chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �'s bookshelf: read-in-2024 en-US Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:30:03 -0800 60 chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �'s bookshelf: read-in-2024 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Comme nous existons 58763104 140 Kaoutar Harchi 4 4.28 Comme nous existons
author: Kaoutar Harchi
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: adult, adult-lit, nonfiction, memoir, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Martyr! 139401966 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 5
]]> 4.15 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: adult, adult-lit, fiction, queer-lit, favorites, read-in-2024
review:
I love this gorgeous, generous, perfect book and want to have 6 different conversations about it all at once. The acknowledgment section trails into a note that ambushes me with even more love and gratitude: “Reader, your attention—a measure of time, your most non-replenishable resource—is a profound gift, one I have done my best to honor.�


]]> White Nights 29610266
A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.]]> 128 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0241252083 4 4.02 1848 White Nights
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1848
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: adult, adult-lit, classic-lit, fiction, owned, short-fiction, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Interpreter of Maladies 435375 --publisher's description]]> 198 Jhumpa Lahiri 5 Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from Jhumpa Lahiri.

In Lahiri’s rich, delicate, precise voice, the miniature stories in this collection tingle on the skin. They are moving, disquieting, and, in some cases, brutally devastating. How Lahiri manages to atomize these incredibly full, dense lives into short form, moving her characters around Boston and Bengal with the ease of a fish through waves—I don’t know. What I do know is that one does not so much read this collection as live in it.

Lahiri writes in language that is alive and unexpected. My initial guesses at what was coming continuously went through some rather severe adjustments. Lahiri was, I quickly learned, always just one step ahead. Yet, at the same time, each unexpected outcome somehow also felt inevitable: the characters in these stories seem to carve out their own patterns, impervious to the shape of the narrative. I never knew where each story was going, and that too felt like life.

There are nine disparate stories in this collection. Together, they form a complete, cohesive, emotionally legible whole. They are stories about loss, exile, and dispersion, and, in any such stories, they are also about love. In tragic, lyrical strains, Lahiri expresses the transient, exilic intimacy that emerges from shared uprootedness and promises to dull the habitual estrangement of everyday life. Against the background of a foreign, sometimes less than caring world, the characters in these stories stretch themselves to reach for one another and hope for understanding. But the attachments they form are not always easy or uncomplicated. This kind of diasporic intimacy is fragile, fraught, and haunted by dreams of home and homeland. It cannot retrieve the past, nor can it anesthetize against the pain of displacement, and in most cases, it cannot last forever. Yet, as Lahiri shows us, the transient, imperfect quality of these pockets of intimacy does not diminish the power of the characters� encounters and collisions with one another: in the intricacy that transforms stories into histories, we are, in some impossible-to-measure way, always already intertwined.

Perhaps that is why “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,� “Mrs. Sen’s,� and “The Third and Final Continent� are the stories I return to the most. They are stories about the people who pass through our lives like a vision, but nevertheless leave indelible traces. People whose presence makes it easier to not only endure but inhabit our experiences of exile. Each story trails off into afterimages of a closeness that can no longer exist, an intimacy that was always already forfeit—and each ending stole my breath.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies, and I am convinced that an encounter with one of these stories will not leave you unchanged.]]> 3.99 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: adult, adult-lit, short-fiction, fiction, owned, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
I can officially attest that Interpreter of Maladies more than merits the rave, rapturous reviews printed on the back–this is a stunning success from Jhumpa Lahiri.

In Lahiri’s rich, delicate, precise voice, the miniature stories in this collection tingle on the skin. They are moving, disquieting, and, in some cases, brutally devastating. How Lahiri manages to atomize these incredibly full, dense lives into short form, moving her characters around Boston and Bengal with the ease of a fish through waves—I don’t know. What I do know is that one does not so much read this collection as live in it.

Lahiri writes in language that is alive and unexpected. My initial guesses at what was coming continuously went through some rather severe adjustments. Lahiri was, I quickly learned, always just one step ahead. Yet, at the same time, each unexpected outcome somehow also felt inevitable: the characters in these stories seem to carve out their own patterns, impervious to the shape of the narrative. I never knew where each story was going, and that too felt like life.

There are nine disparate stories in this collection. Together, they form a complete, cohesive, emotionally legible whole. They are stories about loss, exile, and dispersion, and, in any such stories, they are also about love. In tragic, lyrical strains, Lahiri expresses the transient, exilic intimacy that emerges from shared uprootedness and promises to dull the habitual estrangement of everyday life. Against the background of a foreign, sometimes less than caring world, the characters in these stories stretch themselves to reach for one another and hope for understanding. But the attachments they form are not always easy or uncomplicated. This kind of diasporic intimacy is fragile, fraught, and haunted by dreams of home and homeland. It cannot retrieve the past, nor can it anesthetize against the pain of displacement, and in most cases, it cannot last forever. Yet, as Lahiri shows us, the transient, imperfect quality of these pockets of intimacy does not diminish the power of the characters� encounters and collisions with one another: in the intricacy that transforms stories into histories, we are, in some impossible-to-measure way, always already intertwined.

Perhaps that is why “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,� “Mrs. Sen’s,� and “The Third and Final Continent� are the stories I return to the most. They are stories about the people who pass through our lives like a vision, but nevertheless leave indelible traces. People whose presence makes it easier to not only endure but inhabit our experiences of exile. Each story trails off into afterimages of a closeness that can no longer exist, an intimacy that was always already forfeit—and each ending stole my breath.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies, and I am convinced that an encounter with one of these stories will not leave you unchanged.
]]> Brave New World 1002404
The cover shows a detail from "Mechanical Elements" by F. Léger at the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Paris (Snark International)

For copyright reasons this edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.

]]> 201 Aldous Huxley 0140010521 5 Brave New World is the sort of book about which you have to speak for hours or hardly speak at all. It is jolting, disturbing, and fiercely dislocating. I didn’t want to read it half the time and was almost limp with relief when it was over. Yet, I suspect this is not a story one can ever completely shake loose.

Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World is far from optimistic. The novel imagines us forward into a world that has brutally stamped out all challenges to the domineering processes of capitalism and oppression. A world not unlike our world, but rather, is the extreme of its logic.

The future as Huxley imagines it spells an essential and cataclysmic rupture in the fundament of community and intimacy, determined as it is by a ruthless will to mute the suffering of others and fix them into inferiority and helplessness. It is a future so completely dehumanized that it corrodes freedom, so uncaring that it literally breaks us down, breaks our families apart, breaks our minds and bodies apart.

This is a book so uncannily tuned to the present moment that it made me ill with fear at the thought of it. Huxley’s clarity of vision crosses more than ninety years to beg us to change the way we understand the world and treat each other. In Brave New World, Huxley engages a critical stance towards the very idea of “progress� and the destructive lies that lurk within its dominant discourses. Progress, the novel demonstrates, is never without human consequences. The history of progress, in fact, is one of specific and contextualized human destruction. Huxley’s engagement with the dangers attached to our dismissal of progress’s twin potential for hope and horror crystallizes the terrible danger hanging over our own world, distorted and dazzled by the forces of capitalism and white supremacy.

Yet, the novel isn’t interested in tediously moralizing about the wrongs we do to each other and to the world. Instead, it is invested in something much deeper, much harder to parse. There is a strong sense, throughout Brave New World, of moral critique and intellectual complexity. The questions as raised by the novel may be put in this way: What happens when we disconnect ourselves from a past that still informs our present terrors—and obliterate history? What happens when we stop caring about the world and about each other? Huxley refines these questions—about the nature of history and life and being human—and makes knives of them.

It is hard for many of us, I think, to understand and imagine beyond forms of being-in-the-world that are not completely encompassed by the narrative of “progress.� We are constantly pushed to shed the past and disregard history, to seek a surplus of comfort and be suspicious of the unknowable. But our biggest mistake, the novel tells us, has been accepting to be addressed only in this impoverished idiom, and to suffer quietly the resulting atrophy of the imagination. Brave New World begs us to struggle for alternative ways of life. In challenging our understanding of history and the past, it emboldens us to think more deeply about the deep-seated dialectic between progress and racism, between progress and the patriarchy, about the oppression of the individual through language, and the tenacity of the role of culture in social domination. In disturbing us, it reminds us of all we are in danger of losing: recognition and community and our very humanity.

Through all the layers of large and small violences in Brave New World emerges a voice that testifies to the power of art, literature, and the imagination as defenses against the psychic costs of oppression and despair; emerges a kind of mutiny, a grasping at “God� poetry� real danger� freedom� goodness� sin� which is, at bottom, a grasping at our lives.

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.�
]]> 3.90 1932 Brave New World
author: Aldous Huxley
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1932
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: adult, adult-sff, fiction, classic-lit, owned, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
Brave New World is the sort of book about which you have to speak for hours or hardly speak at all. It is jolting, disturbing, and fiercely dislocating. I didn’t want to read it half the time and was almost limp with relief when it was over. Yet, I suspect this is not a story one can ever completely shake loose.

Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World is far from optimistic. The novel imagines us forward into a world that has brutally stamped out all challenges to the domineering processes of capitalism and oppression. A world not unlike our world, but rather, is the extreme of its logic.

The future as Huxley imagines it spells an essential and cataclysmic rupture in the fundament of community and intimacy, determined as it is by a ruthless will to mute the suffering of others and fix them into inferiority and helplessness. It is a future so completely dehumanized that it corrodes freedom, so uncaring that it literally breaks us down, breaks our families apart, breaks our minds and bodies apart.

This is a book so uncannily tuned to the present moment that it made me ill with fear at the thought of it. Huxley’s clarity of vision crosses more than ninety years to beg us to change the way we understand the world and treat each other. In Brave New World, Huxley engages a critical stance towards the very idea of “progress� and the destructive lies that lurk within its dominant discourses. Progress, the novel demonstrates, is never without human consequences. The history of progress, in fact, is one of specific and contextualized human destruction. Huxley’s engagement with the dangers attached to our dismissal of progress’s twin potential for hope and horror crystallizes the terrible danger hanging over our own world, distorted and dazzled by the forces of capitalism and white supremacy.

Yet, the novel isn’t interested in tediously moralizing about the wrongs we do to each other and to the world. Instead, it is invested in something much deeper, much harder to parse. There is a strong sense, throughout Brave New World, of moral critique and intellectual complexity. The questions as raised by the novel may be put in this way: What happens when we disconnect ourselves from a past that still informs our present terrors—and obliterate history? What happens when we stop caring about the world and about each other? Huxley refines these questions—about the nature of history and life and being human—and makes knives of them.

It is hard for many of us, I think, to understand and imagine beyond forms of being-in-the-world that are not completely encompassed by the narrative of “progress.� We are constantly pushed to shed the past and disregard history, to seek a surplus of comfort and be suspicious of the unknowable. But our biggest mistake, the novel tells us, has been accepting to be addressed only in this impoverished idiom, and to suffer quietly the resulting atrophy of the imagination. Brave New World begs us to struggle for alternative ways of life. In challenging our understanding of history and the past, it emboldens us to think more deeply about the deep-seated dialectic between progress and racism, between progress and the patriarchy, about the oppression of the individual through language, and the tenacity of the role of culture in social domination. In disturbing us, it reminds us of all we are in danger of losing: recognition and community and our very humanity.

Through all the layers of large and small violences in Brave New World emerges a voice that testifies to the power of art, literature, and the imagination as defenses against the psychic costs of oppression and despair; emerges a kind of mutiny, a grasping at “God� poetry� real danger� freedom� goodness� sin� which is, at bottom, a grasping at our lives.

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.�

]]> A Country for Dying 53417864
Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her.

Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona.

Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan.

Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira.

Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Abdellah TaĂŻa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our To pay with our bodies for other people's future."]]> 101 Abdellah TaĂŻa 1609809912 5 3.74 2015 A Country for Dying
author: Abdellah TaĂŻa
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: adult, adult-lit, queer-lit, translated-works, fiction, favorites, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Never Let Me Go 901871 Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.]]> 282 Kazuo Ishiguro 0571224148 5
Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.

Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you� also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you� being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.

Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.

In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,� but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.

This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,� and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.

What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.� The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.

The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.

But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.]]> 3.90 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: adult, adult-lit, classic-lit, fiction, owned, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
This is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.

Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.

Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you� also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you� being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.

Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.

In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,� but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.

This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,� and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.

What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.� The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.

The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.

But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.
]]> The Age of Innocence 17282064
Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence.

Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and, almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer's life has no place for passion and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.]]> 229 Edith Wharton 5 The Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I started it, however, there seemed to be nothing else in the world worth reading—or doing. I was utterly absorbed.

