Volume 4, No. 8: Bottomless Sadness & Books I'm Not Reading

Greetings, book and treat people! I was on vacation last week, and I purposely stayed off the internet. I didn’t look at my email, read the news, or scroll social media. It was a magical week full of wildlife and wonder. I still can’t really believe it happened, though I am deeply grateful to be home and reunited with my doggo love. I was also profoundly aware, all through the days during which I was not engaging with the world beyond what I could see of it, of the ongoing genocide, of all the lives shattered and destroyed. So many Palestinians were killed last week. Nex Benedict, an Indigenous trans teenager, was murdered at his high school in Oklahoma. I came home to the news of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US airman who self-immolated in protest of the genocide in Palestine.

I am bottomlessly sad. I don’t know how else to describe this feeling. I want to write something meaningful about all of it, but I can’t, not yet. I have been reading and thinking and trying to process what is not processable. I don’t have any words. I haven’t shared any tweets or takes or graphics or links to the thoughtful, painful, beautiful, heartrending words of smart people I admire, because none of it feels big enough in this moment to hold the names of all the lives empire has claimed. What I have is this bottomless sadness.

I can’t stop thinking about this one line in Martyr! The protagonist, Cyrus, is obsessed with the idea of martyrdom—meaningful death. His mother died in a way he believes was meaningless, and he is desperate for his own death to matter. At one point, when explaining what he means by “a meaningful death” he says that what he wants is “a death that is legible at the scale of empire.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

This idea, death legible at the scale of empire, haunts me. I’m not sure that any individual death is ever legible to empire. I’m not sure that any individual life is, either. I woke up thinking I’d wrangle this haunting into an essay, but I can’t. I’m too sad, and the world, grotesquely, keeps spinning. I’m too sad, and, grotesquely, I can’t just sit with my sadness and turn it into words, because I have to get back to doing the work that pays my bills. So instead of an essay, only this half-awake thought that we—people with broken hearts and weird desires, people who love specific places and kiddos and creatures, people with whole worlds beating in our chests—are never legible to empire, not in our lives or in our deaths. This half-awake thought that movements—big unwieldy waves of us—might be. This half-awake thought that maybe being legible to empire is not what we should be striving for. This half-awake thought that maybe we should be striving to become more legible to each other.

I haven’t been reading much at all, but this newsletter is theoretically about books, so here are the seven books that are currently on my coffee table with bookmarks in them. I really do want to get back to all of them, but I’m also practicing gentleness with myself. If my brain rejects reading, it rejects reading.

---

Books I’m Not Reading

An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis: This feels like the right book to be reading right now. It was published in 1974, when Davis was 30. There is so much we can all learn from her wisdom and her clarity. So much hasn’t changed.

The Women’s House of Detention by Hugh Ryan: The first section of Davis’s biography is about the time she spent in The Women’s House of Detention, where she was taken when she was first captured by the FBI. It’s wild to read her first-hand account of being jailed there alongside this history. I haven’t gotten past the introduction, but Hugh Ryan is such a careful, thoughtful, brilliant historian—I know I am going to love this book through my rage.

A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu, tr. by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse: I started this book in January, read the first 15 pages, and then set it aside. Sometimes this happens. It has nothing to do with my feelings about the book. I bought it because I absolutely adored the first novel I read by Rytkheu, When the Whales Leave. I’m determined to read everything he wrote that’s been translated into English. This is a historical novel about a Canadian sailor stranded in Siberia and the time he spends with the Chukchi people who live there. One of my goals this year is to read more books by Indigenous authors from outside North America, so hopefully I will get back to this one soon!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: I started rereading this as soon as I finished reading it for the first time. I put my reread on hold during my trip, but I think about this novel every single day, and it’s really the only book I want to be reading. Everything about it feels incandescently urgent. Book of this moment, book of my heart, book of my life.

Ecologia by Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen: This is my current poetry collection (for a given value of current, anyway). Unbound Edition Press sent me a copy last fall and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since! So far the poems are long and conversational. They are about the pandemic, food, memory, trans life.

Lote by Shola von Reinhold: I’m currently rereading this with the Queer Your Year Book Club! It was one of our picks for February, and yes, I know February is basically over. But it was a weird reading month for me, and time is made up anyway. I’m savoring this beloved book slowly, and it’s not to late to join book club and come talk about it with me!

West Wind by Mary Oliver: I’m trying to read one Mary Oliver book every month this year. I doubt I’ll finish this one in February, but who cares. Her work is always a gift and a pleasure.

I did finish two audiobooks recently: Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly and Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson. I adored them both. Greta & Valdin is a family saga about two queer Māori siblings. It’s warm and funny and smart and I adored every single person in it, despite (because of) their flaws. Small Fires is a brilliant memoir (plus) about recipes. I love cooking and I do a lot of it. This book rewired my brain and completely changed how I think about recipes—as art, epics, collaborations, sites of protest and connection.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I got to see a truly spectacular place last week, full of humbling landscapes and creatures that made me feel beautifully small.

Catch you next week, bookish friends.