Volume 3, No. 45: 30 One-Sentence Reviews

Books for this moment, and all moments

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m spending this week on my beloved island with a dear friend. I’ve been walking on the beach every morning, and every morning, I watch the ducks in the waves.

I love them. I love the way they stand there, feet in the cold water, waves breaking over their small bodies, unruffled, unflappable. They slide ungracefully into the water and resettle themselves, their small bodies buffeted by waves so much bigger than them, and still, they float, they swim: unruffled, unflappable. They are teaching me something about stillness and steadfastness; about moving in small groups, with purpose; about staying true and constant for the long haul.

Someone on Instagram shared this comic, which I love, and which is another lesson in steadfastness (it’s worth clicking through).

chava_goodtime

A post shared by @chava_goodtime

I've been calling my reps every day for weeks now. When I first started doing this, it was hard, because it was new, because phone calls. Now it literally requires no effort. It's an ingrained part of my day. I don't think about it. It is so goddamn easy.

So now my ongoing task is: What's the next thing I can do? This one action no longer takes up any emotional or mental space in my life. So now I look for new edges, new ways to fill that space. Now I find another hard-seeming thing, and work on that until it becomes routine, expected, small. This is how I strengthen the muscle.

It's not an endless escalation, either. It's not about adding and adding and adding until there’s no space left. It's about caring deeply, and rooting into beloved community, and pushing myself towards new liberatory practices I didn’t even know I could carry out yesterday, all at the same time. Sometimes, very slowly. Sometimes, with a ferocious urgency. For a whole lifetime.

Since I’ve given myself permission to ignore my self-imposed rules and do whatever I want with this newsletter (11/10, would recommend), I’m trying something totally new today: 30 one-sentence mini reviews. These are all books I’ve read this year. Most of them I haven’t yet reviewed in the newsletter, though I did include a few I wrote about earlier in the year—I couldn’t resist, and many of you are new here. In those cases, I’ve linked to my review instead of Bookshop. If you’d like to see longer reviews of any of these books, please let me know!

None of them are directly about Palestine. They range across the globe, across time, and into the future. What connects them is what connects us: this whole mess of a world we live in, all the violence, all the music, all the terrifying tools of empire, all the liberation struggles—it’s all wound up together, tangled and taut. Reading is a way to look. Reading is a way to connect the threads. These thirty books are thirty doors. They open toward and with each other. Our work is to walk through.

The Books

How Poetry Saved My Life by Amber Dawn: Because “But I also believe that passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice injures us—it widens the disconnect. The part of us that is hurting does not heal in the dark; we must turn on the light to look at it. We must pay attention.”

O Beautiful by Jung Yun: Because how we make the story—how we tell the story—what happens to us in the process of doing the story—matters.

None of the Above by Travis Alabanza: Because the gender binary is an imperialist tool. Because it does the work of white supremacy for us.

The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer: Because what travels through generations—myth, trauma, song, silence, love—keeps traveling.

We Are the Middle of Forever edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth: Because we only have one planet. Because Indigenous peoples all over the world have already lived through the apocalypse. Because hope is a practice.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman: Because the past is not past.

The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher: Because so much that matters lives inside stories. And because queer Palestinian stories, always.

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H: Because sacred texts are not fixed; because religious traditions are moveable; because faith and study and practice can become radical acts of liberation.

Uranians by Theodore McCombs: Because we have to imagine new worlds in order to build them.

Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam: Because we have to imagine new pasts in order to build new futures.

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia: Because softness and ferocity are not mutually exclusive. Because care work is the foundation. Because bearing witness matters.

Nomenclatures of Invisibility by Mahtem Shiferraw: Because “the longing for this freedom to exist / without turbulence, without fear.”

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid: Because anger builds and sparks and creates and connects.

Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark: Because reweaving fairy tales is a kind of resistance. Because: “How can I be sure / we ever emerged // from the deep?”

Em by Kim Thuy, translated by Sheila Fischman: Because all struggles against western imperialism are connected. Because Vietnam is Palestine is Sudan. Because every place is its own and incomparable. Because connection, because contradiction.

And Then He Sang a Lullaby by Ani Kayode: Because queer people love everywhere, struggle everywhere, die everywhere. Because queer life is complicated everywhere.

A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka: Because the U.S. has been funding and enacting genocides since before its inception. Because to look is a beginning.

Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor: Because: “As the saying goes, if you disremember us, you kill us, and I’m here to resist a second dying.”

A Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi, translated by Nandini Murali: Because complexity is not the enemy of moral clarity.

We Won't Be Here Tomorrow by Margaret Killjoy: Because imagining new worlds is a resistance practice. Because it strengthens the muscle.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar: Because ancestral trans and Arab joy. Because singing.

Carry by Toni Jensen: Because everything happening over there, and over there, and over there, is happening, has happened, right here, and right here, and right here.

Be Holding by Ross Gay: Because. Because. Because. Because “All the singing that makes this singing.”

This Place by various authors, foreword by Alicia Elliott: Because to resist the historical narrative the state tries to weave is also to resist the future narrative the state is trying to weave.

Dry Land by B. Pladek: Because the working of loving one thing well is the work of a lifetime.

How to Read Now by Eliane Castillo: Because reading is so much bigger than books.

Soil by Camille T. Dungy: Because so much of what matters begins at home, begins small, begins as seeds, begins with paying attention.

We See Each Other by Tre’vell Anderson: Because how we talk about people and groups drives culture and policy and materially affects lives. Because how we talk about people can lead to their deaths.

