Volume 4, No. 15: Mystery Book Reviews (Like Actually)

little snippets of reviews to come

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m currently working on some big (and exciting!) behind-the-scenes changes to this newsletter. In an effort to take care of myself (rather than hold myself to unreasonable standards), I’m going to (try) to write shorter, less time-consuming newsletters for a while. My hope is that this will give me the time I need to focus on other parts of this work. I have a lot of raw, unedited book reflections that I haven’t published anywhere yet, so I’m going to share those reviews over the next few weeks—one per newsletter. Look, this kind of restraint is hard for me, so I hope you’re proud!

To make all of this a bit more fun, today I present you with: mystery book review teasers! These ten snippets are taken directly from my reading journal. They’re all about books I’ve read and loved in the past three months. Can you guess which ones? Feel free to give it a go in the comments!

Also in the comments, let me know which of these books you’re most intrigued by. If there’s a clear winner, that’s the book I’ll review in full next week!

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Mystery Book Reviews

1. An Award-Winning Memoir

She doesn’t try to weave anything whole. Instead, she exposes all the threads. How do you tell a story that has been broken so many times? How do you tell a story that has been forgotten and mythologized and reworked and hidden so many times? How do you tell a story that had to be made invisible for the people whose story it was to survive it? What’s most incredible about this book is what it makes visible.

2. A Queer Novel Against Empire

What language is this book written in? I just started listening to Aster of Ceremonies, so I’m thinking about the languages we use and how we use them, about who language is for. I’m wondering: is this book a kind of trans language? Is the way the protagonist writes about her life, which is decadent and teasing, lush and flowery, funny and sharp, its own language? What’s the alphabet?

3. An Essential Text

This slim book is a compelling argument for the dismantlement of the American state.

4. A Brilliant New Novel in Translation

I can’t stop thinking about the cycles of generational care in this book, the surprising way trans woman of different ages and circumstances find and take care of each other. There’s such a profound celebration of trans life—all of it, without exception—in the narrator’s meandering journey, in the way she finally comes into herself by becoming kin with the trans women who made her life possible.

5. A Poetry Collection from the Early 2000s

This is a book of story poems. They trace expected patterns, following the title’s theme through to the poem’s end. The line breaks are often simple. But they are full of moments that cut and spark. It got me thinking about what it means to tell a simple story. How do you tell a story directly and without fanfare, and still braid so much emotional heft into its rhythms?

6. A Devastating but Beautiful Coming-of-Age Novel

So much of how we understand the world is filtered through the physical and emotional spaces of our lives. If you’re a queer person living in a culture of violence, toxic masculinity, and homophobia, it’s hard to allow yourself subtlety and nuance. Everything is about survival. The way this book explores that is so powerful and heartbreaking: it’s only when he gets to a place where he’s not alone, where he doesn’t have to hide, that the protagonist can face his pain and his mistakes.

7. A Genre-Blending Book by One of My Favorite Authors

She writes so many truths into this story: How it is so easy to feel at home in your body when someone you love loves your body. How that can make it easy to ignore how you feel about your body. Queerness in this book is full of contradictions: it’s a home, a shield, a wall, an enabler.

8. My First Book by a Poet I’ll Be Reading Forever

I’m thinking about poetic language and what it means to have one. This collection has a clear and singular poetic language. The poems feel honey and warm and ocean-drenched; they feel like soil and earth, rooted and warm. They’re shapes without sharp edges, they’re all dripping flow and smooth and glide. Roundness, yes, that’s what they feel like—like phases of the moon, waning and waxing, but underneath, always whole.

9. A Rageful, Grieving, Loving Memoir by a Young Activist

The overwhelming emotion I finished this book with wasn’t despair, but love. She writes about her traumas, about how the pain she has endured will stay with her always. And she writes about what fuels her—to fight, yes, but also to live: her fierce belief in freedom. Her deep love for land, family, home. Her utter conviction. It’s in everything she writes and everything she does.

10. A Poetry Collection that’s Not in Translation but Feels Like it Could Be

This is a dense and beautiful book about language and inhabiting language and bodies and inhabiting bodies. It’s about the intersection of bodies and language. What does it mean to live in a body whose language is often misunderstood/misused/violated? What does it mean to speak a language that no one else can understand, but everyone can hear? What does it feel like to be cut off from the kin who speak your language, to have no routes back to where your language came from?

And Beauty

• A Room of One Own’s Books is still accepting donations for their annual Books for Black Bookish Wonders initiative. They received a ton of requests this year and they will keep filling them as long as they have funds.

• I listened to this amazing conversation between Hanif Abdurraqib and Ross Gay last week. It was everything. I highly recommend taking an hour to watch it.

• I’m slowly reading The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand. I may be slightly obsessed with villanelles at the moment. I love this one.

• I really enjoyed this piece about the eclipse by Rachel Kolb.

• Fellow birders, you might be interested in this upcoming virtual event: Birders for Palestine: Solidarity Action Hour with Feminist Bird Club.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I love my road in every season.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!