2025 read #46: Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A classic of queer literature, an intimate and insightful love story set in the early nineteenth century. Miller’s descriptions of the small daily intoxications of love and desire are among the best I’ve ever read. Her prose is at the pinnacle of the mid-century style, simple sturdy phrases that get to the innermost heart of emotions and human connection.

Miller balances her story of queer love with incisive critiques of patriarchal power and heterosexual norms. At one point, Patience’s brother says,

These are the passions marriage is meant to discourage and then extinguish. At first we imagine and hope, but in marriage we learn we are not wanted.

This contrasts with the all-encompassing technicolor love of the two women at the center of our story, in all its possessiveness, eroticism, and need.

2025 read #30: The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd.

The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd

213 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 19 to March 24

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Nan Shepherd came to my awareness thanks to the writings of Robert Macfarlane. I read the book Macfarlane positioned as her outdoorsy opus, The Living Mountain, and enjoyed it enough to look into her novels, beginning with The Quarry Wood. It stymied me for a long time, however; that early 20th century approximation of Scots English dialect takes some adjustment.

But what really kept me from getting into this book for so long, I have to confess, is a worsening aversion to literary fiction. The last mundane novel I read was back in December; before that, last April. The contemporary dystopia we have to deal with makes it difficult to get invested in a story that consists of “Look at these eccentric characters!” Give me some dinosaurs or magic or something, sheesh. I’m trying to survive fascism out here.

In my own writing, though, I still struggle with characterization, so I should probably make more of an effort to see how literary authors sketch it in. It’s always good practice to read as widely as possible if you wish to pursue writing.

The Quarry Wood is a coming-of-age novel following Martha as she grows from solemn, wide-eyed girl in rural Scotland, to young woman pushing against social norms and parental resistance to attend university. There, she develops a crush on her foster-sister’s husband, which turns into something of an obsession. The book, sadly, is less about Martha going to university when such a thing was rarely done, and more about her mooning after some married dude. (Repeat the evergreen TikTok audio with me here: “He’s just a guy! Hit him with your car!”)

This skeletal framework of a story is padded out with character sketches, rambling for a page or two at a time to illustrate the peculiarities of a secondary character’s husband or sister, usually someone who isn’t even in the scene. Shepherd’s prose is solid, and even sparkles at times — her descriptions of nature (which Macfarlane especially praised) can be magnificent. But these brilliancies occur too sparsely to light up the rest of the novel.

2024 read #149: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

133 pages

Published 1927

Read from December 2 to December 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Growing up a white child in the 1980s and ’90s, one with a particularly controlling and paranoid parent at that, I subsisted on a steady diet of “canon” classics. The authors were comprehensively white and overwhelmingly male, though one Shelley did sneak in among the Wellses, Vernes, Twains, and Doyles. I also had a clear sense that there was another layer of “classics” awaiting me in adulthood, a stodgier and more respectable “canon” from the early twentieth century, books that might get referenced or parodied enough in cartoons for me to be aware of them, but with a vague sense that they weren’t “for” me.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey fits into this category. As a kid, I knew of it by name, but I had no inkling of its plot — or its length, which is one reason I decided to check it out — until I found it the other day while browsing the library. If you didn't know it either, Bridge is a series of interconnected character sketches that converge upon the titular footbridge and its fatal collapse. A Franciscan monk who happened to witness the collapse investigates the lives of the victims, seeking to prove the justice of his god in their fates.

The theological detective angle turns out to be little more than a framing device. The individual stories are about what you'd expect for a lauded 1920s literary outing, delicately teasing apart the victims' obsessions and unhealthy attachments, with a moderate amount of ethnic stereotyping (though less than one might expect). The prose is crisply modernist, detached and faintly ironic. On the whole, I’d say Bridge holds up pretty well. Unlike a certain bridge.

2024 read #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.

2024 read #41: New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger.