The novel centers on the microcosm of 1870s New York’s elite society and uses it as a lens to scrutinize not only the nuanced spectacle of the leisured class, but also that of the human soul. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton casts a visceral spotlight on the messy and volatile instabilities permeating the seemingly stable narratives of privileged polite society. More specifically, the novel portrays the subtle choreography of mannered social etiquette as, in large part, a masquerade.

From childhood on, Newland Archer was taught the pantomimic language of this social performance, indoctrinated into Old New York’s cult of silence, which finds strength in legacy and reputation and uses its substantial power to impose a false, all-encompassing “all rightness� in untenable circumstances in order to protect itself. As such, Newland is expected to marry the innocent, naïve, and “artless� May Welland who, unencumbered by dreams of subversion, would make a “blameless� wife incapable of surprising him. Yet, Newland cannot bear thoughts of that future, stretching away in safe, dull years on the other side of the gulf separating him from the object of his truest desires: the untouchable Countess Oleska. May’s disgraced cousin.

I loved this book. Wharton explores, with both ingenuity and a poisonous bite, the angst of agency and individuality and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of attempting to escape the societal structures in which we are embedded. The novel’s subject, after all, is the journey of repositioning one’s self in relation to the tradition and culture we grew up in, and the difficulty of continuing to live in the complexity and clarity of that learned wisdom. Newland, for much of the novel, luxuriates in the seductive premise of living an unmoored life, outside the narrow parameters of his privileged slice of New York, which formed him but which he feels he has now completely outgrown. He is eager to go, to cast off the dreadful moorage that is his engagement to May Welland and seize what he can of the world for himself.

Newland, above all, wants Ellen. Seeing Ellen again, for so many years, has brought his world to a proper perspective, and their shared resistance to being taxonomized by the stale societal scripts they were born into brought them closer together. Newland throws himself at Ellen with the sort of carelessness and abandon that befits his youth and station. Despite the powerful tides tugging them apart, he is determined to weather the risks that love and desire necessitate. Yet, of course, the central irony here is that no matter how far Newland’s fall from grace would be, Ellen’s would still be from greater a height. Their clannish society’s customs dictate that such dissent (and descent) from the universal script of propriety must be severely punished. And as these scripts usually go, Ellen (who’s still reeling from her own marital scandal) is set to bear the cost.

While reading this book, the question of who is in the luxurious position of being able to transgress lied like a needle in the back of my mind. Newland’s battle for coherence and self-agency is predicated on the interdependent working of class, race, and gender. Newland flirts with the idea of surpassing the limitations of his social reality, but his desire struck me as yet another masquerade. It is subversive, certainly, but it cannot genuinely harm him—like a defanged serpent. The potential loss and fracture of Newland’s bachelor dreams lead him to disillusionment, but not to any real rebuilding. At the end, Newland cannot truly escape the world that formed him because he is incapable of seeing it clearly in the first place. Newland therefore becomes the prisoner and eventually the victim—if he is a victim at all—of his own misperceptions.

Ultimately, what comes forcefully in The Age of Innocence is the cost of negating the reality of the world we live in and the people we love and are responsible for to uphold the incomplete fictions of our illusions. The ending twisted my heart into sadness and pity, but I can’t conceive of a more apt conclusion for this novel.]]> 3.94 1920 The Age of Innocence
author: Edith Wharton
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1920
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: adult, adult-lit, fiction, classic-lit, read-in-2024, owned, favorites
review:
The Age of Innocence is one of those books that have been teetering on my to-read pile for months while I attended to life’s copious demands. Once I started it, however, there seemed to be nothing else in the world worth reading—or doing. I was utterly absorbed.

The novel centers on the microcosm of 1870s New York’s elite society and uses it as a lens to scrutinize not only the nuanced spectacle of the leisured class, but also that of the human soul. In The Age of Innocence, Wharton casts a visceral spotlight on the messy and volatile instabilities permeating the seemingly stable narratives of privileged polite society. More specifically, the novel portrays the subtle choreography of mannered social etiquette as, in large part, a masquerade.

From childhood on, Newland Archer was taught the pantomimic language of this social performance, indoctrinated into Old New York’s cult of silence, which finds strength in legacy and reputation and uses its substantial power to impose a false, all-encompassing “all rightness� in untenable circumstances in order to protect itself. As such, Newland is expected to marry the innocent, naïve, and “artless� May Welland who, unencumbered by dreams of subversion, would make a “blameless� wife incapable of surprising him. Yet, Newland cannot bear thoughts of that future, stretching away in safe, dull years on the other side of the gulf separating him from the object of his truest desires: the untouchable Countess Oleska. May’s disgraced cousin.

I loved this book. Wharton explores, with both ingenuity and a poisonous bite, the angst of agency and individuality and its unsettling struggle for power in the act of attempting to escape the societal structures in which we are embedded. The novel’s subject, after all, is the journey of repositioning one’s self in relation to the tradition and culture we grew up in, and the difficulty of continuing to live in the complexity and clarity of that learned wisdom. Newland, for much of the novel, luxuriates in the seductive premise of living an unmoored life, outside the narrow parameters of his privileged slice of New York, which formed him but which he feels he has now completely outgrown. He is eager to go, to cast off the dreadful moorage that is his engagement to May Welland and seize what he can of the world for himself.

Newland, above all, wants Ellen. Seeing Ellen again, for so many years, has brought his world to a proper perspective, and their shared resistance to being taxonomized by the stale societal scripts they were born into brought them closer together. Newland throws himself at Ellen with the sort of carelessness and abandon that befits his youth and station. Despite the powerful tides tugging them apart, he is determined to weather the risks that love and desire necessitate. Yet, of course, the central irony here is that no matter how far Newland’s fall from grace would be, Ellen’s would still be from greater a height. Their clannish society’s customs dictate that such dissent (and descent) from the universal script of propriety must be severely punished. And as these scripts usually go, Ellen (who’s still reeling from her own marital scandal) is set to bear the cost.

While reading this book, the question of who is in the luxurious position of being able to transgress lied like a needle in the back of my mind. Newland’s battle for coherence and self-agency is predicated on the interdependent working of class, race, and gender. Newland flirts with the idea of surpassing the limitations of his social reality, but his desire struck me as yet another masquerade. It is subversive, certainly, but it cannot genuinely harm him—like a defanged serpent. The potential loss and fracture of Newland’s bachelor dreams lead him to disillusionment, but not to any real rebuilding. At the end, Newland cannot truly escape the world that formed him because he is incapable of seeing it clearly in the first place. Newland therefore becomes the prisoner and eventually the victim—if he is a victim at all—of his own misperceptions.

Ultimately, what comes forcefully in The Age of Innocence is the cost of negating the reality of the world we live in and the people we love and are responsible for to uphold the incomplete fictions of our illusions. The ending twisted my heart into sadness and pity, but I can’t conceive of a more apt conclusion for this novel.
]]> My Ăntonia 22175240
The story of Antonia Shimerda is told by one of her friends from childhood, Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virginia. Though he leaves the prairie, Jim never forgets the Bohemian girl who so profoundly influenced his life. An immigrant child of immigrant parents, Antonia's girlhood is spent working to help her parents wrest a living from the untamed land. Though in later years she suffers betrayal and desertion, through all the hardships of her life she preserves a valor of spirit that no hardship can daunt or break. When Jim Burden sees her again after many years, he finds her "a rich mine of life", a figure who has turned adversity into a particular kind of triumph in the true spirit of the pioneer.]]> 192 Willa Cather 5 My Ăntonia took hold of me in ways I did not anticipate and could not fully understand. It made me weep, it made me laugh, and it made me care more deeply again about people and things I haven’t thought of in years. I love this story in a way that still nearly overwhelms me with gratitude. To read this book is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly, if only for the space of a few hundred pages. When I finished it, I felt more alive. That is no small thing.

This is my first novel by Willa Cather, which I happened upon in a dusty pile in a second-hand bookshop in Paris and decided to read on a whim. I was immediately pulled away by the quiet sureness of Cather’s voice and vision, the stunning lightness of her touch, and the beautifully evocative undertow of her language, which rings true, clear, and unsentimental. This marriage, between richness of language and a determined view of facts, created indelible images that burned in my mind’s eye as bright as gold under a lamp. In Cather’s hands, the open and windswept Nebraska plains seemed to me to be a place of more beauty and more tragedy than I could ever have imagined it to be. Cather evokes this landscape so intensely you can taste the earth and drying grass and smell the melted butter and gingerbread. Yet, the fullness of Cather’s achievement emerges most vividly in the voices she gives her characters, and her fierce commitment to render even the most minor of them whole and palpable and glorious.

My Ăntonia constellates around encounters rather than plot, capturing the lasting beauty of the quiet, private scenes of intimacy that find people at home or at work, caught in the middle of all the tiny, daily tasks required to build a decent life in an otherwise hostile environment. There is a deep sense, in this novel, of mission and pride in ordinary folks traveling from faraway places and connecting from their various (dis)locations. After all, My Ăntonia is, at its heart, an immigrant story about the fraught hyphenated realities of the American milieu, and the doubts and anxieties that emerge when one wrenches one’s self away from all that is familiar and comforting and sane and seeks to recall the lost stability of homeland in the turbulent landscape of the other. It’s a story about the magic trick that is to live through that kind of displacement and estrangement, or rather, to live more thoroughly within it: the joy and beauty enlivened by shared grief and exile.

My Ăntonia most resonated with me in this language: the fierce and expanded sense of among-ness, the force of proximity and what it might make possible, the call of the crossings of the diaspora. It filled up the parts of me that longed for and still believed in a world that so earnestly offered love, support, and a place to hold our shared abject terror and sorrow. At the same time, it brought home to me the pain and difficulty of memory, of trying to reproduce stories of the past in the present, to remember the people we failed or who failed us, all the intimacies and contradictions that come with the territory.

The story of Ăntonia is delivered to us second-hand, told from the perspective of Jim Burden, whose youth Ăntonia marked and left a stamp on this book. Through Jim’s gaze, and then beyond it, Cather illuminates the gulf between our assumptions of how women should be defined in society and the processes by which these women understand themselves and their experiences. The novel is so deliberate in clearing intellectual and affective space for the working women of the prairie, who fight (in ways often unrecognized) to escape the limitations of their social realities and shape their own sense of self. Cather, in fact, insists on it, claiming the female charactersâ€� incessant daily negotiations of the people around them and the spaces they inhabit as definitional for communities. The sheer vitality and energy of this portrayal is what ultimately allows Ăntonia to elide Jim’s possessive gaze and undermine the inevitable limits of his interpretation.

As I said—I love this book. Yet, while there is so much more I want to celebrate in this novel, there are moments when celebrations need to give way to critical engagement. That Cather can attend so clearly and thoroughly to the capaciousness of her white charactersâ€� lives and experiences, and yet, in the same book, render the very few Black characters in a language so insultingly insufficient, so totally devoid of imagination, is a contradiction that slashes its way through the pages of My Ăntonia. This is so complete a failure that the novel, in these moments, collapses into stilted metaphors of savagery and wildness and racial oversimplifications that add up to characters whose depths are limited to the color of their skin. I’m not interested in redeeming the novel from this failure of language, therefore exonerating myself from having to contend with loving this book. I am much more interested in the limits of a racial imagination that succumbs to anxiety, timidity, and insecurity at the very site with its encounter with the “other.â€� Reading “classicsâ€� often comes, at least in my experience, with this strange, twisted knot of love. I would wish it away, had it not often enlivened and enriched my reading of these texts.]]> 3.90 1918 My Ăntonia
author: Willa Cather
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1918
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: adult, owned, adult-historical, adult-lit, classic-lit, fiction, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
My Ăntonia took hold of me in ways I did not anticipate and could not fully understand. It made me weep, it made me laugh, and it made me care more deeply again about people and things I haven’t thought of in years. I love this story in a way that still nearly overwhelms me with gratitude. To read this book is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly, if only for the space of a few hundred pages. When I finished it, I felt more alive. That is no small thing.

This is my first novel by Willa Cather, which I happened upon in a dusty pile in a second-hand bookshop in Paris and decided to read on a whim. I was immediately pulled away by the quiet sureness of Cather’s voice and vision, the stunning lightness of her touch, and the beautifully evocative undertow of her language, which rings true, clear, and unsentimental. This marriage, between richness of language and a determined view of facts, created indelible images that burned in my mind’s eye as bright as gold under a lamp. In Cather’s hands, the open and windswept Nebraska plains seemed to me to be a place of more beauty and more tragedy than I could ever have imagined it to be. Cather evokes this landscape so intensely you can taste the earth and drying grass and smell the melted butter and gingerbread. Yet, the fullness of Cather’s achievement emerges most vividly in the voices she gives her characters, and her fierce commitment to render even the most minor of them whole and palpable and glorious.

