While I was in rehab, I read a lot of books, some were really good, some I wasn’t really feeling.
First one was great, a book called 2 Trans 2 Furious, a collection of poems, essays, stories, and art about Fast and Furious made by trans people. I could not stop laughing at this book the entire time, the sense of humor was on point. I had never seen Fast and Furious before this, and it made me love the movie when I did eventually watch one (I watched 4, wow it’s so gay. Family.) The book has unexpected emotional moments, some decent body horror, and a lot of comedy. Would recommend. The cis people at my rehab wanted to burn it when I talked about it, so you know it has to be a good one. Check this out if you’re trans and love a good high effort shit post
Second one I read was also great. Normal Sucks by Johnathan Mooney. This book really changed how I viewed the world. It’s part personal narrative written by a person with ADHD and Dyslexia, part history lesson on the way normal came to be, part stories of the disabled. There’s a lot in this book, and it’s fantastic. I will warn, the author does use the r***** word a few times in the book, but in the context it’s being used I don’t find it offensive. Check this out if you want to be a nicer person.
Third book I read was Bible Belt Queers, a collection of art, poems, personal narratives and other such things from well queers from the Bible Belt. I was so so on this book, I found the essays and personal narratives to be really strong, but I didn’t really care for the artistic side of the book. Some of the poems were good, but most of them seemed to drag a bit, and a lot of the art didn’t really catch my eye or was too cluttered for a book page. Maybe I would have felt different about some of these if I saw them on a computer screen or a canvas, but wasn’t a fan of the art in the book. Your mileage may vary though, check it out if it sounds interesting.
Fourth was Fast Time in Palestine by Pamela Olson. The library I was at was fairly conservative, so there weren’t a lot of picks for books on Palestine that weren’t Zionist, so I picked up this one. My biggest criticism of this book is it’s written by a Midwestern American and it often shows, but as she spends more time in Palestine she seems to understand the local’s positions more and more as she sees the oppression they’re under. It’s split between her personal narrative and the stories of horrific violence her Palestinian friends had witnessed, with occasional bits of information about how the genocide is enabled by the rest of the world interspersed throughout. This book is a good read to anybody who isn’t 100 percent sure about what’s going on in Palestine, definitely one I’d hand off to lib friends, not sure if anybody here would really care for it though.
Fifth and final book is A Land with A People, a collection of essays, poems, and art from Palestinians and Jews confronting Zionism. This was a much better read than Fast Times, diving much deeper into the problems of Zionism, into its history, its effects on both a wide scale and a personal scale through both art and essays. This book is really high quality, albeit a bit hard to read as a monolingual English speaker (I was in rehab, I couldn’t Google the anglicized Arabic words, give me a break) but even with the occasional linguistic problems I still got a lot out of this book. I wouldn’t give this book to libs because it goes hard on terms like settler-colonialism, but I appreciated it actually tackling that so much. 10/10 would read again.
What should I read next? What have you read recently that’s interesting?
What type of thing are you wanting to read? Any topic in particular?
We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel is good if you’re in the mood for another trans poetry book.
Transgender Marxism edited by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Joanne Gleeson is a pretty fun collection of essays, as is Susan Stryker and Stephen Wittle’s The Transgender Studies Reader.
If you want something else Palestine-oriented, Ahed Tamimi’s They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl’s Fight For Freedom is a pretty good memoir from a young girl’s perspective (she was thrown in jail for slapping an IOF soldier back in 2018 when she was a teenager).
Nada Elia’s Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine is a good overview at feminist movements in Palestine.
I was a big fan of El Jones’ Abolitionist Intimacies and Ardath Whynacht’s Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide.
Currently reading Zheng Wang’s Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964 which has been pretty interesting so far, as well as Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide which has been hit or miss, but introduced me to the concept of Learning Cities, an educational concept that China began experimenting with in 61 locations in the early 00s (80% of Beijing’s streets had an educational centre by the end of the decade as part of this; they leveraged their administrative levels to establish Learning Families, which networked to create Learning Streets, which networked to create Learning Neighbourhoods, and then Learning Districts, on to Learning Cities (with the ultimate aim of networking Learning Cities into Learning Provinces, and thusly creating a Learning Nation). This was really interesting to read while reading Finding Women in the State, as the administrative levels here mirror those used by the Women’s Federation in the 50s to engage women throughout the country in the socialist project.