New to Liberty by DeMisty D. Bellinger

197 pages

Published 2022

Read from April 1 to April 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

A haunting, beautiful, tragic, aching literary novel, New to Liberty introduces us to three women navigating societally forbidden relationships in rural Kansas. Isolation and prejudice loom through each story: mixed-race Sissily traveling through with an older white man in 1966; Nella secretly rendezvousing with a disabled white man in 1947; Greta finding momentary love with a woman in 1933. Each of them are united by the themes of powerlessness in society, of being manipulated by the men in around them, of straining to find any scrap of control over their lives. Threads of old tragedies and past mistakes weave through each of the narratives, tightening them into a cohesive whole.

Bellinger’s prose hums with place and character, bringing dust-blown summers and horrific attacks to life with equal clarity. Her command of characterization is outstanding. The emotional weight of each of the three stories balances delicately between what is said and what isn’t, a boulder poised on the head of a pin. There are no easy answers, no pat fixes, no neat resolutions. Female solidarity — across racial lines, across lines of sexuality, across generations — is the only solid handhold any of the characters are offered:

We could do nothing…. I stood and swayed with her…. It was horrible, but nice. It was like being in church. It was all three of us throwing all hope to something outside of ourselves, hopefully greater than us three. Hopefully benevolent.

2024 read #39: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History by Aphra Behn

Edited with introduction and notes by Janet Todd

133 pages

Published 1688

Read from March 28 to March 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are in the midst of packing for a move up north. Almost all of my books are already boxed up. What’s left is a dwindling pile of books I’m unsure whether I want to pack or leave behind. This book, a Penguin Classics edition I got at a used bookstore for 75 cents, is part of this residue. Now that I've read it, I have no need to bring it!

I approached Oroonoko as a document from a transitional stage in the culture of Atlantic Europe. Recognizable concepts of race as a social hierarchy were gradually developing from the “Christian vs heathen” dichotomy, as a result of colonialism, plantation economies, and the slave trade, but these ideas were in their infancy, and far from universal. (See Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.) Class and rank were more pressing concerns to avowed royalist Behn. Traumatized as a youth by the English Civil War and the joyless years of the Commonwealth, Behn wrote Oroonoko toward the tumultuous end of James II's reign, when another Stuart sovereign was on the verge of capitulation. The true horror for Behn is not that Africans were enslaved, but rather that an African prince, a natural aristocrat who quotes Plutarch and praises England’s “great monarch” Charles I, could have been enslaved, like a mere commoner.

Which isn't to say that the book isn’t horridly racist. It’s an Early Modern English caricature of a West African couple, set in an early colonial Suriname. It’s all kinds of racist.

Oroonoko is also a document of literary transition. Some consider it one of the earliest novels in English; it predates Robinson Crusoe by three decades. As a book, it’s as awkward as a toddler’s steps. Behn’s background in drama is clear; much of the book reads like someone is summing up for you a play they attended, all the melodrama with none of the poetry of line or command of performance. (At a climactic death scene, Behn writes, “[It] is not to be doubted but the parting… must be very moving.”) Behn claims in her dedication to have penned the story in a matter of hours, which I can well believe. The result is a dud, only marginally worthwhile due to its interesting position in the evolution of the genre.

2024 read #33: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

308 pages

Published 2016

Read from March 4 to March 6

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

At one point, early in Cora’s escape from enslavement, an underground station agent tells her: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” Cora follows his advice, but “There was only darkness, mile after mile.” That’s a concise thesis statement for this novel as a whole.

Much of The Underground Railroad’s marketing emphasizes how Whitehead literalized its namesake network. Physical trains chuff through physical tunnels, connecting vignettes to illustrate the Black experience in America. Enslavement, torture, medical exploitation and experimentation, sterilization, eugenic schemes, cadaver theft, lynching, genocide, rape, evangelism — all of them central to the American project, all of them linked by white Americans’ apostolic frenzy to dehumanize and subjugate Black folks. Stolen land worked by stolen bodies: the sickness and rot at the heart of everything this country has ever been.