My Ăntonia constellates around encounters rather than plot, capturing the lasting beauty of the quiet, private scenes of intimacy that find people at home or at work, caught in the middle of all the tiny, daily tasks required to build a decent life in an otherwise hostile environment. There is a deep sense, in this novel, of mission and pride in ordinary folks traveling from faraway places and connecting from their various (dis)locations. After all, My Ăntonia is, at its heart, an immigrant story about the fraught hyphenated realities of the American milieu, and the doubts and anxieties that emerge when one wrenches one’s self away from all that is familiar and comforting and sane and seeks to recall the lost stability of homeland in the turbulent landscape of the other. It’s a story about the magic trick that is to live through that kind of displacement and estrangement, or rather, to live more thoroughly within it: the joy and beauty enlivened by shared grief and exile.

My Ăntonia most resonated with me in this language: the fierce and expanded sense of among-ness, the force of proximity and what it might make possible, the call of the crossings of the diaspora. It filled up the parts of me that longed for and still believed in a world that so earnestly offered love, support, and a place to hold our shared abject terror and sorrow. At the same time, it brought home to me the pain and difficulty of memory, of trying to reproduce stories of the past in the present, to remember the people we failed or who failed us, all the intimacies and contradictions that come with the territory.

The story of Ăntonia is delivered to us second-hand, told from the perspective of Jim Burden, whose youth Ăntonia marked and left a stamp on this book. Through Jim’s gaze, and then beyond it, Cather illuminates the gulf between our assumptions of how women should be defined in society and the processes by which these women understand themselves and their experiences. The novel is so deliberate in clearing intellectual and affective space for the working women of the prairie, who fight (in ways often unrecognized) to escape the limitations of their social realities and shape their own sense of self. Cather, in fact, insists on it, claiming the female charactersâ€� incessant daily negotiations of the people around them and the spaces they inhabit as definitional for communities. The sheer vitality and energy of this portrayal is what ultimately allows Ăntonia to elide Jim’s possessive gaze and undermine the inevitable limits of his interpretation.

As I said—I love this book. Yet, while there is so much more I want to celebrate in this novel, there are moments when celebrations need to give way to critical engagement. That Cather can attend so clearly and thoroughly to the capaciousness of her white charactersâ€� lives and experiences, and yet, in the same book, render the very few Black characters in a language so insultingly insufficient, so totally devoid of imagination, is a contradiction that slashes its way through the pages of My Ăntonia. This is so complete a failure that the novel, in these moments, collapses into stilted metaphors of savagery and wildness and racial oversimplifications that add up to characters whose depths are limited to the color of their skin. I’m not interested in redeeming the novel from this failure of language, therefore exonerating myself from having to contend with loving this book. I am much more interested in the limits of a racial imagination that succumbs to anxiety, timidity, and insecurity at the very site with its encounter with the “other.â€� Reading “classicsâ€� often comes, at least in my experience, with this strange, twisted knot of love. I would wish it away, had it not often enlivened and enriched my reading of these texts.
]]> <![CDATA[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]> 4961777
This warm, completely original and hugely acclaimed first novel tells the wondrous story of Oscar and his family, and their attempts to find love and belonging in America.]]> 335 Junot DĂ­az 0571241239 3 3.83 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
author: Junot DĂ­az
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: adult, adult-lit, fiction, owned, adult-contemporary, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 36481955
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 304 Ottessa Moshfegh 5
It is hard to know what to make of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its narrator. I inhaled the story in two quick sittings and found myself afterwards in something of a daze. My mind was spinning, a compass without a lodestone, and no matter how much I held up my feelings to the light, I could not decide if I were feeling bereft that it was over, or simply relieved.

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a rich, orphaned, conventionally beautiful WASP in her twenties who hopes to annihilate her past and emerge an improved version of herself by devoting an entire year to nothing but sleep. To ensure this transformation, she dopes herself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In her waking hours, she makes regular visits to the street corner bodega, to the drug store, and less regular ones to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking her supply of pharmaceuticals. She watches popular movies from the 90s (ideally starring Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg), and endures visits from her “best friend� Reva who drinks, worries about being skinny, makes herself vomit, and recites hollow-eyed feel-good self-help slogans.

This is the baffling premise on which My Year of Rest and Relaxation depends, and Moshfegh makes little effort to rationalize it. Instead, the novel records this process of self-creation—what the narrator describes as her “hibernation”—which (at its most destructive) amounts to a total disavowal of the past, a kind of self-obliteration. Our narrator wants to slough off her past self like old dead skin, and re-emerge into the world more sharply herself. As a possibility, this effort is frightening, but—a little exhilarating too. The longing is that our narrator might pack herself into sleep so deeply and for so long that she can never unpack her (old) self again. After a year of “feel[ing] nothing…a blank slate� with “no past or present,� she might raise her head, look into the mirror, and find, reflected back, a completely altered self.

At its heart, this is a novel that reaches to the parts of ourselves that know what it means to live in a world that one does not want, and which one did not choose for themselves, and wanting out. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers an anti-social way out of such a bind. Our narrator, who “hate[s] talking to people,� is desperate to express this essential loss to the world, a reprieve that neither friends nor lovers can provide. With no past to lean on or learn from, no future can be imagined, and with a present that is entirely occupied with “black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness,� our narrator’s acts of self-destruction grow and luxuriate unbearably. She does not attempt to reform or repair the broken pieces of her life, or exercise control over them, nor can she stop the past from reemerging. Scenes from her childhood interrupt her hibernation: a cold, unloving family, and later, a sleazy ex-lover and a ruptured intimacy with a friend she keeps hurting needlessly.

A quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, rose up from some shadowy recess of my mind when I was reading this book: “And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.� The novel’s narrator is an artist without an art form. Her relationship to art, in fact, is one of greatest disillusionment. In one memorable paragraph, our narrator makes an exact and frankly depressing observation about the state of art:

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate� their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.


With no art form, no viable outlet for expressing her brokenness, our narrator—in her quest to escape her grief, to be cured of herself and be reborn—simply self-destructs.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation descends into dark places: Moshfegh explores the emotional wreckage of her narrator with a precision both touching and terrifying. There is a liberatory sort of shock to reading about a version of woman that is messy, porous, detestable, cruel, passive, and self-loathing; to transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. It is that messy rawness of life that makes this novel not just provocative but persuasive as well, a novel that compels the reader into a riskier intimacy, caught up in the strange gravity of a narrator whose acts are both recklessly vulnerable and utterly unforgivable. It also, frankly, puts an unrepentantly horrible narrator in better charity with the reader.

Moshfegh also plays fast and loose with the novel’s traditional plot structure. In a novel of impasse and precarity, such infidelity to plot is required: it gives depth and form to the utter formlessness and trespass of grief. My Year of Rest and Relaxation emphasizes rupture and repetition rather than continuity. There is a sense of unreality to the passage of time in the story: time either moves in stuttering, lumpy pieces, like swimming through syrup, or strangely fast, with a lucidity more terrifying than the narrator’s drug-induced listlessness. It is as though the novel makes the point that time works differently when you’re grieving—or when you’re losing your mind.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation also, crucially, refuses our appetite for resolution. Although the novel ends with a sense of lightness and the spectral possibility of healing, it does not go from “black emptiness� to an ecstatic, devotional appreciation of living. In Central Park, as our narrator watches “life buzz[ing] between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock,� she tells us that “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.� Maybe her sleep did work. Or maybe it was the relief of knowing that, whether we are happy or not, the world simply goes on, in a way that predates all of us, and which will certainly outlive us.]]> 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-lit, fiction, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
I think the best books force themselves into our minds and make a quiet disturbance there. They strike something in us, and even if we don’t fully understand it, we feel altered in some strange and irrevocable way.

It is hard to know what to make of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its narrator. I inhaled the story in two quick sittings and found myself afterwards in something of a daze. My mind was spinning, a compass without a lodestone, and no matter how much I held up my feelings to the light, I could not decide if I were feeling bereft that it was over, or simply relieved.

The narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a rich, orphaned, conventionally beautiful WASP in her twenties who hopes to annihilate her past and emerge an improved version of herself by devoting an entire year to nothing but sleep. To ensure this transformation, she dopes herself up on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. In her waking hours, she makes regular visits to the street corner bodega, to the drug store, and less regular ones to Dr. Tuttle for the purpose of restocking her supply of pharmaceuticals. She watches popular movies from the 90s (ideally starring Harrison Ford or Whoopi Goldberg), and endures visits from her “best friend� Reva who drinks, worries about being skinny, makes herself vomit, and recites hollow-eyed feel-good self-help slogans.

This is the baffling premise on which My Year of Rest and Relaxation depends, and Moshfegh makes little effort to rationalize it. Instead, the novel records this process of self-creation—what the narrator describes as her “hibernation”—which (at its most destructive) amounts to a total disavowal of the past, a kind of self-obliteration. Our narrator wants to slough off her past self like old dead skin, and re-emerge into the world more sharply herself. As a possibility, this effort is frightening, but—a little exhilarating too. The longing is that our narrator might pack herself into sleep so deeply and for so long that she can never unpack her (old) self again. After a year of “feel[ing] nothing…a blank slate� with “no past or present,� she might raise her head, look into the mirror, and find, reflected back, a completely altered self.

At its heart, this is a novel that reaches to the parts of ourselves that know what it means to live in a world that one does not want, and which one did not choose for themselves, and wanting out. My Year of Rest and Relaxation offers an anti-social way out of such a bind. Our narrator, who “hate[s] talking to people,� is desperate to express this essential loss to the world, a reprieve that neither friends nor lovers can provide. With no past to lean on or learn from, no future can be imagined, and with a present that is entirely occupied with “black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness,� our narrator’s acts of self-destruction grow and luxuriate unbearably. She does not attempt to reform or repair the broken pieces of her life, or exercise control over them, nor can she stop the past from reemerging. Scenes from her childhood interrupt her hibernation: a cold, unloving family, and later, a sleazy ex-lover and a ruptured intimacy with a friend she keeps hurting needlessly.

A quote from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, rose up from some shadowy recess of my mind when I was reading this book: “And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.� The novel’s narrator is an artist without an art form. Her relationship to art, in fact, is one of greatest disillusionment. In one memorable paragraph, our narrator makes an exact and frankly depressing observation about the state of art:

The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate� their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind.


With no art form, no viable outlet for expressing her brokenness, our narrator—in her quest to escape her grief, to be cured of herself and be reborn—simply self-destructs.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation descends into dark places: Moshfegh explores the emotional wreckage of her narrator with a precision both touching and terrifying. There is a liberatory sort of shock to reading about a version of woman that is messy, porous, detestable, cruel, passive, and self-loathing; to transform the novel into a space where that woman is able to bleed and break apart, where she has permission to lose herself and not be wrong. It is that messy rawness of life that makes this novel not just provocative but persuasive as well, a novel that compels the reader into a riskier intimacy, caught up in the strange gravity of a narrator whose acts are both recklessly vulnerable and utterly unforgivable. It also, frankly, puts an unrepentantly horrible narrator in better charity with the reader.

Moshfegh also plays fast and loose with the novel’s traditional plot structure. In a novel of impasse and precarity, such infidelity to plot is required: it gives depth and form to the utter formlessness and trespass of grief. My Year of Rest and Relaxation emphasizes rupture and repetition rather than continuity. There is a sense of unreality to the passage of time in the story: time either moves in stuttering, lumpy pieces, like swimming through syrup, or strangely fast, with a lucidity more terrifying than the narrator’s drug-induced listlessness. It is as though the novel makes the point that time works differently when you’re grieving—or when you’re losing your mind.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation also, crucially, refuses our appetite for resolution. Although the novel ends with a sense of lightness and the spectral possibility of healing, it does not go from “black emptiness� to an ecstatic, devotional appreciation of living. In Central Park, as our narrator watches “life buzz[ing] between each shade of green, from dark pines and supple ferns to lime green moss growing on a huge, dry gray rock,� she tells us that “My sleep had worked. I was soft and calm and felt things. This was good. This was my life now.� Maybe her sleep did work. Or maybe it was the relief of knowing that, whether we are happy or not, the world simply goes on, in a way that predates all of us, and which will certainly outlive us.
]]> Othello 437349 Othello has increased its stature as one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies ever since it was first written, between 1603 and 1604, due to the victimisation suffered by its tragic hero, Othello, as a result of his skin colour. Othello is a "noble Moor", a North African Muslim who has converted to Christianity and is deemed one of the Venetian state's most reliable soldiers. However, his ensign Iago harbours an obscure hatred against his general, and when Othello secretly marries the beautiful daughter of the Venetian senator Brabanzio, Iago begins his subtle campaign of vilification, which will inevitably lead to the deaths of more than just Othello and Desdemona.

