Living deep in the thicket of fall meant countless trips to the library; I read a battered copy of Princess Jellyfish by Akiko Higashimura, which I would have loved as a 12 year old, and which made me think of my 12 year old self more gently. Weird little girls rule my world. After, another book that didn’t do much for me, Gmorning, Gnight, by Lin-Manuel Miranda (illustrated by Jonny Sun). Then, Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which is wretched and wild and gorgeous and made me sit up in bed as if I could get the words inside of me better. Still think about it now.
And I stood and breathed their air and considered – as always – things like fragility, danger, luck, imperfection, chance, being kind, being funny, being honest, eyes, hair, bones, the impossible hectic silent epidermis rejuvenating itself, never nervous, always kissable, even when scabbed, even so salty I made it, and I felt so many nights utterly, totally yanked apart by how much I loved these children, and I asked them, loudly: Do you want to MOVE ON?
— Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Then began my comics binge, which is what I do when I get into reading slumps. First it was The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge (trans. Ryan Holmberg), which was creepy and wet, then SFSX by Tina Horn (illustrated by Michael Dowling, Alejandra Gutierrez, Jen Hickman, Tula Lotay), which was just wet but then also a little dry, then volume 2 of Moomin by Tove Jansson which was big and beautiful like the moon.
Then: Umma’s Table by Yeon-Sik Hong (trans. Janet Hong), which had me crying at the kitchen table at 8pm on a Monday, Moms by Yeong-shin Ma (also trans. Janet Hong) which was a riot, and The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita (trans. Ryan Holmberg) which bothered me but only a little.
After that I took a brief trip to Boston. On the plane ride back, in the dark and looking at the slow writhe of clouds out the window, I read poetry for the first time in a while — Come, Thief by Jane Hirschfield, and Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, and felt like I had finally walked upon some kind of clearing in a very deep forest where stuff was hanging out and chill and I was able to talk to it, at last, in a way that had been inaccessible to me for a long time. I think I am also just stuck on this metaphor because I am halfway through Long Strange Trip, which describes the Grateful Dead as the green meadow clearing in the forest of that age’s music industry.
In the last week of work before the holidays, when I was at my most exhausted, I read Ultrasound by Conor Stechschulte, which was twisty and made such interesting use of layers and pencil crayon that he made me mistrust the whole thing, except in a good way. Then Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (trans. Sam Bett and David Boyd) which I had started at the beginning of October, the very first book I checked out of the library branch next door after moving, which started quietly and also ended quietly, but still violent in such a realistic, internal way that makes it hard to forget. Finished with This Wound is a World by Billy-Ray Belcourt, whose exhibits and talks I had gone to a few times but had never actually read any of his work — enjoyed.
That’s all for now (and probably for the year). I had a very good time with books this year.