Railroad’s vignettes are powerful, appalling, gripping, linked by the conceit its literal underground tunnels, at first a streamlining artifice of storytelling and metaphor that reaches its full brilliance at the end of the book. Regardless of marketing, Railroad is as magnificent, and as devastating, as you’d expect.

2024 read #12: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

400 pages

Published 2010

Read from January 22 to January 26

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Much like Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, Swamplandia! is a Pulitzer Prize finalist from the early 2010s that stakes much of its critical reputation on the artful use of fantasy fiction elements, which ultimately prove to be mundane events filtered through the traumas and griefs of its viewpoint characters. Oh, and both were set in remote corners of the United States. Clearly this was something of a vibe at the time. (“It’s weird that it happened twice,” etc.) Both books would appear to be literary fantasies if you rooted your expectations in the cover blurb copy. Both prove to be contemporary realism long before the end.

In my review of The Snow Child, I went on a tear about how the literary establishment denigrates fantasy fiction, all while simultaneously scavenging through its storytelling vocabulary for the immaculate vibes. Go read that rant if you like. Today, I’m less bothered by it than I had been five years ago.

It helps that Swamplandia! largely lives up to its hype. It is luminous and strange, buoyed like an alligator between worlds, between sun and silt, between death and starlight, between its eponymous island theme park and the outside world the Bigtree children must confront for the first time. Russell’s descriptions are elastic and unexpected figures of beauty. Surprising metaphors add pop throughout the novel. The gravity of inevitability haunts its heart. If any “mundane” novel makes full use of the possibilities of fantasy, it’s this one.

As a white trash child raised in isolation myself, I related intensely to the Bigtree children. Ava’s perspective perfectly captured the magical thinking of being thirteen, the tensile eagerness of self-delusion. Her attempts to gain early entry to the world of competitive gator wrestling were reminiscent of my own naive confidence in my teenage authorship. At one point Ava narrates: “I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.” Which, same. Meanwhile, Kiwi’s rough introduction to mainland capitalism and social mores was instantly recognizable to someone who went from living in a car to working at a convenience store at 18. I identified with his anthropological notebook most of all.

(Unrelated to anything else, Kiwi’s chapters made me realize that the writers of Jurassic World could have given us a trilogy of dinosaur horror from the perspective of stoned teens working below minimum wage summer jobs at the park, and now I’m disappointed we never got that.)

Russell does the typical “first novel from an acclaimed short story author” thing: interweaving the Bigtree family’s tale with self-contained interludes, such as the brief emancipation and early death of Louis Thanksgiving (or, for that matter, the chapters from Kiwi's perspective). It works beautifully, though at times it tested my attention span.

2023 read #142: Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth.

Castle Rackrent: An Hibernian Tale, Taken from Facts, and from the Manners of the Irish Squires Before the Year 1782 by Maria Edgeworth

90 pages

Published 1800

Read from November 30 to December 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

I read this for one reason: I hadn’t yet read anything from the decade of the 1800s, and this sounded like the least uninteresting book I could find from those years. Plus, it’s short. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799–1804, but not today.

Rackrent is, for the most part, a delightfully snarky little satire of English colonialism in Ireland, ironically chronicling four heirs of the Rackrent estate, all of them some flavor of predatory English lord on occupied soil: “the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy….” The satire is in a vein that should be familiar to anyone who’s read Early Modern literature:

However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return….

Beneath the slyly ingratiating surface, it’s all deliciously pointed.

Someone in the publishing process, however — quite possibly Maria Edgeworth’s father — took it upon themselves to bootlick tender English feelings in an introduction, insisting that English abuses of Ireland spontaneously ceased sometime around 1782, and that everybody is happy and congenial now and that the Irish simply adore their English overlords:

The Editor hopes his readers will observe that these are “tales of other times”: that the manners depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age: the race of the Rackrents has long since been extinct in Ireland; and… are characters which could no more be met with at present in Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time, when individuals can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits, and a new consciousness. Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity, and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors.

