Further reading (2020-2022)

Journal

22 Mar 2024 — Further reading (2020-2022)

Three lists.

When I arrived in France in 2019, another writer asked what I was currently reading. ‘Nothing,’ I had to reply, embarrassed. I was living out of a suitcase for an unknown period of time. Books were limited cargo. I read the books on strangers’ shelves and listened to audiobooks when commuting. In 2021, with suitcases unpacked in London, and six months of lockdown still ahead of me, I set myself the goal of increasing my reading to one book per fortnight. I made it, just.

I thought I’d replicate the same goal in 2022, but when I started reading, I found I had doubled my pace. I read an unimaginable one book per week. Many of them were small and the majority were fiction. I worked and I read. And admittedly, I abandoned podcasts in the process.

Here are three (long) lists of what I read in 2022, 2021, 2020.

Books read in 2022
In 2022, I chose three tracts to guide what I read:

- speculative fiction
- knowledges for Earth-bound flourishing
- understanding England

... plus a few just-because reads.

Reading in 2022 was a journey through Blak and Black radical imagination, Korean and Japanese lit, sci-fi, urbanism, and a mid-year care package of Australian identity reads from Sarah Hyne. I devoured Deborah Levy’s living autobiography and wondered how I could possibly go on without her voice/wisdom/wit in my ears as I commute through London (and life). I began noticing and gathering learnings from the feminist oracles among these texts — adrienne maree brown, Françoise Vergès, Audre Lorde — wisdom keepers/sharers guiding us on how to do life on Earth differently.

Documented by order with medium specified.

[A] audio
[T] tangible

1 [T] Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta
2 [A] Winter, Ali Smith
3 [T] The Plague, Albert Camus
4 [T] The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K Le Guin
5 [T] The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne
6 [A] Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Robin Wall Kimmerer
7 [T] Then, Now, Maybe., Rosie Fea
8 [A] Octavia’s Brood, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha
9 [A] Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy
10 [T] Short Stories of Apocalypse, Emergency Magazine
11 [A] The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
12 [A] Troubling Love, Elena Ferrante
13 [A] Real Estate, Deborah Levy
14 [T] Keeping the House, Tice Cin
15 [A] Spring, Ali Smith
16 [T] The Word for World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin
17 [A] Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
18 [A] Luster, Raven Leilani
19 [A] Black Vodka, Deborah Levy
20 [T] Oval, Elvia Wilk
21 [T] Another Now, Yanis Varoufakis
22 [A] My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
23 [A] To the River, Olivia Laing
24 [T] Fire Country, Victor Steffensen
25 [A] Summer, Ali Smith
26 [A] The Writing Life, Annie Dillard
27 [T] Grievers, adrienne maree brown
28 [T] Wild Seed, Octavia E Butler
29 [A] The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri
30 [A] Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
31 [T] Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
32 [T] New Australian Fiction 2021, Kill Your Darlings
33 [T] Too Much Lip, Melissa Lucashenko
34 [A] Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D. G. Kelley
35 [T] When I dare to be powerful: Women so empowered are dangerous, Audre Lorde
36 [A] How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi
37 [A] Companion Piece, Ali Smith
38 [T] Winter in Sokcho, Elisa Shua Dusapin
39 [A] All the Lovers in the Night, Mieko Kawakami
40 [T] Small Bodies of Water, Nina Mingya Powles
41 [A] Lies, Damned Lies, Claire G Coleman
42 [T] Mind of my Mind, Octavia E. Butler
43 [T] Beggar’s Belief: Stories from Gerald’s Bar, Gerald Diffey
44 [A] A Short History of the World According to Sheep, Sally Coulthard
45 [A] I want to die but I want to eat tteokbokki, Baek Sehee
46 [T] Meanwhile City, Milk
47 [A] Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
48 [T] The Neighborhood, B Magazine
49 [T] Growing up in country Australia, edited by Rick Morton
50 [A] Heaven, Mieko Kawakami
51 [T] Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown
52 [T] A Decolonial Feminism, Françoise Vergès

How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

Books read in 2021
Reading in 2021 was a year of following new interests: actively exploring speculative fiction and design, and expanding what a writing practice might look like with these new inputs. I started reading Ali Smith’s seasons quartet in the matching season, assuming I would learn about this place and this climate, and gaining so much more. I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which shifted my language and ways of knowing towards landscape/Country. Kimmerer continues to be a key reference for me — if you’ve read any of my essays for SPACE10 and Peppermint the past few years, I continue to find inspiration in the learnings of Braiding Sweetgrass, as well as her essays The Serviceberry and Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System, both published by Emergence Magazine.

In 2021, I separated my documentation of what I was reading by medium.

Tactile:

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose
The Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler
After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad
In The Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
2038 The New Serenity, German Pavillion, Venice Biennale 2021
Intimations, Zadie Smith
Reworlding: Ramadallah, Six Science Fiction Stories from Palestine
Fiction Practice: Prototyping the Otherworldly
Radical Softness as a boundless form of resistance, Be Oakley
Misfits, Michaela Coel
The Dispossessed, Ursula K Le Guin
Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith

Audio:

Kokomo, Victoria Hannan
NW, Zadie Smith
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman
Second Place, Rachel Cusk
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo
Autumn, Ali Smith
Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson
Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney
Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown
Swallow the Air, Tara June Winch

...unless the past and future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go.

— Shevek in The Dispossessed

Books read in 2020
Here are tactile books found in sublets and borrowed from roommates. Gemma gifted me two Virginia Woolf classics when she upped sticks from London. I read Octavia Butler for the first time, and from here my reading (and work) shifts towards speculative futures and radical imagination. I listened to Rachel Cusk’s trilogy and finished Elena Ferrante’s quartet. While living in France, I found myself tuning into US politics more than I did while living in Australia, and listening to US authors too. Australian authors — Claire G Coleman, Tara June Winch, Tony Birch — reflect desires to maintain connection to home.

Tactile:

Milk and honey, Rupi Kaur
Let my people go surfing, Yvon Chouinard
Claudine at School, Colette
The Outsider, Albert Camus
The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon
The Power, Naomi Alderman
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Parable of the Sower, Octavia E Butler
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Audio:

The story of the lost child, Elena Ferrante
Becoming, Michelle Obama
Outline, Rachel Cusk
The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman
Cherry Beach, Laura McPhee-Browne
Beauty, Bri Lee
Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld
The White Girl, Tony Birch
Growing Up African in Australia, edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke
Transit, Rachel Cusk
Kudos, Rachel Cusk
The Yield, Tara June Winch
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante
Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid

All that you touch you change.
All that you change changes you.
The only lasting truth is change.

— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Further reading

Books read in 2023
Emergence Magazine