about > reading

i hate rereading so all of these i've basically only read once, apart from some of the essays. there's too much shit out there to read something when you already know what it says?! where i can i've linked to pdf's - but support the authors if you can.

  • monster culture (seven theses) - jeffrey jerome cohen, theses on monsters - china mieville, and can the monster speak - paul b preciado

    • my process of understanding myself ~as a trans woman~ (which is obv still in progress) involved simultaneously breaking down a lot of real self hatred for my apperance, and in coming to accept the way that trans women are seen and feared, to prepare myself to become one. i filtered a lot of that through the idea of the 'monster', and I'm deeply greatful to these essays for helping me to do that.

  • nevada - imogen binnie

    • yeah, i know. bite me. this basically resolved any lingering 'am i trans' thoughts. i've never felt so seen.

  • the etched city - k.j. bishop

    • absolutely beautiful. a strange, dreamlike book, following a pretty evil gunslinger and a surgeon with a 'ghost conscience'. one of the best in the 'weird fiction' subgenre, which has been strangely forgotten - it's not even in print in the uk anymore?! cw for all sorts of horrible violence. some of my favourite quotes from it, to give you a flavour:-

    "While watching the slow execution, she had recalled an old story of a prophet who, at one point in his career, was met by an angel who cut him open from throat to groin. The angel then washed the prophet's heart with holy water, and filled it with gems symbolising knowledge and faith. She had thought, abstractly, 'Wouldn't we all like to imagine that we are so within, filled with valuable, beautiful and indestructible things, not this vulnerable and stinking offal?'"

    "We modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which todays poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreathes of poetry and bouquets of painting.

    You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.

    I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled towards a normality that can better accommodate us."

  • the name of the rose - umberto eco

    • i don't know how he did it but eco fit about 20 books inside this one. maybe one of the only books to properly convey how people in the past had the same desires and human condition as us, but thought so so differently about the world. some of the best prose you'll ever read.

    ""For all her shouting, she was as if mute. There are words which give power, others that make us all the more derelict, and to this latter category belong the vulgar words of the simple, to whom the Lord has not granted the boon of self expression in the universal tongue of knowledge and power"."

  • minima moralia - theodor adorno

    • a grumpy cunt describes how even the smallest things in life are fascist. a friend said "it sounds exactly like having a conversation with you". unfortunately for my self esteem i fucking love this book, and it is blazingly useful to actually understand the fascist cultural moment we're in. alienation laid bare.

    "They lie badly, which alone really makes the lie a moral offence against the other. It implies his stupidity, and so serves to express contempt. Among today’s adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.”


    here's everything i've read that i've put on my goodreads, since about ~late 2023. honestly i give up on books i'm not feeling fairly often. if i've pushed through to the end and logged it then it's probably at least worth a read.