Endnotes, also appended by this editor, made every effort to satirize the Irish at large for their “laziness,” their funereal lamentations, their litigiousness, drunkenness, not paying their rent on time, and so on. Unsurprising, given the overwhelming fragility of the colonialist ego, which we can observe for ourselves in our own era.

And, sadly, this editor wasn’t Rackrent’s sole letdown. There’s a plotline in which the wastrel Sir Kit marries Jessica, a Jewish heiress, which detours the narrative into some shitty of-the-era antisemitism.

2023 read #115: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Afterword by Elizabeth Hardwick

221 pages

Published 1818

Read from October 9 to October 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve barely read anything in the romantic classics vein. My experience begins and ends with Jane Eyre. It was just last month that I learned what “sensibility” meant in the context of Sense and Sensibility. So naturally I should begin with a satirical send-up of the genre, right?

Right from the start, the narrative voice is delightful, commiserating over young Catherine’s disadvantages as a Gothic heroine: her mother is alive; her neighborhood lacks a suitable rakish heir or mysterious foundling to court her; her carriage arrives at Bath safely without any upsets or dramatic robberies. The first young gentleman she meets exclaims over her failure to keep a journal, and goes on at length about quality muslin. But Catherine soon has her hands full with arcane social protocols, competing suitors, manipulative friends, and tangled knots of social pressures and civilities, afflictions enough for any tear-drenched heroine.

The central conceit, of course, is that Catherine filters the prosaic afflictions and limitations of her bourgeois life through the expectations of a Gothic novel. Existing as a woman in this era (or any other era) is full of horrors all on its own, so for the most part, it works. Courtesy masks the deepest cruelty; truth is delivered only through irony; money and title override everything. Much is made of the young woman’s choice to refuse, only for social pressures to remove her ability to choose. There are times when the banal detestability of the Thorpes makes the narrative drag. Honestly, when Henry Tilney gets into his “Oh, you silly women” speeches, he’s just as bad — even before the narrative brings us to the titular Abbey and the scheming general.

Like every other book of its time, Abbey brims with the bigotry and mores of its culture, which makes it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly, even with Austen’s wry commentary.

2023 read #110: Zone One by Colson Whitehead.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

322 pages

Published 2011

Read from September 30 to October 4

Rating: 4 out of 5

I detest the artificial distinction between mundane “literary” fiction and speculative, fantastical elements. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror — these are just different tools in the storytelling toolkit. Incorporating them into highbrow fiction is no stranger, no less literary, than utilizing romance, mystery, suspense, or fancy prose in your literary book. Yet the publishing industry (and book critics) shun anything that smacks of “genre.” Except when a mainstream highbrow writer dabbles in it, of course.

I haven’t read much of Whitehead’s work — just The Intuitionist so far — but from what I’ve seen, he never shies away from genre elements. (What are The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad if not contemporary fabulism?) Yet the critic blurbs at the front of Zone One grab your sleeve to exclaim that it “is not the work of a serious novelist slumming it with some genre-novel cash-in…” Note the disdain, the monocle-shifting assumption that no one serious would sully their hands with genre work. Also the odd implication that SFFH somehow makes more money than mainstream mundane fiction.

It’s attitudes like this that cause lit critics to fall over themselves praising the originality of any literary author who uses a genre trope that’s been a cliché for fifty years. (I loved Never Let Me Go, but let’s be real here.) 

Anyway. Zone One is excellent, despite centering on a genre trope — zombies — that’s been a cliché for well over fifty years. Like so many others, I got burnt out on zombies back in the ’00s. I read World War Z, played lots of Left 4 Dead, and felt that Shaun of the Dead put a nice little bow on the subject. As expected, Whitehead is talented enough to find life left in the subgenre (pun intended). “We ignore the monstrous surrounding us in modern life” isn't the freshest take (again, see Shaun of the Dead), but what Whitehead does with it feels worthwhile.

