How Much of These Hills is Gold, C. Pam Zhang: In my opinion, a contemporary classic. Weaves Chinese myth with stories of the American Gold Rush. Beautiful prose and valuable takeaways re: family, truth, and gender.
A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib: Essay upon essay of mind-plowing poetics and storytelling. Hanif’s version of Baldwin’s Devil Finds Work. A wide swath of topics from blackface to spades to magic.
Writers & Lovers, Lily King: Came to me at the exact right (or wrong?) time, just when my father passed away. A keenly-observed novel about grief and persona that is something like if SweetbittermetNormal People.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee: Inspired me to get over myself and just start writing again. The essay on roses absolutely floored me.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman: Hard to stomach, but necessary. Foundational for the way I am thinking about neo-slave narratives and speculative historical fiction.
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke: The minute I read this, I added it to the syllabus for my class on women in isolation. Part graphic novel, part longform essay, part research paper, and wholly extraordinary.
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Jennifer Lynn Stoever: This one’s just for me. The burning core at the center of my reading list and the inspiration and model for my scholarship.
The Street, Ann Petry: Read it because of the book above, but an absolute banger of a book. Devastating ending. Would be extraordinary taught alongside Native Son.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin: This book has everything. Polyamory. Earth-bending. An alien creature frozen inside a giant piece of rock in the middle of the ocean. Love this woman, love seeing Blackness-as-default in sci-fi novels.
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel: You read it in high school for a good reason. A true exemplar of the genre and a fascinating way to teach non-chronological storytelling.
rest below the cut
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
Brothers & Keepers, John Edgar Wideman
Bunk: The True Story of Hoaxes, Hucksters, Humbug, Plagiarists, Forgeries, and Phonies, Kevin Young
Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas
Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Tomi Adeyemi
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Mary Ann Doane
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Ben Blatt
Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, Brian Hochman
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
People We Meet on Vacation, Emily Henry
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue, Mackenzi Lee
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Legendborn, Tracy Deonn
Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, Christina Lauren
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Nina Sun Eidsheim
One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston
One to Watch, Kate Stayman-London
Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Amy Lawrence
An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole
It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble
Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination, Susan J. Douglass
How to Fail at Flirting, Denise Williams
The Flat-Share, Beth O'Leary
Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Michele Hilmes
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud
we’re really at that point in the year where no one cares about anything huh
My psych professor mentioned swaddling in lecture so I emailed him a picture of me being swaddled in my dorm room and asked if I could get extra credit because it was really hot in there and I got really sweaty and he was like “fabulous, sure”
I’m going to miss the Honors Advisor from my university.
This is definitely my favorite email i’ve recieved from a professor, with the subject line “back at it”.
Sounds like a great time for me to repost the memes I’ve sent in emails to my students.
i am looking through my phone tonight while you wash dishes ten feet away, and i am thinking, as i have thought so often lately, about loss. you poke fun at me for avoiding the word death: “if something happens,” i say. but something has happened. in the years i’ve loved you i’ve been a thousand changing faces, and i hope to be a thousand more. i’ve been a thousand versions of myself, and you a thousand versions of yours. and i’ve loved each and every one because that is what we do. we finish sentences and edit essays and each hold the most breakable pieces of the other inside the armor of ourselves.
each day brings little deaths and rebirths, losses and gains, but the constant has been you. your kindness and laughter; my hand on the nape of your neck the way you like to be comforted. our sweat and tears mingling the way these things do. what separates us from the day we met? nine years, two rings, three states, four degrees. tens of thousands of miles traveled, years lived apart. the loss of my father. mountains and valleys and sertraline prescriptions. and in all that space, somehow our hearts only managed to grow closer.