Trans Liberation by Leslie Feinberg: Because, from a speech given in 2002: "I am lesbian and transgender. I am a workin-class, secular Jewish socialist. And with every breath and every sinew, I fight for Palestinian liberation.” And because, from the book: “When I talk about unity, I don’t mean reducing all our particular identities or struggles to one. I mean putting our collective strength and energy behind the defense of all our identities and all our demands.”

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka: Because even in war, even in the most horrific times, the unbearable times, even in death, queer people are reaching for each other, are speaking the truth of their lives, are laughing.

The Beyond

Meals with Friends

When my friend Will and I get together, we eat well. Our breakfasts: bread friend in butter, greens with pickled onions, savory Dutch baby, perfectly cooked eggs. Our dinners: a pork shoulder covered in spices and slow-roasted for six hours, a fall potato and leek galette. Our lunches: pulled pork and brussels sprouts in stock simmered gently overnight, grilled cheese with apples and mustard. I try to carry this love with me into my life after our annual fall island trip. I try to feed myself with the same attention.

Peak Fall Galette with Potatoes & Leeks

Galettes are so easy to make! For this one, I sautéed leeks and garlic in butter. I roasted thin slices of potatoes and sweet potatoes until they were soft and a bit crispy. I made a quick dough and rolled it out. I spread it with ricotta, then the leeks, then arranged the potatoes on top. Fold it up, give it an egg wash, sprinkle with sesame seeds and lots of grated Parmesan, bake: fall glory in a perfect, messy pastry.

Sticky Cranberry Gingerbread

I made this gingerbread as a teatime treat. You make a quick cranberry sauce and then swirl it into dark gingerbread batter. It’s very Novembery and warming.

Recent Audiobooks

Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh, read by Fajer Al-Kaisi: I briefly mentioned this last week. I finished it, and it’s very good. There’s so much in it: memoir, politics, history—all told through the lens of walks Shehadeh has taken in the West Bank. He's a lawyer and writes about some of the cases he's worked on, attempting to return stolen land to its Palestinian owners. He writes about the history of Israeli settlements, his own family's history, and his relationship to the hills around. Mostly this is a book about a man who loves his home and refuses to give up what he loves most about it: walking though his beloved hills. Despite armies, settlers, checkpoints, uncrossable roads. It's devastating, and a love letter.

How to Keep House While Drowning written and read by KC Davis: I’ve heard good things about this from a lot of people. I’m about halfway through, and I’m enjoying it. I appreciate Davis’s cleaning/care task philosophy because it’s easily applicable to lots of different situations. There’s a lot in here that isn’t relevant to me because of who I am and what is easy for me (for example, washing dishes and doing laundry), but I can apply the same principle to things that are hard for me (cleaning the bathroom). It’s very short. I recommend it.

Further Reading

Here are a few booklists I’ve saved recently, all of which address the interconnectedness of liberation struggles. I haven’t read all the books on all of them (it’s a lot of books!), but they all come from trusted sources, recommended by trusted sources, and/or feature many books I have read and loved.

• Thanksgiving Reading, Decolonized (A Room of One’s Own)

• 40 Books to Understand Palestine (Lit Hub): This is a great list, selected by Palestinian and Palestinian American authors and authors who have been advocating for Palestine in their work.

• Books to Understand Current Liberation Struggles & Conflicts (@blackliberationist)

• Palestine Book Recommendations for Specific Interests and Poetry as Resistance: Palestinian Poets (@melsmagicalreads)

• Hanna (@theworldtoread) has started a series of booklists titled ‘Reading the World, Politically’. So far she’s done one for Sudan and one for Palestine. I recommend checking them out!

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I made a list of extremely serious, definitely useful, and not-at-all ridiculous ways to start reading longform essays for everyone who, like me, struggles to read anything that’s not a book. I wrote this piece ages ago; it’s ironic that it went up in a month when I’ve read more longform essays than I have in—maybe ever.

A Taste of the Commonplace

I asked my friend Will, who I’m spending the week with, to pick a word to represent the week. He picked ‘beverages’ (each day, we have tea with our breakfast, mid-morning hot cocoa, afternoon teatime, and after-dinner mulled cider). I didn’t have any quotes tagged ‘beverages’ in my commonplace book, so I looked up ‘food’ instead. Here’s a passage from The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah. The author of this essay is writing about the importance of food and cooking in her relationship with her partner:

We understand food as a nurturing reality, and a way of exchanging information about each other, and each other’s lives, because we come from different diasporic backgrounds. We have different cultural knowledges; you can say we come from different kitchens and so we’re constantly exchanging knowledge with each other.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, especially because so much of what I see on social media, the images coming out of Gaza, are images of death, destruction, and terror. I am not minimizing the importance of this kind of reporting and witnessing. But I’ve also been seeking out images and writing about olive trees and tatreez. It’s why I appreciate accounts like this so much.

And Beauty

First, some words I’ve been sitting with this past week:

• “A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation” by Fady Joudah: This is a remarkable essay. I encourage you to spend some time with it. I also highly recommend Joudah’s poetry collection The Earth in the Attic.

• “I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears and Displacement” by Hind Khoudary

• “The Optimism of Uncertainty” by Howard Zinn: This essay from 2004 is worth a read.

• “Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so” by Arwa Mahdawi

• Fatimah Asghar’s newsletter from last week, 'Don't Let Them Kill Us', is very good. It is always good; you should subscribe.

As always, a little beauty to send you on your way: This is one of my favorite vistas, at one of my favorite times of year.

Catch you next week, bookish friends! This newsletter will be free through the end of the year, but if you’d like to pay for a subscription to support my work, you can do so here.