An extraordinary play, both for its dramatic economy and power as well as its remarkable language, from Othello's bombastic "traveller's history" to Desdemona's elegiac "willow song", the play raises uncomfortable questions about ongoing questions of not only racial identity but also sexuality, as Othello and Desdemona's sexual relationship becomes the voyeuristic site of Iago's attempt to destroy them. Particularly fascinated with the question of what it means to "see", Othello also contains one of the greatest tragic death scenes in all of Shakespeare, with Othello's final identification with "a malignant and a turbaned Turk". --Jerry Brotton

]]> 138 William Shakespeare 0140621059 4 3.79 1603 Othello
author: William Shakespeare
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1603
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/11
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: adult, classic-lit, read-in-2024, owned
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Remnants of Filth: Yuwu (Novel) Vol. 1]]> 63361744 The Noble General's Only Stain

Noble-born Mo Xi is the foremost general of Chonghua, known for his ruthless temper and ascetic air. Once he was one of two promising young commanders, twin stars of the empire. His comrade, the lowborn Gu Mang, was Mo Xi's brother-in-arms, best friend, and--secretly--his lover, until the day Gu Mang turned traitor and joined the ranks of their nation's greatest enemy.

Now Gu Mang has been returned to the empire a ruined man, a shadow of the military genius he once was. The public clamors for his death, and no one yearns for vengeance more than Mo Xi. Or so he thought--for faced once more with his bitterest enemy, Mo Xi is left with more questions than answers. Why did the man he loved betray him? And what secrets hide behind Gu Mang's tortured eyes?]]> 427 Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou 168579467X 3 4.27 Remnants of Filth: Yuwu (Novel) Vol. 1
author: Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/04
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: adult, adult-historical, adult-sff, fiction, read-in-2024, queer-lit
review:

]]> Jazz 30137761 256 Toni Morrison 5 Jazz, I could not stand how thoroughly, passionately loving the novel is, how recklessly generous it is—to the characters, to the City, to the reader. How intimate the story is, like constantly overhearing a confession. I was overcome.

Jazz begins with these opening lines, spoken in reverence and curse:

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.


It is an intense beginning, one that pulls away the room, leaving nothing but the shock of words. In Jazz, Morrison asks us to own up to the more disturbing aspects of romantic love. She reveals, quite unforgettably, how complicated our attachments to one another are, the collisions and longings of bodies, the way people become minefields for each other, treading, treading, and treading, until the whole thing is set ablaze.

With the cadence of a storyteller, which can turn a street corner into a sacred place, Morrison grapples for her characters� depths. She is fierce in her determination to capture the rich landscape of Black social life, to enable both pleasure and trauma, both violent dehumanization and profound humanity, and to locate the beauty that exists in the commonplace. She writes dazzlingly about the bewilderment of desire, about the complicated nature of womanbonds, and what it costs to give others so much power over us. She brings humanity to narrative tension, and shapes each character with tenderness and care.

Morrison describes Jazz as a “talking book,� and it is. Reading the novel, one senses not so much a pen writing, but a voice performing. It is that aura of the storyteller, so grounded and direct and conversational, which gives the novel an air of spontaneous improvisation. But it is also that Jazz (as its title hints) is musical in structure. Morrison allows the novel to sing, to repeat and harmonize, to rehearse new themes, riff upon them, leave and return to them. At points in the novel, where a chapter trails off into a word or phrase, that same word or phrase will return to the beginning of the next chapter, sometimes with a difference, revealing ripples and new patterns like texture on a ground. Expanding the space of the novel ever wider and ever clearer.

This is what exhilarates most about Jazz—that it resists enclosure. Morrison’s stunning success comes through a shrewd awareness of the reader’s expectations, as well as the ability to expand and reconfigure our emotional responses to the text. In a novel where the self is constantly constituted and interrupted through storytelling, nothing is signed and sealed. By the end, the characters escape the outcome even the novel’s prepared for. They elide the restrictions imposed upon their bodies and go on to improvise their own futures, as if to say, where there is potential for improvisation, there is potential for freedom.]]> 3.88 1992 Jazz
author: Toni Morrison
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: adult, adult-historical, fiction, classic-lit, adult-lit, owned, favorites, read-in-2024
review:
I cannot tell you how much my entire soul snaps to attention when I’m reading Toni Morrison. I am shocked into pure longing; I want to get my mouth around her words, and my mind, breathe them in with the avidity of a dying man. Yet, halfway through Jazz, I could not stand how thoroughly, passionately loving the novel is, how recklessly generous it is—to the characters, to the City, to the reader. How intimate the story is, like constantly overhearing a confession. I was overcome.

Jazz begins with these opening lines, spoken in reverence and curse:

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.


It is an intense beginning, one that pulls away the room, leaving nothing but the shock of words. In Jazz, Morrison asks us to own up to the more disturbing aspects of romantic love. She reveals, quite unforgettably, how complicated our attachments to one another are, the collisions and longings of bodies, the way people become minefields for each other, treading, treading, and treading, until the whole thing is set ablaze.

With the cadence of a storyteller, which can turn a street corner into a sacred place, Morrison grapples for her characters� depths. She is fierce in her determination to capture the rich landscape of Black social life, to enable both pleasure and trauma, both violent dehumanization and profound humanity, and to locate the beauty that exists in the commonplace. She writes dazzlingly about the bewilderment of desire, about the complicated nature of womanbonds, and what it costs to give others so much power over us. She brings humanity to narrative tension, and shapes each character with tenderness and care.

Morrison describes Jazz as a “talking book,� and it is. Reading the novel, one senses not so much a pen writing, but a voice performing. It is that aura of the storyteller, so grounded and direct and conversational, which gives the novel an air of spontaneous improvisation. But it is also that Jazz (as its title hints) is musical in structure. Morrison allows the novel to sing, to repeat and harmonize, to rehearse new themes, riff upon them, leave and return to them. At points in the novel, where a chapter trails off into a word or phrase, that same word or phrase will return to the beginning of the next chapter, sometimes with a difference, revealing ripples and new patterns like texture on a ground. Expanding the space of the novel ever wider and ever clearer.

This is what exhilarates most about Jazz—that it resists enclosure. Morrison’s stunning success comes through a shrewd awareness of the reader’s expectations, as well as the ability to expand and reconfigure our emotional responses to the text. In a novel where the self is constantly constituted and interrupted through storytelling, nothing is signed and sealed. By the end, the characters escape the outcome even the novel’s prepared for. They elide the restrictions imposed upon their bodies and go on to improvise their own futures, as if to say, where there is potential for improvisation, there is potential for freedom.
]]> The Pairing 199352366
Time apart has done them good. Theo has found confidence as a hustling bartender by night and aspiring sommelier by day, with a long roster of casual lovers. Kit, who never returned to America, graduated as the reigning sex god of his pastry school class and now bakes at one of the finest restaurants in Paris. Sure, nothing really compares to what they had, and life stretches out long and lonely ahead of them, but—yeah. It's in the past.

All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour that never happened, good for 48 months after its original date and about to expire. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip. Solo. Separately.

It's not until they board the tour bus that they discover they've both accidentally had the exact same idea, and now they're trapped with each other for three weeks of stunning views, luscious flavors, and the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. It's fine. There's nothing left between them. So much nothing that, when Theo suggests a friendly wager to see who can sleep with their hot Italian tour guide first, Kit is totally game. And why stop there? Why not a full-on European hookup competition?

But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can't have.]]> 432 Casey McQuiston 1250864054 2 Way too many French people 3.86 2024 The Pairing
author: Casey McQuiston
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-romance, fiction, queer-lit, read-in-2024
review:
Way too many French people
]]> Sense and Sensibility 1190357 371 Jane Austen 0140430474 5 3.98 1811 Sense and Sensibility
author: Jane Austen
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1811
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: adult, adult-historical, adult-lit, classic-lit, fiction, owned, favorites, read-in-2024
review:
thank you, Jane Austen, for affirming that you can find genuine, long-lasting love after being subjected to the most soul-harrowing, mind-crushing, heart-pulverizing situationship of your life
]]> You Should Be So Lucky 196774809 We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.]]> 360 Cat Sebastian 5 well-loved.

If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.

You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.

I cheered so hard for the characters� happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself.]]> 4.44 2024 You Should Be So Lucky
author: Cat Sebastian
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-romance, fiction, queer-lit, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
This is, without hyperbole or exaggeration, one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. One of those books you buy in paperback and reach, reach, and reach for until they are tattered and yellowed and full of scribbled notes, which is to say, until they are well-loved.

If you had told me that a romance novel about a baseball player and the reporter begrudgingly covering his story would so thoroughly change the landscape of my life in less than two days, I would have said... yep, actually, that sounds about right. More seriously, I loved this book. Set in 1960s New York, You Should Be So Lucky speaks with insistence and quiet intensity to the beautiful density of queer existence, caught up in a world that refuses to accommodate it. Amidst so much unfreedom, the characters in this book build beautiful capacious lives and affirm the tenacity of queer love and the sustaining power of queer community against the routine brutalities of state-sanctioned homophobia and the scripted histories of death, violence, and uprooting. You might be forced to endure subjugation, the novel says, but that does not mean only living life as a subjugated person. And that—well, that hit home.

You Should Be So Lucky is also a deeply moving depiction of grief that refuses to relegate its dead characters to a numb aside, asking us instead to sit with the vast helplessness of mourning someone you're not allowed to love and thus not allowed to grieve. How do you build yourself out of such mourning? How do you begin to heal? This is a novel that is just so utterly kind and generous to its queer characters that I was left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.

I cheered so hard for the characters� happiness. I believed in their belonging to one another and wanted so desperately for them to believe it too. I cried a lot, but I screamed joyfully even more. Please read it for yourself.
]]> The Woman Warrior 25534223 252 Maxine Hong Kingston 1447275225 5 The Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplined modes of thinking and unexpected forms of agency. It does so by privileging silence, refusal, indeterminacy, and a certain infidelity to form and genre; but also by thinking in terms of collectivities and communal traditions instead of the singular, all-obliterating experience of the “I”—or, at least, with an acute sense of its difficulties.

The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in the US as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The memoir begins with the injunction, from mother to daughter, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,� which immediately oxidizes into betrayal when Kingston subsequently reveals the content of her mother’s words. The story Kingston is offered is a cautionary tale that rises out through layers and layers of silence: an adulterous “no-name aunt� who is punished for transgressing her community’s sexual norms by being treated as a ghost, “as if she had never been born.� It’s an intense beginning that suggests something of the weight of trauma and loss that shapes the narrative on the pages, and it is enough to press the breath from your lungs. What follows is an internal journey that leads to an equally terrifying sense of having to stand down a hostile world that holds certain lives so cheaply.

Maxine Hong Kingston tracks the processes of self-creation and self-understanding through the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) territories of silence, erasure, misremembrance, rupture, and violence. Her coming of age is cobbled together through myth and imagination. She does more than reproduce the material facts of her life: she expands her life into a mythology more enduring and more substantial than the impoverished existence scripted for her, interconnecting her story to deep, perennial lineages that echo endlessly into the present. She shifts perspective, slips from the indicative to the subjunctive, collapses space and time: she is the "no-name" slave woman, the filial daughter, the sword-bearing warrior Fa Mu Lan, the poetess Ts’ai Yen shoring up the narrative of her life through song. In this surplus, Kingston locates an essential agency that cannot be reduced to nothingness. She uses all herself up in a desperate longing for a language that might hold her. And she refuses annihilation.

At the heart of this narrative is the author’s struggle to negotiate her subject position as a woman, on the one hand, and her dual identity as both Chinese and American, two poles laboring for mastery in her life, warping her into a permanent outsider. In this delicate negotiation, Kingston grapples with the nature of articulation itself. Throughout the book, one senses a real strain to criticize the subjugation of women and the culture of silencing that is transmuted into her, without concealing and conceding to the forces of stereotype. This effort does not always succeed, and the memoir sometimes shades into contemptuous generalizations. But this is perhaps expected: few stories, particularly ones as vulnerable as this, can be dichotomized into a neat narrative of either transgression or nothing at all. Kingston depicts the inner workings of her immigrant family as a seething cauldron of anger, resentments, misrecognition, and difficult intimacies in the wake of uprooting and displacement. Beneath this turbulent surface, however, lurks a real sense of love and caretaking, and a longing to express the fullness and earned integrity of her mother, her aunt, all the indomitable women in her life, real or otherwise—and, of course, herself. I think of Kingston’s memory of her mother cutting her tongue, an act of violence unfathomable to Kingston who “felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry.� Yet, when she asks her mother about it, the answer is not what she expects: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.� The act of violation becomes an imperfect expression of love.

