cover. I’m so sad that Florida is SO fascist that Emily doesn't teach there anymore, because of all the rotten shit DeSantis is pulling in education, how it completely poisoned the queer-freak wildlife refuge that was The New College. Anyway. Is this post a downer? THE WORLD’S A MESS IT’S IN MY KISS!

Not my hand.

Novice Witches and Apprentice Wizards: An Essential Handbook of Magic by Francesca Matteoni and Elisa Macellari. A gorgeously illustrated book of 101 witchcraft info, which I always find inspiring. A good gift for a witch, especially a baby one. These folks have made an oracle too, and it looks really good.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors. It was a goddamned pleasure to read this novel, which tracks the romance of an ethereal, young artist in love with an older, alcoholic ad man, from their first hook-up through their increasingly dysfunctional marriage. These characters are so charming and wise, even at the height of their distress, situation that advance from mess to mental illness, leaving dead pets and suicide attempts in their wake, and redeeming it all, at the end, with art, and humanness, I guess. With chapters that bounce outside our main couple and into the lives of friends, co-workers and romantic rivals, this feels like one of those big books about normal straight people and their relationships that everyone reads, only none of these characters are normal, and some aren’t straight. Loved this book. When’s the movie happening?

Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gata, Translated by Anna Kushner. I was at my local public library, looking for something I couldn’t find and I found this instead. The cover, which seemed to be a deconstructed queering of Che Guevara via Andy Warhol, especially in Glendale, where the straights are soooooo straight. I grabbed it, and what an unexpected delight. A femmy gay boy is actually an incarnation of the Greek prophetess Cassandra, only she is in Cuba, being sent to fight the war in Angola, to help drive out apartheid, a worthy fight but war is hell, especially for a genderqueer femme who winds up the lust object of a brutal commander. A dark and magical book.

The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 by Richard Brautigan. This guy runs a library where people bring books they wrote and he shelves them. It’s a very obscure and surreal job, and he lives there in the library. One day he meets a lady and they like each other and she sort of moves in and they eat cookies and have drinks and make love a lot. This is in Northern California, 1966. She gets pregnant and they have to go to Mexico for an abortion and it’s a whole thing, borrowing a van and getting to the airport and crossing the border and getting a taxi. Obviously, there aren’t enough stories about abortions and I liked this. At points it was sexist in a groovy way, as to be expected, I suppose, but it didn’t ruin it for me. Is there a way to queer this and do a cover of it? What is writers did covers, like bands did? The only person I know to do such a thing was the late, great Kevin Killian, who would invite other writers to collaborate on re-writes of books. Like, one was a cover of Flowers in the Attic, and it was called Flowers in the Downstairs Part of the House. Thinking about this sometimes makes me laugh in a way that I feel a sort of hysteria rise in my chest. What a genius. Anyway, I found The Abortion at the library, and it shouldn’t have felt like such a subversive thrill to find such a title on the shelves, but it did.

Okay, I’m feeling like a bad mother. Though I did take a break to play Beyblades, my son is back in front of the YouTube, and we have not yet sat down in his room with a sketchpad to brainstorm a low-key reno. Like the kind of reno a renter makes. Moving furniture around, basically. I still have a lot more books to tell you about.