Surprise surprise, I changed my mind entirely !!! So you get a few selected reviews for some of my favorite favorite books from the past two years as well as the links to my GoodReads shelves for the rest !!! Happy New Year to all those who celebrate !!!!!! 🌟🎄❄️☃️🏖 🌟🎄❄️☃️🏖 🌟🎄❄️☃️🏖
Early on in the pandemic, someone on my timeline prompted readers for the first movie they ever saw alone in theaters. Mine – according to Letterboxd – was Annihilation in March of 2018, at The Landmark on Pico in LA, while I was still in college. It would be the first of many, many subsequent movies I would see alone.
In my reply, I wrote that I saw it at a time when I was still feeling a lot of things I thought I was supposed to have already gotten over by that point, like isolation and impostor syndrome. I was awfully lonely to begin with, but this solo moviegoing came to be a very special, private ritual for me, one that allowed me to feel settled in my own brain, where it was rich and florid and filled with presence even though, after all, it was just me in there.
Annihilation the novel is markedly different from Annihilation the film. The former is much more interior, far less linear, equally interested in construction as de-construction (all of which I prefer). It’s an example of what I personally think the science fiction and speculative fiction genres should aim to achieve: ultimately, a reflection on human nature, removed from any timeline.
The Stranger, by Albert Camus
I think I’m entering the stage of life (or quarter-life crisis, or whatever) where absurdism is really starting to click for me. Not in a depressing way. It’s more hopeful, like “everything is meaningless, so I am freed from any sort of predestined doom.” This thread does so much of a better job getting at what I mean:
Oh, Elena. My Brilliant Friend is the blueprint for writing female friendships – messy while well-intentioned; biting, yet at the same time fiercely tender. Shifting under the metaphorical rubble of postwar Naples, their rivalry is padded by the intimate kinship that can only exist between two bright young girls in a provincial neighborhood that doesn’t know what to do with bright young girls.
Circe and The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
If it hadn’t been for the last three chapters, The Song of Achilles probably wouldn’t have even made my favorites. But Miller writes grief in the most wrenching, electrifying, simply alive way – showing us that if we never get to experience losing a love as great in our own lifetimes, the only other possible alternative is to have the purest privilege of reading about it.
Circe… I will truly never, never, never be over you.
This is what it means for mythology to reveal the human condition; how much it matters to unpack hearsay with a feminist lens; how to touch on the thousands-of-years-old stores of feminine vengeance and bitterness and loss and erasure.
Nothing so fully consumes my attention like the mythological-level devastation wrought by female rage. And even so, here, “female rage” doesn’t account for the lengths a mother will go to protect her child, the sorrow of immortality in having to watch all of your loved ones die before you, of refusing to cooperate in a world built by men and gods.
Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
I think by this point, Perfect Blue has very clearly established itself as a pro-Trick Mirror, pro-cognitive dissonance space. Here is something I wrote about the book at the onset of 2021, on the cusp of mass vaccine circulation illuminating a potential end to the tunnel (at least in Western countries), that now feels more crushingly applicable than ever going into 2022:
“We know delusions are dangerous. They enable justifications for bigotry and hate; they diminish irrefutable realities; they revel in the devastating fracturing of society. But delusions may also be the engine powering what we call “optimism”–– without delusions, how could we possibly believe in the value of individual contributions within broader social movements? How could we get through days (and we all know there were quite a few this year) that don’t always feel worth getting through for? 2020 for myself was a time of learning to sit comfortably in the cognitive dissonance between self-delusion and awareness of those delusions – “how can I believe in/act on X when I am/benefit from Y” – but here I am assuring you that from this vantage point the fog is not so thick, and you can finally see how much we owe to contradiction after all.”
This Bridge Called My Back (4th ed.) edited by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
One of my favorite Substacks, Tiny Driver, shared this anthology in an earlier newsletter as a part of the reading list for a class they were teaching titled “Asian Americans and Third World Solidarity.” The anthology reminded me a lot of a college seminar my friend taught in much of the same spirit, on sexual assault in AAPI communities. The readings she selected encouraged restorative over punitive justice and emphasized the necessity of community in the undertaking of healing. At that point in my education, both formal and informal, these readings were nothing short of revolutionary to my own thinking. I became more familiar with how working-class (immigrant, undocumented, refugee) communities and academia have been inextricably linked, each validating the other, and how both have always historically been wellsprings for radical thought and action.
In the Preface to the Fourth Edition, Moraga speaks of the Third World Feminist consciousness as a “transnational and increasingly complex movement of women today, whose origins reside in Asia, throughout the global south and in Indigenous North America” ... of re-introducing this collection of writings originally published in 1981 for the very fact of it being dated ... of the need for political memory “so that we are not always imagining ourselves the ever-inventors of our revolution.”
“… we mothers of the yam, of the rice, of the maize, of the plantain … The work: to make revolution irresistible.” – Toni Cade Bambara