If the zombie fad was borne of white Americans processing 9/11 and their vulnerability in the face of the Other, Zone One is a satire of how George W. Bush encouraged everyone to go shopping to defeat the terrorists. Survivor camps sell their own branded merchandise. Various corporate conglomerates offer “sponsorships” to survivors, permitting them to loot their brands, so long as the items cost less than $30. In exchange, the companies get hush-hush boons from the provisional government. Apocalypse celebrities — those whose exploits evading the living dead exuded true Final Girl energy — get appointed to cabinet positions.

While there are bursts of action, of grisly tableaux, ambushes of concise heartbreak, and the final seeping weight of tragedy, the bulk of the narrative spirals in desultory rounds musing about the suburban past and the hypothetical future. Our viewpoint character Mark Spitz, like so many other survivors, is distinguished by his mediocrity, his inconspicuous ability to fail upward. “A part of him thrived on the end of the world. How else to explain it: He had a knack for apocalypse.”

If Station Eleven was my personal harbinger of our current plague, painting December 2019 and January 2020 with prescient anxiety, Zone One feels like a suitable companion piece to the pandemic’s current stage, its ongoing horror and dislocation, its unaddressed traumas all conveniently punted out of sight in order for us to get on with tendering our bodies to capitalism, our cynicism seasoned with almost four years of officially acceptable cataclysm. Whitehead coins Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, a concept we need to grapple with here in the shambles of our world: “In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.”

2023 read #100: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

337 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 15 to September 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

I don’t feel stuck in a reading rut, necessarily, but in recent months I find I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy novels and dinosaur fiction and not much else. I miss the variety of genres and topics I used to read. As a writer, it’s insufficient to read only the genre you write. So when I found this historical fiction novel at my local library, I thought, why not?

It is unsurprisingly excellent, an assured work from the sort of literary author who makes you realize genre writers rarely bother with good prose. Edugyan weaves a marvelous, absorbing descriptive flow and makes it look effortless. She could write rings around most fantasists, even 21st century fantasists.

George Washington Black is born into the horrific conditions of chattel slavery in Barbados. His cruel “master,” Erasmus Wilde, has a scientifically-inclined brother, nicknamed Titch, who arrives with the makings of an aerostat, with which he proposes to make the first aeronautical crossing of the Atlantic. Titch requests eleven year old Wash as his personal and scientific assistant, planning to have Wash along as “ballast” on the trip. Wash discovers a natural talent for drawing, but knows this brief reprieve is not to last.

When family dramas, stoked by their own cruelties, convulse the Wildes, and leave one of their own dead, Wash is blamed. Commandeered by Titch into his aerostat, Wash escapes Barbados in the night, but the balloon doesn’t get them far. Turns out that escaping structures of power and violence isn’t as easy as spinning away in a balloon.

Washington Black is an intimate, subtle examination of one man’s navigation through the structures of white supremacist power, a Bildungsroman of Wash’s maturation against a backdrop of vicious cruelties and ingrained attitudes. Would-be white savior Titch commandeers Wash’s life; years later, a scientist who treats Wash as his intellectual equal nonetheless accepts that Wash’s name will never be given due credit in their shared projects. The book is horrifying and delicate and beautiful. I quite liked that Wash is never under any narrative pressure to forgive anyone. Rather, he is driven by an almost scientific need to understand, even — or perhaps especially — to understand those who have wronged, used, abandoned, and brutalized him.

“We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies,” Wash narrates in the coda, “from the revelation of what our bodies and minds could accomplish.”

2023 read #62: Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon.

Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

356 pages

Published 2021

Read from June 2 to June 7

Rating: 4 out of 5

General spoilers ahead that you could probably have derived from the cover summary.

