Half a hundred
There is no Book Olympics. Nevertheless I am pleased that my number of books-read-in-2024 has vaulted past fifty. Lydia Davis noted somewhere that she was proud to have read 52 books in one year, and bookish friend Myles regularly consumes at least a hundred. Judges can note that I passed the Davis heat though don’t bet on me crossing the Myles finish line.
#51 in 2024
A good friend pressed Heather O’Neill’s novel, When We Lost Our Heads into my hands after we talked about how girl-friendships live and then die and occasionally resurrect. (thank you, Lalita) This book is a goth Elena Ferrante, a Lemony Snicket for women. The chapter headings alone are seductive:
A School for Girls Who Refuse to Smile
The Heart is an Ugly Thumper
Drive a High Heel Through My Heart
Chapter One begins with two little girls facing off in a duel in nineteenth century Montreal. One of them is the heiress of a sugar factory, the other one will become a rebel pornographer. Told with the simplicity of a fairy tale, their lives become an imaginary history of the fight for women’s rights, pitching Marie Antoine against Sadie Arnett, with a supporting cast of rebels with the surnames Marat, Robespierre, and Danton. It’s Golden Mile vs. Squalid Mile, magic realism fuelled by rage. Inevitably, there is a lot of cake. And O’Neill’s amusing similes just keep on coming.
The moon was like a clown who hadn’t completely wiped the makeup off his face.
She was shocked by the sense of absence. It was as though she had lost both her arms and she was told that she had to pick up something heavy.
The ruffles down her skirt were like a series of waves about to break against shore.
#52 in 2024
By the way, I hope I didn’t cause any awkwardness when I mentioned the incident with the soldier, or the checkpoint, or when I reveal that we are living under an occupation here.
After reading O’Neill, I picked up Adanīyah Shiblī’s Minor Detail. It was like making a U-Turn on a highway. The amount of whimsy is zero. I read it in one fell swoop. Minor Detail is mind-boggling in form and content.
Shiblī is a Palestinian author and her short novel consists of two stories. The first one is in August 1949, a year after the Nakba. A group of Israeli soldiers born in Europe are cementing their hold on their new territories by expelling all Arabs from the border. The minor detail is the rape and murder of a young girl, based on a true story published in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. I am writing this summary in one coherent sentence, but that’s not how Shiblī does it. The lens on her camera pulls back very slowly from an insect bite to a desert landscape, all from the point of view of an Israeli lieutenant. The level of detail becomes excruciating.
He took the towel, dipped it in the bowl, rubbed it with the bar of soap, and wiped his chest and arms. He rinsed it, passed the bar of soap over it again, and wiped his armpits. Then he rinsed it, rubbed more soap on it, and wiped his legs, without removing the bandage from his thigh. When he had finished wiping down his entire body, he rinsed the towel once more and hung it where it had been before.
In the second part, the action jumps to the present, when a 25 year old Palestinian researcher becomes obsessed with the dead girl and puts her own life at risk in order to find out more. There are some people who navigate borders masterfully, who never trespass, but these people are few and I’m not one of them. I’ve never read anything that forces you to understand what it is like to live on the West Bank, enduring the spider of fear as you cross from one checkpoint to the next, just to get to work, go to a museum.
I read Minor Detail thanks to Ruth Franklin’s substack. Franklin has written about Shirley Jackson, the Holocaust, and is currently working on Anne Frank — and in response to the attack on October 7, she proposed a book list with both Israeli and Palestinian authors. You can read the comments on Shiblī here.
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“We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland…And it is here, in particular, that our creativity and innovation will be tested… ‘Man, not the tank, shall prevail.’”
The translator is Elisabeth Jaquette.
#53 in 2024
I know at least one young feminist who says that Amia Srinivasan is her goddess; this Oxford Professor of social and political theory and writer publishes frequently in the London Review of Books, and now here’s her big book, The right to sex : feminism in the twenty-first century. Srinivasan is 39 years old which means she was born when I was making theatre that led to reviews where the male critics called me ‘angry feminist, not shrill’. (Meant as a compliment.) Professor Srinivisan is too cool to parade her anger and she would dice the word ‘shrill’ like an onion.
This is how she begins:
Feminism is not a philosophy, or a theory, or even a point of view. It is a political movement to transform the world beyond recognition.