In this sense, The Woman Warrior reflects the porous borders between knowing and unknowing, inside and outside, betrayal and devotion, love and disillusionment. It’s a book, in other words, about translation. Maxine Hong Kingston moves through awful and tender silences, reads between the lines, attends to the gaps in the narrative, and speculates when necessary. In the process, she repeatedly loses sight of herself, of her mother, of the past, and then regains it, only to lose it again. Everywhere, the very possibility of translation cannot be made inseparable from its impossibility.

I loved this book for its gestures of refusal, its willingness to be against the grain and in and alongside the contradictions of becoming one’s self and being in community with others. The Woman Warrior holds an underlying sadness that leashes into the words like rainwater through roots. And a kind of fury too—the fury of “a first daughter of a first daughter”—still chafing against the leash of a mind too accustomed to good behavior. It all rather “translates well.”]]> 3.69 1976 The Woman Warrior
author: Maxine Hong Kingston
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1976
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: adult, adult-lit, classic-lit, owned, read-in-2024, favorites, fiction, nonfiction, memoir
review:
The Woman Warrior is a trenchant, gorgeous, and discomforting memoir that follows in a rich tradition of feminist writing that cleaves to undisciplined modes of thinking and unexpected forms of agency. It does so by privileging silence, refusal, indeterminacy, and a certain infidelity to form and genre; but also by thinking in terms of collectivities and communal traditions instead of the singular, all-obliterating experience of the “I”—or, at least, with an acute sense of its difficulties.

The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston’s story of growing up in the US as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. The memoir begins with the injunction, from mother to daughter, “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,� which immediately oxidizes into betrayal when Kingston subsequently reveals the content of her mother’s words. The story Kingston is offered is a cautionary tale that rises out through layers and layers of silence: an adulterous “no-name aunt� who is punished for transgressing her community’s sexual norms by being treated as a ghost, “as if she had never been born.� It’s an intense beginning that suggests something of the weight of trauma and loss that shapes the narrative on the pages, and it is enough to press the breath from your lungs. What follows is an internal journey that leads to an equally terrifying sense of having to stand down a hostile world that holds certain lives so cheaply.

Maxine Hong Kingston tracks the processes of self-creation and self-understanding through the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) territories of silence, erasure, misremembrance, rupture, and violence. Her coming of age is cobbled together through myth and imagination. She does more than reproduce the material facts of her life: she expands her life into a mythology more enduring and more substantial than the impoverished existence scripted for her, interconnecting her story to deep, perennial lineages that echo endlessly into the present. She shifts perspective, slips from the indicative to the subjunctive, collapses space and time: she is the "no-name" slave woman, the filial daughter, the sword-bearing warrior Fa Mu Lan, the poetess Ts’ai Yen shoring up the narrative of her life through song. In this surplus, Kingston locates an essential agency that cannot be reduced to nothingness. She uses all herself up in a desperate longing for a language that might hold her. And she refuses annihilation.

At the heart of this narrative is the author’s struggle to negotiate her subject position as a woman, on the one hand, and her dual identity as both Chinese and American, two poles laboring for mastery in her life, warping her into a permanent outsider. In this delicate negotiation, Kingston grapples with the nature of articulation itself. Throughout the book, one senses a real strain to criticize the subjugation of women and the culture of silencing that is transmuted into her, without concealing and conceding to the forces of stereotype. This effort does not always succeed, and the memoir sometimes shades into contemptuous generalizations. But this is perhaps expected: few stories, particularly ones as vulnerable as this, can be dichotomized into a neat narrative of either transgression or nothing at all. Kingston depicts the inner workings of her immigrant family as a seething cauldron of anger, resentments, misrecognition, and difficult intimacies in the wake of uprooting and displacement. Beneath this turbulent surface, however, lurks a real sense of love and caretaking, and a longing to express the fullness and earned integrity of her mother, her aunt, all the indomitable women in her life, real or otherwise—and, of course, herself. I think of Kingston’s memory of her mother cutting her tongue, an act of violence unfathomable to Kingston who “felt sorry for the baby whose mother waited with scissors or knife in hand for it to cry.� Yet, when she asks her mother about it, the answer is not what she expects: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.� The act of violation becomes an imperfect expression of love.

In this sense, The Woman Warrior reflects the porous borders between knowing and unknowing, inside and outside, betrayal and devotion, love and disillusionment. It’s a book, in other words, about translation. Maxine Hong Kingston moves through awful and tender silences, reads between the lines, attends to the gaps in the narrative, and speculates when necessary. In the process, she repeatedly loses sight of herself, of her mother, of the past, and then regains it, only to lose it again. Everywhere, the very possibility of translation cannot be made inseparable from its impossibility.

I loved this book for its gestures of refusal, its willingness to be against the grain and in and alongside the contradictions of becoming one’s self and being in community with others. The Woman Warrior holds an underlying sadness that leashes into the words like rainwater through roots. And a kind of fury too—the fury of “a first daughter of a first daughter”—still chafing against the leash of a mind too accustomed to good behavior. It all rather “translates well.�
]]> Funny Story 199354786 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 384 Emily Henry 0241624142 4 4.27 2024 Funny Story
author: Emily Henry
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/25
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-romance, fiction, read-in-2024
review:
Emily Henry needs to write a romance that happens to me personally
]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone (Penguin Modern Classics)]]> 36303872 384 James Baldwin 0241342031 5 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a gorgeous book, as is everything Baldwin writes. Baldwin’s language is of terrifying tenderness and relentless intimacy, and always steals my breath. His writing has a way of eviscerating you before you can notice what has been said. There are sections in this book that dazzled and moved me, others I remember with an almost physical pain. Reading Tell Me, it is impossible to reconcile the novel with its early reception, where it has been largely dismissed and considered as emblematic of Baldwin’s artistic decline. On the contrary, I think Baldwin has produced in this book one of his sharpest and most clear-eyed critiques of patriarchy, sexuality, and oppressive forms of masculinity.

Leo Proudhammer, a successful stage actor, has had a heart attack in San Francisco. In the aftermath, Leo meditates on what he has been and what he has become. The novel toggles beautifully between the past and the present, to capture Leo’s struggle for alternative ways of being in the world, capable of carrying the weight of his desperate longing not only to escape the social enclosures that deny him life, but to thrive and not merely survive.

Leo’s quest for selfhood represents the possibilities of Black male subjectivity as a delicate and continuous negotiation between the inward-self and the story constructed and produced of Blackness everywhere in the US and elsewhere. Leo is desperate to rescript his life away from the entangled biographies of violence and annihilation that the judgments, both racist and homophobic, of the culture around him confines him into, and to put together, and shore up, the narrative of his own life. Throughout the novel, one gets a sense of a man glancing at us out of the corner of his eye, very much anxious about the impression his words are making. Leo, an intensely private public man, knows that his body is marked out wherever he goes, its boundaries and limits located and under constant surveillance. For our lonely thespian narrator, the whole world is a stage, and he’s learned to wear an ever-changing mask over his true self as a crucial strategy of survival—and it is in the distance between Leo the actor and Leo the person that Leo’s identity emerges.

Baldwin works the processes of self-definition and self-creation from a place that is deeply knowing about the tyrannies of anti-Blackness and social ascription. In this novel, he grapples at close quarters with what it means to be borne on the sharp currents of a world that allows you so little, what it means to live with the constant oppression of terror. The white world is never far from Leo’s consciousness: in his life, at work, with his intimates, he is constantly forced into subservient roles.

Leo’s relationship with his older brother, which is life’s codex, is ripped open by violence and social injustice, and a young Leo was forced to live on the far side of the gulf stretching between them, which neither he nor his brother can cross. The loss of his brother ran Leo into adulthood before he was ready. It was the rip that opened so many endless chasms, the moment of breakdown. It is these pages, in which Baldwin conjures the pure strength of the tenderness and grief that exists between the two brothers, that filled me with the most special anguish—and which I reread the most. Leo’s subsequent affair with his white lover Barbara, however deeply loving and genuine, was no palliative for such oppression. Barbara’s whiteness is a threat to Leo, a fact that keeps tugging them apart. Even his later involvement with Christopher, a young Black radical, cannot placate the internal disarray Leo feels, a dislocation that stems from Leo’s abiding struggle between his artistic role, his celebrity, and his social obligations as a racial spokesman. Underlying this chapter of Leo’s life is Baldwin’s own struggle to reconcile his fame as a race spokesperson of Black people—for white America.

In conjoining the intensity of desire and disillusionment, Baldwin reveals the truths of power, uncorrupted by sentiment and feints at innocence, and illuminates both the utter difficulty and utter necessity of imagining our relationships to each other, our entanglements and obligations of care, as crucial sites for forming resistant identities. Ultimately, Baldwin’s novel is motivated by a deep urge to inhabit, act out, and circulate new meanings of radicalism and protest, meanings that engage critically with institutions of heterosexuality, whiteness, religion, and family, and strive to expand the horizon of possibility for new and better worlds.]]> 4.26 1968 Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone (Penguin Modern Classics)
author: James Baldwin
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: adult, adult-lit, fiction, owned, read-in-2024, favorites, classic-lit
review:
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone is a gorgeous book, as is everything Baldwin writes. Baldwin’s language is of terrifying tenderness and relentless intimacy, and always steals my breath. His writing has a way of eviscerating you before you can notice what has been said. There are sections in this book that dazzled and moved me, others I remember with an almost physical pain. Reading Tell Me, it is impossible to reconcile the novel with its early reception, where it has been largely dismissed and considered as emblematic of Baldwin’s artistic decline. On the contrary, I think Baldwin has produced in this book one of his sharpest and most clear-eyed critiques of patriarchy, sexuality, and oppressive forms of masculinity.

Leo Proudhammer, a successful stage actor, has had a heart attack in San Francisco. In the aftermath, Leo meditates on what he has been and what he has become. The novel toggles beautifully between the past and the present, to capture Leo’s struggle for alternative ways of being in the world, capable of carrying the weight of his desperate longing not only to escape the social enclosures that deny him life, but to thrive and not merely survive.

Leo’s quest for selfhood represents the possibilities of Black male subjectivity as a delicate and continuous negotiation between the inward-self and the story constructed and produced of Blackness everywhere in the US and elsewhere. Leo is desperate to rescript his life away from the entangled biographies of violence and annihilation that the judgments, both racist and homophobic, of the culture around him confines him into, and to put together, and shore up, the narrative of his own life. Throughout the novel, one gets a sense of a man glancing at us out of the corner of his eye, very much anxious about the impression his words are making. Leo, an intensely private public man, knows that his body is marked out wherever he goes, its boundaries and limits located and under constant surveillance. For our lonely thespian narrator, the whole world is a stage, and he’s learned to wear an ever-changing mask over his true self as a crucial strategy of survival—and it is in the distance between Leo the actor and Leo the person that Leo’s identity emerges.

Baldwin works the processes of self-definition and self-creation from a place that is deeply knowing about the tyrannies of anti-Blackness and social ascription. In this novel, he grapples at close quarters with what it means to be borne on the sharp currents of a world that allows you so little, what it means to live with the constant oppression of terror. The white world is never far from Leo’s consciousness: in his life, at work, with his intimates, he is constantly forced into subservient roles.

Leo’s relationship with his older brother, which is life’s codex, is ripped open by violence and social injustice, and a young Leo was forced to live on the far side of the gulf stretching between them, which neither he nor his brother can cross. The loss of his brother ran Leo into adulthood before he was ready. It was the rip that opened so many endless chasms, the moment of breakdown. It is these pages, in which Baldwin conjures the pure strength of the tenderness and grief that exists between the two brothers, that filled me with the most special anguish—and which I reread the most. Leo’s subsequent affair with his white lover Barbara, however deeply loving and genuine, was no palliative for such oppression. Barbara’s whiteness is a threat to Leo, a fact that keeps tugging them apart. Even his later involvement with Christopher, a young Black radical, cannot placate the internal disarray Leo feels, a dislocation that stems from Leo’s abiding struggle between his artistic role, his celebrity, and his social obligations as a racial spokesman. Underlying this chapter of Leo’s life is Baldwin’s own struggle to reconcile his fame as a race spokesperson of Black people—for white America.

In conjoining the intensity of desire and disillusionment, Baldwin reveals the truths of power, uncorrupted by sentiment and feints at innocence, and illuminates both the utter difficulty and utter necessity of imagining our relationships to each other, our entanglements and obligations of care, as crucial sites for forming resistant identities. Ultimately, Baldwin’s novel is motivated by a deep urge to inhabit, act out, and circulate new meanings of radicalism and protest, meanings that engage critically with institutions of heterosexuality, whiteness, religion, and family, and strive to expand the horizon of possibility for new and better worlds.
]]> Piranesi 50202953
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 272 Susanna Clarke 163557563X 5 4.22 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/14
date added: 2024/08/06
shelves: adult, adult-sff, fiction, arc, favorites, read-in-2021, owned, read-in-2024
review:
Three years ago, this book rescued me from the obliterating fog of a pandemic-induced depression. This year, it carried me through the interminable months of writing my master's dissertation. Always, reading it is like dropping anchor: I know that when I reach for its pages and read the words “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite,� I can, at long last, stop wondering what I am for.
]]> <![CDATA[Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head]]> 55835966 Poems of migration, womanhood, trauma, and resilience from the celebrated collaborator on Beyoncé's Lemonade and Black Is King, award-winning Somali British poet Warsan Shire.