Mycelium had quite the niche cultural moment at the start of the 2020s, didn’t it?

As a writer who’s written more than my share of mycelium poetry, and as a fan of mushroom horror in general, it’s no surprise that I was enthralled by this book. I’m in awe of Solomon’s conceptual link between mycelium networks and the communication and preservation of memory, memories digested and drawn into the network — memories of the vast cruelties and appalling injustices of how white people have treated the Black and Indigenous people they enslaved and genocided. It is a brilliant thesis for a contemporary horror novel, and Solomon is an amply talented author, well able to handle the sprawling concept and to tell an engrossing, horrifying, heartbreaking story along the way.

Sorrowland has symbiotic fungus, not-deer chasing our protagonist Vern through the woods, horrifying visions of the monstrous acts of white supremacy past and present, blurring the lines between hallucinatory hauntings and reality, but only the first third or so fits into the atmospheric horror genre. Solomon is more interested in exploring the ways colonialist hierarchies can be fought. Most of the middle section is focused on building found family and intentional community, the joy and need for connection, however small that might be. The pacing can be uneven at times, but it’s an important subject to explore, more vital to what Solomon is trying to say than all the mushroom horror bits were.

Having to flee this newfound safety once again, Vern encounters a string of vignettes — hunters who react to something new with cruelty and domination, poor moteliers bickering back and forth about family trauma — and straightforwardly asks of us readers:

What turned babies, fragile and curious, into… men who could not interact with a new thing without wanting to dominate it?

What order of events did Vern need to disrupt in the lives of the millions upon millions who woke up every morning proud to be Americans? What made someone love lies?

Not the most subtle commentary, but here in the 2020s we’re long past the time for subtlety. The world is burning the fuck down and colonialist white supremacy, in all its forms, is responsible. To hell with it all. Paint this book’s message over all the billboards, please.

2023 read #30: Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

334 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 14 to March 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

The current moment has seen the fascist movement manufacturing genocidal outrage toward trans and other queer people just living their lives. Part of this astroturfed sentiment has involved programming rightwing tools on the internet to parrot "No one ever thought about gender before the last five years!" It doesn't count for much as a protest against the vast crush of fascism afflicting my nation, but as a tiny fuck-you I decided to finally read Orlando.

My partner R introduced me to the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton, which is fantastic and -- if I'm being honest -- superior to the book. It took me a while to vibe with the book. It has an antique feel I wasn't expecting from modernist lit, though that is part of its literary satire. Woolf toys with mores of gender and sexuality, equally in her own time and in the various eras that Orlando is said to live through. But there's a further element of satire against literature, the literary canon, the English custom of elevating men of "genius" into said canon. If you go into Orlando expecting sexy genderfluid adventures in piracy, you'd be much better off with some modern queer YA.

Much of Orlando hasn't aged well, particularly its casual 1920s racism. There are some delightfully dry lampoons of sex and gender conventions, but they're buried in much more expansive satires of literary worthies and the romance of poetry. Nonetheless, it's edifying to see a writer in the 1920s with a more sophisticated understanding of sex and gender -- and the very different definitions of each -- than present-day reactionaries could ever hope to achieve. Let's all hope that the modern fascists' attempt to speed-run the 1930s will end in their full humiliating defeat, and quickly.

2023 read #26: The Dodo Heart Museum by Kelly Weber.

The Dodo Heart Museum: A Fabulist Shadow Box by Kelly Weber

35 pages

Published 2021

Read March 12

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes I think I’m a pretty good writer. I’ve been published a handful of really cool places. My stories and poems have gotten modest praise, a handful of Pushcart nominations, and even earned me a few hundred bucks over the years. Every now and then I waver, though, and feel that my writing lacks substance, misses the depth of ideas and language I truly wish I could explore.

