THE SHELF: an update
mfw a reading challenge to finish a shelf of books reignites my love for reading
hi yall,
returning to my preferred lane after an inadvertent swerve into political analysis: writing entirely too much about media i like. let’s start with a long-overdue update on my little reading challenge i started in july:
it’s funny, when i first wrote that i was debating on setting the deadline as the end of the year, but now it’s november and i’ve gotten through a grand total of five books from The Shelf. considering none of these are the pageturning pop reads at the top of bestseller lists, and i spend much of my time working on art, thinking about art, building a new website for my art, writing, and doing the usual adult drudgery such as cleaning, cooking, and running errands, a book a month is fine. it’s just part of the blame for my pace lies in the fact i read, like, six extracurricular books. oops! at least the spirit was there.
for The Shelf itself, i have finished moby dick, one hundred years of solitude, grendel, grace jones’ i’ll never write my memoirs, and dawn. dawn is where my first diversion occurred. it’s part of a series, so the next book adulthood rites felt natural to read next, and then i sped through imago to complete the trilogy. i then took my ass to the library and picked up bloodchild, read and enjoyed it in a feverish whirlwind, and am now eyeing the seed to harvest compilation on another Shelf that’s supposed to be part two of my challenge. i’ll resist that temptation for now… maybe. turns out i adore octavia butler, and now get to resent, in my special aquarius way, how easily my past teachers pegged me as a potential fan of hers. truthfully, i think i’ve gone beyond fan, slingshotted past stan, and am theorizing that my soul was born from her mind like athena and was placed into a random baby to be born into the world. race and sexual dynamics explored through semi-consensual alien pregnancy is just too aligned with where my personal fiction writing is going. when i call the woman “mother”, know that i only kind of mean it in the gay “mother of the house” way — 20% mutha, 80% “literally formed from her mental dna”.
i’m back on track with james baldwin’s go tell it on the mountain. he’s one of my mom’s favorite authors, which means less than you might think considering our personalities are so similar otherwise — she likes mysteries and charles dickens’ most boring tomes, i like sci-fi/fantasy and classics that hide queer subtext. it’s not the greatest match in taste and she gave up recommending books to me years ago. baldwin exists in the slim overlap. he has a way of writing that sneaks up on me in the way i imagine dickens does for people who can stand him, where i don’t grasp the full beauty of the prose until a lot of it has passed and the tiny details add up into one breathtaking picture. i can feel the dirt and dust and darkness covering the main character john grimes, a name that conjures images of both a nonperson (the “john doe”) and the filth (literal, spiritual) he’s trying to rise from. it’s a short book i want to savor to make sure i lavish enough attention upon each page to do the prose proper justice. if i was born from octavia butler’s horny alien soup, i’ve been reaching for baldwin’s fictional nectar with larval feelers ever since. i’m mad it’s taken me so long to move beyond his essays! another thing to stew over.
american prometheus is worth the hype for sure, something i think all of the newfound oppieheads born during the summer of barbieheimer can attest to. i also got into reading a song of ice and fire finally, and knocked back the first two books years after the game of thrones finale sent agonized shockwaves throughout the world. my tendency to stay aloof towards extremely popular things protected me from the anguish, but the books are fantastic. even george r. r. martin’s fantasy-typical racism doesn’t take away from the only measure of quality that matters in the genre: how many ambitious, well-rounded women are present at one time. daenerys is the best girl in fiction and you will never make me disagree with anything she does.
well, my next update should be some individual ditties to go more in-depth about my readings so far. i’ll leave you all with a link to Rakuten Kobo's store, from which i bought a little e-reader to carry around in my tiniest purses so i can be the most insufferable bitch at the (metaphorical, i don’t drink or enjoy crowds) bar without engaging with the kindle panopticon. i’ve got a digital media course’s worth of theory loaded onto it right now — the grind never stops.