Mama, I made it
out of your home,
alive, raised by the
voices in my head.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own stumbling way towards womanhood. Drawing from her own life and the lives of loved ones, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women, and teenage girls. In Shire's hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life: full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life: full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense. This is polychrome life: full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl.

The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.]]> 86 Warsan Shire 0593134354 4 My body is burning with the shame of not belonging... Everything you did to me, I remember.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is no easy book. Within these poems is a woman wrestling her various hauntings: her body a site of savage surveillance, her girlhood a long inventory of violation, her home no longer a home but “the mouth of a shark.� All the torturous vagaries of living-while-woman, living-while-Black, living-while-refugee, written in and through precarity's unassuageable condition.

There is something that hurts so much in all of this. Shire's language can flay you open before you even notice the pain. It's poetry driven by terrible necessity: dark, difficult, and tense with potential. But every poem ultimately arrives at tenderness and care. There is a deep shared knowing between the speaker and the women in her life that makes possible escape, even if escape is only in the mind, even if escape cannot reprieve the vulnerability of compounded collective traumas. When Shire writes, towards the end of the book, “I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much / love, / you won’t be able to see beyond it,� she holds a space open for us to imagine otherwise, a space that is something like freedom.]]> 4.21 2022 Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
author: Warsan Shire
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: adult, poetry, read-in-2024, nonfiction
review:
Warshan Shire is a poet of strong and unforgettable presence. I have collected so many of their lines over the years, and (to borrow an expression from Christina Sharpe) they have collected me too. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging... Everything you did to me, I remember.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is no easy book. Within these poems is a woman wrestling her various hauntings: her body a site of savage surveillance, her girlhood a long inventory of violation, her home no longer a home but “the mouth of a shark.� All the torturous vagaries of living-while-woman, living-while-Black, living-while-refugee, written in and through precarity's unassuageable condition.

There is something that hurts so much in all of this. Shire's language can flay you open before you even notice the pain. It's poetry driven by terrible necessity: dark, difficult, and tense with potential. But every poem ultimately arrives at tenderness and care. There is a deep shared knowing between the speaker and the women in her life that makes possible escape, even if escape is only in the mind, even if escape cannot reprieve the vulnerability of compounded collective traumas. When Shire writes, towards the end of the book, “I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much / love, / you won’t be able to see beyond it,� she holds a space open for us to imagine otherwise, a space that is something like freedom.
]]> Rebecca 636993
So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past the beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten...her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant -- the sinister Mrs. Danvers -- still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of the evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca...for the secrets of Manderley.]]> 380 Daphne du Maurier 0380778556 3 Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne could run!

All in all, gorgeous writing. There is a keen sense of suspense in the beginning that kept me riveted to the page. Such a gnawing and permeating portrait of anxiety, painting so clearly the feeling of being wound up so tight, a piano wire so taut it might snap at any moment. The novel, unfortunately, does not sustain it throughout, and the thrill sags somewhere around the middle. Respectfully to our unnamed narrator, I think this would have been a more compelling read if it switched to Rebecca’s perspective at some point. What can I say? I support women's rights, but I fucking dig women's wrongs.]]> 4.17 1938 Rebecca
author: Daphne du Maurier
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1938
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/20
date added: 2024/08/04
shelves: adult, classic-lit, owned, adult-historical, adult-thriller-mystery, fiction, read-in-2024
review:
Rebecca walked so Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne could run!

All in all, gorgeous writing. There is a keen sense of suspense in the beginning that kept me riveted to the page. Such a gnawing and permeating portrait of anxiety, painting so clearly the feeling of being wound up so tight, a piano wire so taut it might snap at any moment. The novel, unfortunately, does not sustain it throughout, and the thrill sags somewhere around the middle. Respectfully to our unnamed narrator, I think this would have been a more compelling read if it switched to Rebecca’s perspective at some point. What can I say? I support women's rights, but I fucking dig women's wrongs.
]]> <![CDATA[The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1)]]> 150249463
In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.

Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.

At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.

As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.

By an “endlessly inventive� (Vulture) author with a “wicked sense of humor� (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.]]> 410 Robert Jackson Bennett 1984820729 5 so good. 10/10. Would read again in a heartbeat.

There is so much to sing about here, but what I loved most about this book is how it roots so hard for its neurodivergent protagonists who have to actively and painstakingly manifest worth and recognition in a world that gives them so readily and abundantly to everyone else. This is in many ways a story about being confronted with systems of power that make no allowance for difference, where difference is in fact recorded as suspect, and differently abled bodies become the locus of aberrance even as they are exploited, manipulated, and remade for the use, whims, and fantasies of the rich and powerful. It’s a story about transgressing, defying, redressing and resisting this dominant order, sometimes at world-destroying costs. You will find so many resonances here with the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment, and it might just make you afraid.

If you’re a fan of the unique dynamic of Sherlock and Watson, the eccentric flare of Benoit Blanc in Knives Out (2019), and/or like your fantasy with more than a dash of murder, mystery, and existential threat—this is for you. Heck, if you’re just a fan of a good time, you do not wanna miss this book! Read it for yourself, and let it bedazzle your brain.]]> 4.40 2024 The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1)
author: Robert Jackson Bennett
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/08
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: adult, adult-sff, fiction, adult-thriller-mystery, favorites, read-in-2024
review:
You can always count on RJB to write a stunningly original work of fantasy that’s precisely and cunningly crafted to leave its reader feeling bereft and abandoned and craving a sequel like an ember craves air. This was so good. 10/10. Would read again in a heartbeat.

There is so much to sing about here, but what I loved most about this book is how it roots so hard for its neurodivergent protagonists who have to actively and painstakingly manifest worth and recognition in a world that gives them so readily and abundantly to everyone else. This is in many ways a story about being confronted with systems of power that make no allowance for difference, where difference is in fact recorded as suspect, and differently abled bodies become the locus of aberrance even as they are exploited, manipulated, and remade for the use, whims, and fantasies of the rich and powerful. It’s a story about transgressing, defying, redressing and resisting this dominant order, sometimes at world-destroying costs. You will find so many resonances here with the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment, and it might just make you afraid.

If you’re a fan of the unique dynamic of Sherlock and Watson, the eccentric flare of Benoit Blanc in Knives Out (2019), and/or like your fantasy with more than a dash of murder, mystery, and existential threat—this is for you. Heck, if you’re just a fan of a good time, you do not wanna miss this book! Read it for yourself, and let it bedazzle your brain.
]]> In Memoriam 179546799
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.
Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.
An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]> 400 Alice Winn 0593467841 4 4.53 2023 In Memoriam
author: Alice Winn
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: adult, adult-historical, fiction, read-in-2024, queer-lit
review:
was this book perfect? no. did it completely usurp my attention for hours on end and deal me irreparable emotional damage? hell yeah
]]> The Late Americans 56917531
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.� These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.]]> 320 Brandon Taylor 0593332350 4 being that is not fearful to be unresolved, and further expanded the grammar for what can be thought and imagined in relation to queerness.

This is why I think of The Late Americans as a novel of immanent queerness. By this I don’t mean—and I cannot stress this enough—queerness as a tokenizing mode of representation. Rather, I see this book as a project that understands itself as part of a long tradition of queer critique.

The queer characters in Taylor's novel form complex identities and entanglements that elide restrictions imposed upon queer bodies and go against the prevailing societal sense of how queer people act on themselves and on each other. Queerness, in other words, is crucial for an understanding of the text, but it is also crucially unsettled. This is the central unifying element of Taylor’s work as I see it: it mobilizes queerness to produce a vision of queer life that resists the desire for absolute clarity.

The Late Americans, like Taylor’s debut novel Real Life, is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, paradox, instability, complexity, contradiction, and multivalence. this “archive of feelings”–to borrow an expression from Ann Cvetkovich–adds up to inscribe queerness as a scene of studied ambivalence, and it it precisely this sense of ambivalence that allows Taylor’s characters to retain their right to opacity and maintain a sense of autonomy to disclosure and display. Their journeys, in other words, implicitly symbolize the author's desire to make room for a queerness that exists beyond what queer theorist Lee Edelman describes as “the norms that perpetuate the â€comfort zoneâ€� of dominant cultural forces.â€�

The Late Americans inverts the pattern of Taylor’s previous fiction. In this book, Taylor accommodates multiple voices, disrupting the insistent devotion to a singular subject that characterized his debut novel Real Life. The recombinant narratives here constellate around eight different characters, and we follow them as they live “out the wet amphibian prologue to their adult lives.�

Taylor, it must be said, is a brilliant conjurer of the internal disarray of being in your twenties and struggling with no ready blueprint to find your footing on ever-shifting sands: the precarity, the constant buzzing of crisis, the everyday tyrannies of trying to shore up the narrative of your life while worrying about a future that is not yet visible. As in Real Life, most of the narrators here are joined in the kinship of suffering that is academia, and they mesh together in that random way that people who find themselves working and living in tight, enclosing spaces mesh together. As another reviewer noted, “everyone knows someone who knows or is sleeping with or having an affair with somebody else.�

This question of relationality is a central fault line in Taylor’s fiction. Taylor is fearfully attuned to the complexities of intimate arrangements and affiliations made, severed, and remade in the hollow of young adulthood. His observations are so astute to the point of provoking a shock of recognition or even of incredulous laughter.

Even more than Real Life, The Late Americans anatomizes a capacious vision of the social that embraces the messy without foreclosing intimacy. Taylor’s language of the social is binding, jarring, conflicted, and erotic. It makes room for intensity, anger, alienation, neediness, inadequacy, yearning, resentment, and exists entirely beyond a binary judgment of “good� versus “bad.� It insists on co-articulating desire and disillusionment, tenderness and terror, all the forms of betrayal/absence/withholding that we enact upon one another, without trying to resolve the tensions between them. Instead, the novel simply accepts that life is sometimes “all wrong and all right and all fucked up.�

But there is nothing quite simple about being bound to life. Taylor knows this, and in The Late Americans, he makes very palpable the volatile biographies of violence that make people difficult to be or difficult to be with. The novel keys our attention to the powerful ways that trauma, sexual violence, the need or compulsion to be seen, binds people to all kinds of intimate configurations. The characters in The Late Americans hurt people when they’re trying to love them. They are ruthless in their will to mute the suffering of others. They hold on to things that diminish them. They put on masks and cultivate detachment as defence. They desire admiration and it makes them vindictive and afraid.

It is precisely these self-deceptions, these gaps and elisions in the narrative, that power the novel. The dance of shifting between multiple narrators allows The Late Americans to be porous, relational, and aware. It also makes visible the dangers of mapping one’s story in a way that refuses to contend with the story of another. There is no exclusive point of view here. No villains or martyrs. We must therefore build a tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations. How else can we approach our complex entanglements to each other if not cautiously and from multiple angles?

In this sense, what the novel is ultimately after is an ethics of togetherness, a politics of care, of what is required in order to be together. Love, in the words of cultural theorist Laurent Berlant, “always means non-sovereignty.� It requires that we register that which exists beyond the sphere of ourselves, that we relinquish control, expose too much of the self, and invite vulnerability. Everyone knows that to say here is how I love you and here is how it hurts is to risk annihilation.

Nothing in the novel, I think, articulates this dilemma more revealingly than sex. Yes, sex. And there is quite a lot of it here. There is good sex, bad sex, fraught sex, boring sex, destructive sex. When two characters who love each other cannot “get themselves to align,� sex becomes a panacea against the awkward impasse of language. In another instance, sex is a fraught offering of the self for the use of the other, the body reconfigured as a site for freedom. In another, sex is an appeal for recognition, laden with a desire for an intimacy that is denied and disavowed. In another, it is an enactment of the desire to become undone, to be emptied of being in the intensities of bodies that seek, closely press against each other, and then separate. In these moments, sex becomes an opportunity for understanding (and exposing) the characters� well-rehearsed choreographies of self. In these moments, we understand “how strange,� indeed, “[are] these networks of human relation.�

Because there are so many things to admire about this novel, I almost hesitate to sound a negative note. I do have, however, a couple quibbles to point out. Despite what may have been the author’s best intentions, The Late Americans falls into the narrative bog of trying to make distinct experiences out of characters who easily collapse into each other. Put simply: I had a hard time remembering who was who sometimes. You could find me muttering to myself, “wait, so is this the insufferable capital-punishment-loving vegan boyfriend, or the other equally insufferable adulterer trust-fund boyfriend?� (This does not include Seamus, Fyodor, or Noah, whom I love with my whole best heart, okay)

The female characters in the book also yearn for the same degree of development afforded their male counterparts. Fatima's POV I liked more than Beth's, but both narrations struck me as a little too sanitized, defanged, made toothless somehow. A bit more poison in the pen, I think, would have fleshed them out in more interesting ways.