This slender chapbook made me feel completely outclassed as a writer. It feels part oldschool zine, full of collages and drawings and found images, and part document from an unraveling reality. The book opens with instructions on how to tear it apart and reassemble it into a new whole ordered by the wind. What seems at first to be the fictional review of a fantastic poetry collection distorts and fractures into a poem itself; the writer of this fabulous collection swallows her parents backstage. A dictionary defines the verb form of goldenrod and adjective sense of jar. Women grow the teeth of musk deer and permit snow to inhabit their throat. Girls follow creatures into the forest in the dark. Language is full of perils here; folk tales are spun through keyholes. Fragments, a hoard of small secret words, repeat themselves in new orders and disorders: glass and sugar, pearl and blue.

Any one of these prose poems and strange hints of fabulism could be quoted at length and speak Weber’s brilliance better than any line I could write here: “Now she stands beneath the branches, breathing. Now the small white branches are like the shape of her lungs full of air.”

2023 read #25: Fair Play by Tove Jansson.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

Translated by Thomas Teal

Introduction by Ali Smith

107 pages

Published 1989 (English translation published 2007)

Read March 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

A novel, a fictionalized memoir, a string of vignettes that reveal more in what isn't said than in what is. Like Jansson's The Summer Book, the stories here sketch the domestic joys and prickly squabbles of two characters pushing and pulling on the gravitational lines of their need for attachment and space.

Here, the central pair are based on Tove and her partner (or "companion"), the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. The two reside in separate apartments at opposite ends of one floor, share their summers in an island cottage, travel and gather into older age together. Their love is shown in silhouette around their cranky exchanges and need for space away from one another. To speak it would be superfluous.

As one would expect from Jansson, the imagery is precise as the shadows in northern summer, showing more than it tells.

2023 read #23: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

256 pages

Published 1999

Read from February 25 to March 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

It's been a while since I've read an artsy literary novel, one with Big Ideas and Deft Prose and a pocketful of obscure but important-sounding nominations. I used to read this sort of thing a lot more back when I first got my library card, but even back then, books like this were only an occasional offering, mental roughage to counter my diet of mid-tier fantasy.

Even in the rarified strata of literary fiction, The Intuitionist is an odd one, right on the (completely arbitrary) line between important contemporary literature and allegorical fantasy. In a mid-century city that's basically New York, elevators are imbued with a nearly metaphysical dimension, enabling the literal and spiritual elevation of mankind, opening the realm of verticality and truly modernizing the city. Two rival schools of thought, Empiricism and Intuitionism, coexist uneasily within the world of elevator inspectors. Lila Mae Watson, the first Black woman elevator inspector in the city, is a devout Intuitionist, and gets swept up in what appears to be a burgeoning conflict between the two ideologies for the soul of the city's verticality. The eccentric founder of Intuitionism may, or may not, have written notes on the perfect elevator before he died. But nothing is as it appears.

Not having read much lit fic, especially in recent years, I can only say that this feels like an exemplary first novel: ambitious, lush with its prose, a bit clunky and uneven in spots. Whitehead's exploration of historic and contemporary race and racism is expert, woven intimately through the story and his satirical structure of transcendental elevation. I'm excited to read through the rest of his catalog now.

2023 read #17: Dreams & Nightmares: An Anthology, edited by Aura Martin.

Dreams & Nightmares: An Anthology, edited by Aura Martin

77 pages

Published 2022

Read February 5

Rating: N/A

This one, like HELL IS REAL, is an anthology curated by one of my writer friends, and contains one of my pieces (in this case, a word-search poem). Reviewing it with any semblance of objectivity is impossible, but that's okay, because all of my reviews are utterly subjective anyway.

Aura had the idea of doing a small anthology of poems centered around dreams and nightmares, and invited indie writers she knew to take part. A few also contributed short prose pieces. The end result is a lovely, lavish hardback volume, gorgeously illustrated by Kate Doughty.

