Some Books from the First Half of 2023
"I am not America's nightmare; I am the American Dream."
—"Crazy, Classic, Life," Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer
I'm going to be switching up how I talk about books online. For the first half of this year, I was posting on a Twitter thread little mini thoughts about the books I read. You can read my thoughts on books 1–128 in this thread. I'm going to switch that to my blog since I feel this blog will be a little more stable than the current quaking occurring in the social media world.
I did want to bring attention, though, to some of the books that really gripped me through the first half of 2023.
Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons
The metaphor for this book is rather simple: women become dragons. It doesn't happen to all women, but when they do become dragons, they are mistakenly treated as anethema by the society. Barnhill weaves a rather blunt comparison to the #MeToo Movement and #BelieveWomen, which is actually why I liked the text—it's unmistakably forward about its positions and agenda.
RD Pires, A Vast, Unethered Ocean
This book is haunting—and it's about a haunting. Brooklyn is haunted by the ghost of his late partner, Ollie. To deal with this haunting, Brooklyn goes on a road trip to return to the moment when he and Ollie met. It's sad, but it's also heartening. I became a Pires fan through his short story collection (see below), but this solidified my love of this author's ability to uncover the heart and soul in a way that considers the vastness of human experience.
Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us
After a charismatic religious group starts the apocalypse through a pandemic, the only thing to stand against it is an LGBTQ+ center. Hell Followed With Us strikes all the things I love: science fiction, queerness, religion. It's a meditation on that struggle between the realization that your born-into family has done really bad things and your found family provides solutions that are better than your born-into family. It's harrowing in the most post-apocalyptic (or just apocalyptic) sense.
Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea
I describe this book as Arrival meets the present orca uprising (see: yachts being sunk by whales) but with octopi. It’s about communication, society, and engagement with difference. Nayler's approach to the text is very classic science fiction, but instead of just scientific exploration, Nayler's work also emphasizes humanity and character. The scientific musings are excellent; the novum and cognitive estrangement are strong enough to take you into a new world and well enough to mediate the alien with the familiar; and the characters are sincere, working toward science in a broken world.
RD Pires, A Sky Littered with Stories
This short story collection of Pires provides a good introduction to the span of ability that Pires has. My favorite part of the collection was the subtle fantastical and speculative moments—none were overt space-faring science fiction but each had a sprinkle of magic, reminiscent to magical realism or Poe's short stories. I can't stress this part enough: Pires's writing haunts. And it haunts in a certain Morrisonian way that I rather enjoy.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
I read this book for my African-American Literary Theory class, and it was a rather good end to the trajectory of African-American literary theory and where it will go. Sharpe meditates on various meanings of being "in the wake"—the wake of slave ships crossing the Atlantic; the wake celebrating the life and mourning the loss of a fellow human being to violence; the wake of living. Sharpe's work is a combination of literary critcism, cultural theory, and Black studies that I simply and thoroughly love.
Janelle Monáe, The Memory Librarian
This short story collection builds on the creative work Monáe did in Dirty Computer, her album from 2018. In the album, she forwarded a world in which any body that does not conform to the normative is considered a "dirty computer," something that must be removed from the world. Her album and short story collection work in tandem to develop a science fictional world that brings to a forefront the struggle of queer and Black experience but also its joy—in discovery, in exploration, and in love.
Image of a stack of the books discussed in this blog post.
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