That said, The Late Americans was a serious pleasure to read, and I love it for the ways that it spoke, with care and beauty, to the fissures that reveal themselves within us in our heartbreaking efforts to place ourselves in the world and arrive at tenderness and care.]]> 3.38 2023 The Late Americans
author: Brandon Taylor
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/07/28
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-lit, fiction, queer-lit, read-in-2024
review:
I feel a very strong kinship with Taylor’s work. His books have energized both my reading and my thinking in terms of pushing against the unimaginativeness and banality of heteronormative articulations of queerness and queer life. They made available to me a vision of queer being that is not fearful to be unresolved, and further expanded the grammar for what can be thought and imagined in relation to queerness.

This is why I think of The Late Americans as a novel of immanent queerness. By this I don’t mean—and I cannot stress this enough—queerness as a tokenizing mode of representation. Rather, I see this book as a project that understands itself as part of a long tradition of queer critique.

The queer characters in Taylor's novel form complex identities and entanglements that elide restrictions imposed upon queer bodies and go against the prevailing societal sense of how queer people act on themselves and on each other. Queerness, in other words, is crucial for an understanding of the text, but it is also crucially unsettled. This is the central unifying element of Taylor’s work as I see it: it mobilizes queerness to produce a vision of queer life that resists the desire for absolute clarity.

The Late Americans, like Taylor’s debut novel Real Life, is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, paradox, instability, complexity, contradiction, and multivalence. this “archive of feelings”–to borrow an expression from Ann Cvetkovich–adds up to inscribe queerness as a scene of studied ambivalence, and it it precisely this sense of ambivalence that allows Taylor’s characters to retain their right to opacity and maintain a sense of autonomy to disclosure and display. Their journeys, in other words, implicitly symbolize the author's desire to make room for a queerness that exists beyond what queer theorist Lee Edelman describes as “the norms that perpetuate the â€comfort zoneâ€� of dominant cultural forces.â€�

The Late Americans inverts the pattern of Taylor’s previous fiction. In this book, Taylor accommodates multiple voices, disrupting the insistent devotion to a singular subject that characterized his debut novel Real Life. The recombinant narratives here constellate around eight different characters, and we follow them as they live “out the wet amphibian prologue to their adult lives.�

Taylor, it must be said, is a brilliant conjurer of the internal disarray of being in your twenties and struggling with no ready blueprint to find your footing on ever-shifting sands: the precarity, the constant buzzing of crisis, the everyday tyrannies of trying to shore up the narrative of your life while worrying about a future that is not yet visible. As in Real Life, most of the narrators here are joined in the kinship of suffering that is academia, and they mesh together in that random way that people who find themselves working and living in tight, enclosing spaces mesh together. As another reviewer noted, “everyone knows someone who knows or is sleeping with or having an affair with somebody else.�

This question of relationality is a central fault line in Taylor’s fiction. Taylor is fearfully attuned to the complexities of intimate arrangements and affiliations made, severed, and remade in the hollow of young adulthood. His observations are so astute to the point of provoking a shock of recognition or even of incredulous laughter.

Even more than Real Life, The Late Americans anatomizes a capacious vision of the social that embraces the messy without foreclosing intimacy. Taylor’s language of the social is binding, jarring, conflicted, and erotic. It makes room for intensity, anger, alienation, neediness, inadequacy, yearning, resentment, and exists entirely beyond a binary judgment of “good� versus “bad.� It insists on co-articulating desire and disillusionment, tenderness and terror, all the forms of betrayal/absence/withholding that we enact upon one another, without trying to resolve the tensions between them. Instead, the novel simply accepts that life is sometimes “all wrong and all right and all fucked up.�

But there is nothing quite simple about being bound to life. Taylor knows this, and in The Late Americans, he makes very palpable the volatile biographies of violence that make people difficult to be or difficult to be with. The novel keys our attention to the powerful ways that trauma, sexual violence, the need or compulsion to be seen, binds people to all kinds of intimate configurations. The characters in The Late Americans hurt people when they’re trying to love them. They are ruthless in their will to mute the suffering of others. They hold on to things that diminish them. They put on masks and cultivate detachment as defence. They desire admiration and it makes them vindictive and afraid.

It is precisely these self-deceptions, these gaps and elisions in the narrative, that power the novel. The dance of shifting between multiple narrators allows The Late Americans to be porous, relational, and aware. It also makes visible the dangers of mapping one’s story in a way that refuses to contend with the story of another. There is no exclusive point of view here. No villains or martyrs. We must therefore build a tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations. How else can we approach our complex entanglements to each other if not cautiously and from multiple angles?

In this sense, what the novel is ultimately after is an ethics of togetherness, a politics of care, of what is required in order to be together. Love, in the words of cultural theorist Laurent Berlant, “always means non-sovereignty.� It requires that we register that which exists beyond the sphere of ourselves, that we relinquish control, expose too much of the self, and invite vulnerability. Everyone knows that to say here is how I love you and here is how it hurts is to risk annihilation.

Nothing in the novel, I think, articulates this dilemma more revealingly than sex. Yes, sex. And there is quite a lot of it here. There is good sex, bad sex, fraught sex, boring sex, destructive sex. When two characters who love each other cannot “get themselves to align,� sex becomes a panacea against the awkward impasse of language. In another instance, sex is a fraught offering of the self for the use of the other, the body reconfigured as a site for freedom. In another, sex is an appeal for recognition, laden with a desire for an intimacy that is denied and disavowed. In another, it is an enactment of the desire to become undone, to be emptied of being in the intensities of bodies that seek, closely press against each other, and then separate. In these moments, sex becomes an opportunity for understanding (and exposing) the characters� well-rehearsed choreographies of self. In these moments, we understand “how strange,� indeed, “[are] these networks of human relation.�

Because there are so many things to admire about this novel, I almost hesitate to sound a negative note. I do have, however, a couple quibbles to point out. Despite what may have been the author’s best intentions, The Late Americans falls into the narrative bog of trying to make distinct experiences out of characters who easily collapse into each other. Put simply: I had a hard time remembering who was who sometimes. You could find me muttering to myself, “wait, so is this the insufferable capital-punishment-loving vegan boyfriend, or the other equally insufferable adulterer trust-fund boyfriend?� (This does not include Seamus, Fyodor, or Noah, whom I love with my whole best heart, okay)

The female characters in the book also yearn for the same degree of development afforded their male counterparts. Fatima's POV I liked more than Beth's, but both narrations struck me as a little too sanitized, defanged, made toothless somehow. A bit more poison in the pen, I think, would have fleshed them out in more interesting ways.

That said, The Late Americans was a serious pleasure to read, and I love it for the ways that it spoke, with care and beauty, to the fissures that reveal themselves within us in our heartbreaking efforts to place ourselves in the world and arrive at tenderness and care.
]]> The Souls of Black Folk 23360227
"Jonathan Holloway introduces W. E. B. Du Bois' 1903 classic for our time, when visions of a 'post-racial' America clash with the enduring centrality of what Du Bois termed 'the problem of the color-line.' We need Du Bois now more than ever."—Adam Bradley, University of Colorado, Boulder

This collection of essays by scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on Black history, racism, and the struggles of Black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,� and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality. These essays on the black experience in America range from sociological studies of the African American community to illuminating discourses on religion and “Negro music,� and remain essential reading in our so-called “post-racial age.� A new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway explores Du Bois’s signature accomplishments while helping readers to better understand his writings in the context of his time as well as ours.]]> 240 W.E.B. Du Bois 0300195826 4 4.29 1903 The Souls of Black Folk
author: W.E.B. Du Bois
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1903
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: adult, nonfiction, essays, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Perverse Modernities)]]> 8386004 272 Christina Sharpe 0822346095 4 4.50 2009 Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Perverse Modernities)
author: Christina Sharpe
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: adult, nonfiction, read-in-2024
review:

]]> Ordinary Notes 128198990

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. 'I learned to see in my mother's house,' writes Sharpe. 'I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.' Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, a chorus of voices and experiences is summoned to the page. Sharpe practices an aesthetic of 'beauty as a method', collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a 'Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness', and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.]]> 379 Christina Sharpe 1914198158 5 �about art, grief, memory, community, and what it means to eke out a sense of “beauty as a method� in times of great rupture�feels like an enormous gift and I can only begin to speak my gratitude. If I could venture out into the world right now and reverently press this book into every single reader’s hands, believe me I would.]]> 4.55 2023 Ordinary Notes
author: Christina Sharpe
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves: adult, nonfiction, essays, poetry, memoir, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
The joy of reading Christina Sharpe is one of knowing that this book, this thing here, in your hands, these words will become part of your cellular structure. I'm mesmerized by her work, emotionally and intellectually, and often upended by it. To read such intelligent, rigorous, and luminous insights�about art, grief, memory, community, and what it means to eke out a sense of “beauty as a method� in times of great rupture�feels like an enormous gift and I can only begin to speak my gratitude. If I could venture out into the world right now and reverently press this book into every single reader’s hands, believe me I would.
]]> Ways of Seeing 19704715 How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.



"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak."



"But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."



John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

]]> 209 John Berger 4 4.06 1972 Ways of Seeing
author: John Berger
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1972
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/02
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves: nonfiction, essays, read-in-2024, adult, favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A River Dies of Thirst: Journals]]> 6605134 Anton Shammas

This remarkable collection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems and prose meditations is both lyrical and philosophical, questioning and wise, full of irony and protest and play. “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.� As always, Darwish’s musings on unrest and loss dwell on love and humanity; myth and dream are inseparable from truth. “Truth is plain as day.� Throughout the book, Darwish returns frequently to his ongoing and often lighthearted conversation with death.

Mahmoud Darwish (1941�2008) was awarded the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001. He was regarded as the voice of the Palestinian people and one of the greatest poets of our time.]]> 153 Mahmoud Darwish 0981955711 0 4.25 2009 A River Dies of Thirst: Journals
author: Mahmoud Darwish
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves: currently-reading, adult, classic-lit, poetry, read-in-2024, translated-works, nonfiction, essays
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition]]> 19323941 ]]> 122 Virginia Woolf 0547544405 4 A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.

The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.� The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own� metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.�

A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,� she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.� Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.

Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.

That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money�,� Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.� While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.

Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister� is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.

(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)]]> 4.10 1929 A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition
author: Virginia Woolf
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/22
date added: 2024/05/27
shelves: adult, essays, read-in-2024, nonfiction
review:
Locating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at Cambridge), A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.

The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.� The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own� metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.�

A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,� she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.� Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.

Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.

That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money�,� Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.� While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.

Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister� is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.

(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)
]]> We Could Be So Good 62365905 Casey McQuiston meets The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in this mid-century romdram about a scrappy reporter and a newspaper mogul's son--perfect for Newsies shippers.

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city's biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can't let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy.

Andy Fleming's newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He's barely able to run his life--he's never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he'll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.

Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can't deny. But what feels possible in secret--this fragile, tender thing between them--seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they're willing to fight.]]> 384 Cat Sebastian 0063272768 4
This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in this case) always gets to me. I’m reminded that queer people have loved and grieved and fought and survived through a world that never ceased to want us dead. I wanted to reach into the page and give both Rick and Andy a hug. ]]> 4.25 2023 We Could Be So Good
author: Cat Sebastian
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves: adult, adult-contemporary, adult-romance, fiction, queer-lit, read-in-2024
review:
Cat Sebastian, I was not familiar with your game.

This was an intensely emotional ride. Reading romantic queer stories set in the past (the 1950s in this case) always gets to me. I’m reminded that queer people have loved and grieved and fought and survived through a world that never ceased to want us dead. I wanted to reach into the page and give both Rick and Andy a hug.
]]> Real Life 53607856
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.]]> 235 Brandon Taylor 5 Real Life was like a crush, an obsession, a compulsion. For the past 24 hours, there was nothing worth the investment of my time more than reading this book. When I wasn’t reading it, it seemed almost to beckon me like a half-curled hand, both pleading and accusatory. When I finished reading it, I sat there in the state of bereftness that only comes over me at the end of a particularly good book: the sense of coming slowly back to myself and to the world outside, and finding both echoing with a harrowing sense of hollowness that was not so much the absence of something but the overwhelming presence of something turned inside out.