The poems tend (as you might expect) toward the strange and ethereal. Bodies shift and become subsumed. Some are disembodied altogether, others ache and spill water and blood from too-real forms. There are many drownings.

Despite the loose, casual nature of this book’s selection process, I’m happy to report that everyone involved gave it their utmost. Not one piece feels phoned in. A running list of some of my favorites:

"I Dream of Water" by Kirsten Reneau

"Sue Dream" by Heath Joseph Wooten

"Passionfruit" by Anoushka Kumar

"Bangungot" by Keana Aguila Labra

"Pedagogy, or How My Father Taught Me to Drive" by Nova Wang

"Liminal Heat" by Kaitlyn Crow

"Confession in the Church of the Moon" by June Lin

"Last Day of Summer: A Reductive Triptych" by Tommy Blake

"Albatross" by Jack Apollo Hartley

“As Good as Fear” by Kate Doughty

“I Called the Moon ‘Mama’” by Carson Sandell

“Free-Falling to the Other Plane” by Laura Ma

2023 read #16: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi.

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
235 pages
Published 2018
Read from February 4 to February 5
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I first tried to read this book way back in March 2019. That was a different world, four years ago. A different place in my life, a ring of time now long gone. I had just packed up my life to begin a new one in Ohio, promising my kid that his new step-parent and I would prepare a new home for him in a new state, that this would all be for the best, my then-partner and I relying on our years of daydreams to scaffold our tender new future, our unfamiliar try at family. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Freshwater back then. I read maybe a quarter of it on my phone, tucked away in a corner of a library waiting for the mud to harden outside while my then-partner took classes; it made my head swim with its baffling, blood-mantled beauty. I put it away and forgot about it while I went through the motions of that new life, one fated from the start to shrivel into nothing but another change, another loss, another disappointment. I’ve learned a lot about myself since then, and the world itself has passed away and been born into a harder, more jagged and fragile shape.

Freshwater made sense to me this time.

How to describe what it is? It is an autobiography as a fable, a religious documentation of the self and and its multiples and madness, a metaphysical Bildungsroman. It is a poem pulled and stretched wide while still soft. It is a catalog of anguish and horror spun with transcendent words. It is grief on top of grief, adrift. And then, finally, acceptance.

2023 read #14: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

373 pages

Published 2021

Read from February 1 to February 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I don't think I can review this book without some substantial spoilers, so consider yourself warned. I'll do my best.

I expected this to be a book about dark magic, hauntings, and metaphysical mysteries. Most of what I read these days is fantasy, so of course that was my automatic assumption. The book's atmosphere is immaculate: set in a creaky old house at a girls' finishing school in the Catskills, famously founded by the daughter of a witch who escaped Salem and marked early by tragedies and legends of witchcraft. (I did my best not to let the book's hazy indifference toward the actual geography of the Catskills ruin my immersion in this atmosphere. Suffice it to say that the Hudson River and Esopus Creek are not the same thing.) Instead, it's a cleverly metafictional dark academia thriller, most closely aligned with The Girl on the Train out of anything else I've read in recent years.

Like The Girl on the Train, A Lesson in Vengeance is a story of gaslighting and manipulation. Vengeance has the added clever twist that our narrator, Felicity, is planning to write her senior thesis on the very same themes as the book itself. As Felicity sums it up: "Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator's perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters." That thematic recursion was my favorite aspect of Vengeance.

As a whodunnit, Vengeance might have been a bit too easy to crack. Major spoilers here: The way Ellis was constantly manipulating and controlling Felicity made it too obvious that Ellis couldn't be trusted, and Felicity's own layers of false memories regarding the night her girlfriend Alex died also made it obvious that some degree of "darkness" existed in her characterization. But overall I found the ending satisfying. At least it avoided the trap Girl on the Train fell into, with its generic thriller standoff climax. The way Ellis and Felicity's stories wrapped up pulled everything into a tidy little circle.