Srinivisan takes an intersectional approach to inspect the fight for women’s rights and asks one pointed question after another. For example, if we agree to always believe the woman, which woman do we believe? The white woman who says she was raped or the brown woman who says her son is being set up? She questions feminists who trust in the coercive powers of the state - because once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down. I would recommend her book for the discussion on porn alone. Also, who can resist these chapter titles?
The Conspiracy Against Men
Coda: The Politics of Desire
On Not Sleeping with Your Students
Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism
There is no settling in advance on a political program that is immune to co-option, or that is guaranteed to be revolutionary rather than reformist. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move. This requires being prepared — strategically and emotionally — to abandon ways of thinking and acting to which you may have become deeply attached. In that sense, nostalgia is a barrier to any truly emancipatory politics. This is as true in feminism as anything else.
#54 in 2024
When Ta-Nehisi Coates recommends a book, I listen. “One of the most immersive novels I’ve ever read,” he blurbs on the dustjacket. The final revival of Opal & Nev is a debut novel by Dawnie Walton, a fictional history of an imaginary 1970s punk duo consisting of the fierce, Black, bald-headed Opal and the stoned, White, ginger-haired Nev. They are the Next Big Thing until their Black drummer is killed during their performance, an incident based on the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, when an 18 year old Black man was stabbed to death by members of Hells’ Angels.
Walton is an experienced magazine editor, and her book is structured like an extended profile written for a magazine, with short bios and interviews and editor’s notes, which makes it a lot of fun. Though the story is strictly fictional, real people pop up like Janelle Monáe and Questlove and the Black fashion designer Stephen Burrows (check out the American designers in Versailles 1973 ). Now and then the writing gets a little bumpy, like a ride in a private plane with dingy seats. But who cares? No point in crying over spilled champagne.
The final revival of Opal & Nev was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Esquire and President Obama.
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I understand that what people are really trying to ask me is this: “How in the world did a woman so black and so ugly manage to believe she could be somebody?”
*
He took off his MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN ball cap and tried to hand it to me.
*
“I think you and Nev are the most arrogant, self-centered, manipulative people I’ve ever met.”
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and it seemed as if I’d hurt her. But she switched it off quick. “Whew,” she sighed, “thank God. My ears were popping up on that pedestal.”
#55 in 2024
I wonder how many books there are in which a straight male narrates his obsession with a prostitute.* That’s the thrust of the novella Mitko, except that the Not Love Affair is between two gay men. The john is a lonely American teaching English in Bulgaria, with limited knowledge of the local language. The boy for rent is a stranger steeped in a criminality that was part of his appeal. The power imbalance shifts one way, then the other. Sadness ensues.
*If you know, please remind me.
The third time today, he said, turning to me and grinning as at some accomplishment.
The author Garth Greenwell writes beautifully, pensively, like a male Maggie Nelson, mixing his existential reflections with rough sexual adventures. This is his first book, written while teaching at the American College in Bulgaria. Later he expands the story of Mitko into a book which I haven’t read. (What Belongs To You)
Our pleasures come so seldom unaccompanied by shame
…forcing us to wonder which of the faces turned to us is the real face and which is the subterfuge, which the essential and which the accident.
how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat
It will take me a long time before I forget how lovingly and meticulously Mitko washes his shlong in the bathrooms of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia. That sounds like it’s funny but it isn’t; melancholia, not humour, drives this book.
I found my anger already easing as I realized that in fact my pleasure was not abridged by his absence, that it was not even lessened. Instead, as the intensity of present experience dimmed and became, already processed by memory, approachable, even malleable, I found my pleasure actually heightened, so that what was surely a betrayal (we had our contract, no less binding for having never been signed, never set in words at all) became a refinement of our encounter, allowing him to become more vividly present to me even as I was left alone on my stained knees, and allowing me, with all the freedom of fantasy, to make of him what I would.
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These five books made me think a lot about privilege and perspective. Who is oppressed by whom and how it shapes a writer’s sentences.
With all due respect, I abandoned: Ji Xianlin, The Cowshed: memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War; Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Currently reading: Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
The new list is coming up. In the meantime, on the remaining list:
Donna Jeanne Haraway, Manifestly Haraway: the cyborg manifesto, 2016 (1980s classic discussion of human/machine/animal boundaries)
If you’re wondering how my list is put together, check out my system here.