**
On the surface, Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, is the story of a gay black biochemistry student named Wallace from a small town in Alabama studying in an unnamed predominantly white Midwestern university. But that barely touches the experience of reading this novel.

The first element that makes Real Life so utterly distinctive is the writing. Taylor’s language has shores, depths, a purpose, and a shape. It’s both intensely internal and utterly expansive. The novel’s narrator, Wallace, speaks to us as if he is closing his eyes and imagining he is opening other eyes that look inward instead of out. But as fine and vivid as that deep soul-probe is, he zooms outward just as deftly, marking everything, no detail too small to escape his notice. In this way, the language mirrors, with perfect asymmetry, Wallace’s own tendency to see himself in every aspect of existence around him. The language, in and of itself, becomes a portrait.

Real Life is, in many ways, a character study. A mind, the novel shows us, is a place. It is a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. You can pace inside a mind in endless, restless circuits and never find its edges. Wallace’s mind is a world unto itself, pulled tight and secretive, his thoughts sinking deep, undetected, like underground water. “You are so determined to be unknowable,� his friends tell him, feeling that they could no more reach him than they could fly into the air. But no matter how good a place is at hiding things, a place cannot erase them. It can only conceal them for a while, and concealed things are not gone.

There is a familiar forlornness in Wallace’s narration that comes through with powerful clarity, a kind of claustrophobia of the soul—no walls to throw an echo back, you clap and clap, but nothing answers back. Wallace’s longing—for a person, for a world, for a very sense of self—runs like a current in the novel. This longing jostles for space alongside the remembered ghosts of Wallace’s past: his hurt, his anger, his guarded grief over his recently dead father. It is a need growing inside his chest like a fruit splitting its rind: to shed his skin, snakelike, and fling himself into the seething unknown. Wallace’s lust, and his collusion with Miller. Academia, and how it is twofold for Wallace: it both sidelines him and shepherds his life. Wallace is bottlenecked in the narrow halls of his predominantly white school, pressed together like tinned fish with people waiting for him to set foot in the wrong spot and prove their assumptions about him. But these walls, and these people, are also the invisible nautilus shell protecting him from the rest of world, and “if he should lose it, he might not survive his life.�

Real Life is about the inescapability of the past, how we become locked inside it, how it turns the present into a cage, and how the work of healing cannot truly begin until we are confronted with the cage, brought face to face with ourselves from within it. It’s also about how people can live shoulder to shoulder yet remain utterly invisible to each other. There is an edge to Wallace, a hard collision with life, that his friends and colleagues—most of whom are white—had no familiarly with. Micro-aggressions are examined, and midway through Real Life, Wallace makes a painful observation: “There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down.� Wallace’s friends might listen and nod, but the doors behind their eyes are closed, and their complacent silence proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, or a sprained wrist. “None of this is fair,� writes Taylor, “None of this is good, [Wallace] knows. But he also knows that the point is not fairness. The point is not to be treated fairly or well. The point is to get your work done. The point is results.� To survive in perpetual rupture—that is the tyranny of real life.

In these passages, and so many others like it, we see the empowering and purifying rage of Taylor’s prose. The novel offers itself up, bare and vulnerable, for its readers so they don’t have to take on the sometimes impossible task of finding language to make sense of what they are feeling. We live in a culture that makes such little effort to understand the experiences of queer people of color, let alone help us understand our own. But Real Life is a scream that ensures visibility. And it rings a bell deep inside, striking a resonant, vibrating note that makes us nod yes with recognition—and gratefulness.]]> 3.85 2020 Real Life
author: Brandon Taylor
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves: fiction, queer-lit, favorites, read-in-2020, adult, adult-lit, adult-contemporary, read-in-2024, read-in-2023
review:
My experience of reading Real Life was like a crush, an obsession, a compulsion. For the past 24 hours, there was nothing worth the investment of my time more than reading this book. When I wasn’t reading it, it seemed almost to beckon me like a half-curled hand, both pleading and accusatory. When I finished reading it, I sat there in the state of bereftness that only comes over me at the end of a particularly good book: the sense of coming slowly back to myself and to the world outside, and finding both echoing with a harrowing sense of hollowness that was not so much the absence of something but the overwhelming presence of something turned inside out.

**
On the surface, Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, is the story of a gay black biochemistry student named Wallace from a small town in Alabama studying in an unnamed predominantly white Midwestern university. But that barely touches the experience of reading this novel.

The first element that makes Real Life so utterly distinctive is the writing. Taylor’s language has shores, depths, a purpose, and a shape. It’s both intensely internal and utterly expansive. The novel’s narrator, Wallace, speaks to us as if he is closing his eyes and imagining he is opening other eyes that look inward instead of out. But as fine and vivid as that deep soul-probe is, he zooms outward just as deftly, marking everything, no detail too small to escape his notice. In this way, the language mirrors, with perfect asymmetry, Wallace’s own tendency to see himself in every aspect of existence around him. The language, in and of itself, becomes a portrait.

Real Life is, in many ways, a character study. A mind, the novel shows us, is a place. It is a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. You can pace inside a mind in endless, restless circuits and never find its edges. Wallace’s mind is a world unto itself, pulled tight and secretive, his thoughts sinking deep, undetected, like underground water. “You are so determined to be unknowable,� his friends tell him, feeling that they could no more reach him than they could fly into the air. But no matter how good a place is at hiding things, a place cannot erase them. It can only conceal them for a while, and concealed things are not gone.

There is a familiar forlornness in Wallace’s narration that comes through with powerful clarity, a kind of claustrophobia of the soul—no walls to throw an echo back, you clap and clap, but nothing answers back. Wallace’s longing—for a person, for a world, for a very sense of self—runs like a current in the novel. This longing jostles for space alongside the remembered ghosts of Wallace’s past: his hurt, his anger, his guarded grief over his recently dead father. It is a need growing inside his chest like a fruit splitting its rind: to shed his skin, snakelike, and fling himself into the seething unknown. Wallace’s lust, and his collusion with Miller. Academia, and how it is twofold for Wallace: it both sidelines him and shepherds his life. Wallace is bottlenecked in the narrow halls of his predominantly white school, pressed together like tinned fish with people waiting for him to set foot in the wrong spot and prove their assumptions about him. But these walls, and these people, are also the invisible nautilus shell protecting him from the rest of world, and “if he should lose it, he might not survive his life.�

Real Life is about the inescapability of the past, how we become locked inside it, how it turns the present into a cage, and how the work of healing cannot truly begin until we are confronted with the cage, brought face to face with ourselves from within it. It’s also about how people can live shoulder to shoulder yet remain utterly invisible to each other. There is an edge to Wallace, a hard collision with life, that his friends and colleagues—most of whom are white—had no familiarly with. Micro-aggressions are examined, and midway through Real Life, Wallace makes a painful observation: “There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down.� Wallace’s friends might listen and nod, but the doors behind their eyes are closed, and their complacent silence proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, or a sprained wrist. “None of this is fair,� writes Taylor, “None of this is good, [Wallace] knows. But he also knows that the point is not fairness. The point is not to be treated fairly or well. The point is to get your work done. The point is results.� To survive in perpetual rupture—that is the tyranny of real life.

In these passages, and so many others like it, we see the empowering and purifying rage of Taylor’s prose. The novel offers itself up, bare and vulnerable, for its readers so they don’t have to take on the sometimes impossible task of finding language to make sense of what they are feeling. We live in a culture that makes such little effort to understand the experiences of queer people of color, let alone help us understand our own. But Real Life is a scream that ensures visibility. And it rings a bell deep inside, striking a resonant, vibrating note that makes us nod yes with recognition—and gratefulness.
]]> <![CDATA[Twelfth Night, or What You Will]]> 28673189 232 William Shakespeare 5 3.93 1602 Twelfth Night, or What You Will
author: William Shakespeare
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1602
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves: adult, classic-lit, fiction, read-in-2024, favorites
review:
What a beautiful gay fiasco, the proportions of which only Shakespeare can pull off. A hilariously irreverent play that is also a precise staging of desire and gender that thwarts all kinds of convention. Shakespeare was simply, certifiably, That Bitch™️.
]]> Starling House 59426445
Starling House is odd and ugly and fully of secrets, just like its heir. Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but it might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden, and it feels dangerously like something she's never had: a home.

But she isn't the only one interested in the house, or the horrors and wonders that lie beneath it. If Opal wants a home, she'll have to fight for it. She'll have to dig up her family's dark past and let herself dream of a brighter future. She'll have to go down, down into Underland, and claw her way back to the light.

Starling House is the sweeping, romantic new novel from New York Times bestseller and Hugo Award-winner Alix E. Harrow.]]> 320 Alix E. Harrow 4 uninterrupted reading? My adhd was found dead in a ditch!]]> 3.98 2023 Starling House
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/15
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: adult, adult-horror, fiction, read-in-2024
review:
4 hours of uninterrupted reading? My adhd was found dead in a ditch!
]]> The Merchant of Venice 28479110 240 William Shakespeare 0141396547 5 Me, on my death bed: “Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; / And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love.�

(I also highly recommend watching the 2004 film adaptation starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Lynn Collins. It's SO good!)]]> 3.65 1596 The Merchant of Venice
author: William Shakespeare
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1596
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: adult, classic-lit, read-in-2024, fiction
review:
Me, on my death bed: “Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; / And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge / Whether Bassanio had not once a love.�

(I also highly recommend watching the 2004 film adaptation starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Lynn Collins. It's SO good!)
]]> The Queer Art of Failure 19195585 The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory� as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.]]> 299 J. Jack Halberstam 0822394359 5 4.03 2011 The Queer Art of Failure
author: J. Jack Halberstam
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/19
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves: adult, nonfiction, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sex, or the Unbearable (Theory Q)]]> 18226520 Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.

Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.]]> 168 Lauren Berlant 0822355949 3 3.86 2013 Sex, or the Unbearable (Theory Q)
author: Lauren Berlant
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/13
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves: nonfiction, read-in-2024, adult
review:

]]> <![CDATA[An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures]]> 255773 An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, she develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and AIDS activism and
caretaking.

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act/up New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherrie Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how these cultural formations---activism, performance, and literature---give rise to public cultures that both work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma-one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.]]> 368 Ann Cvetkovich 0822330881 4 4.14 2003 An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
author: Ann Cvetkovich
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/05
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves: read-in-2024, nonfiction, adult
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief]]> 381426 Deavere Smith's "Twilight," and Invisible Man to The Woman Warrior , in the process demonstrating that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and social health. Her investigations reveal the common interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. A provocative look at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.]]> 271 Anne Anlin Cheng 0195151623 4 4.13 2000 The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief
author: Anne Anlin Cheng
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/17
date added: 2024/03/17
shelves: read-in-2024, nonfiction, adult
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History]]> 2016619 206 Heather Love 0674026527 4 4.20 2007 Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
author: Heather Love
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/13
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: nonfiction, read-in-2024, adult
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics]]> 379013
Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Muñoz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.

Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color—in Carmelita Tropicana’s “Camp/Choteo� style politics, Marga Gomez’s performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis’s “Terrorist Drag,� Isaac Julien’s critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s performances of “disidentity,� and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serial The Real World.]]> 227 José Esteban Muñoz 0816630151 5 4.40 1999 Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
author: José Esteban Muñoz
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/19
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: nonfiction, adult, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals]]> 43249167 A breathtaking exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.

In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.]]> 462 Saidiya Hartman 0393285685 4 4.14 2019 Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
author: Saidiya Hartman
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves: adult, nonfiction, read-in-2024
review:

]]> This Wound Is a World 36255892 This Wound is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky to world inside.� Billy-Ray Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder sadness and pain like theirs without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay.”]]> 62 Billy-Ray Belcourt 1927823641 4 This Wound Is a World calls on us to stretch, to imagine, to struggle for more bearable worlds. To refuse colonial annihilation and painstakingly manifest beauty and tenderness in our lives and with our intimates.

I loved this collection of poetry, and once I finished it, I wanted to immediately put it in a care package and post it to several dear friends.]]> 4.50 2017 This Wound Is a World
author: Billy-Ray Belcourt
name: chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) �
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/01/07
shelves: adult, poetry, read-in-2024, queer-lit
review:
Belcourt writes from the visceral position of queer Indigenous life. He understands that the work of language is to expand our capacity for survival. To break open, rupture, make possible, unmake and remake the world away from what it has been made. This Wound Is a World calls on us to stretch, to imagine, to struggle for more bearable worlds. To refuse colonial annihilation and painstakingly manifest beauty and tenderness in our lives and with our intimates.

I loved this collection of poetry, and once I finished it, I wanted to immediately put it in a care package and post it to several dear friends.
]]>