This year has not only been fruitful academically and writing-wise—the joys of getting nearly double the submissions accepted into poetry magazines, an internship with and my first ever featured reading with Poetry As Promised in Allentown, which is relatively wise but also reading-wise. I saw Christopher Schroeder’s Substack post about books he read this year, and I decided to add my spin on it. I hope you enjoy this, Mr. Schroeder.
My categories are as follows: books I read for school (i.e. for a class), books I read for my thesis, and books I read for funsies/extracurricular books. This is because as of right now, those are the categories I am reading books for, fortunately, or unfortunately. Hopefully, when I graduate next fall, I will get a respite from reading books “for school” (that is until I go to library school which will happen about a year or so after I graduate).
For books I had to read for school, I would recommend, as I am sure English teachers and professors have for time immemorial (okay, less than 100 years), TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. A searing critique of modernism, in particular how it deadens people, is unfortunately tinged by the Bleistein stanza and its latent anti-Semitism. At some point, I will write an essay about TS Eliot and anti-Semitism (and repost my essay on Yeats, anti-Semitism, and fascism) here, but this week is not the time. Regarding more poetry, I’d also recommend Gwendolyn Brooks’ Blacks. It is a compendium of full publications of her first two books—A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen and selections from her works after that. It was so good that I decided not to return it to Bryn Mawr (if you work at the bookstore, I’m sorry I didn’t return it, dw, I’ll get my sour gum). Some other notables are Between Dignity and Despair by Marion Kaplan about Jews in Nazi Germany, and War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris L. Bergen. Both of these were for my history class on the Holocaust, and for any undergraduate reading this, I’d recommend taking a class on it. This is not to promote any usage or invocation of the Holocaust in politics since 1945 (jewbelong.org signs, anyone?) but to understand its effect on Europe and the way that said history has been told, centering some groups (Jews, mentally ill/”undesirables” and prisoners of war) and marginalizing others (Roma, Sinti, homosexuals because Section 175 was still on the books which prevented survivors from speaking out until the 1970s, Black Germans or Europeans in general) in doing so. I’d also recommend the article Transfixed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the 'Kommandeuse of Buchenwald' by Alexandra Przyrembel: I’ve been thinking about its discussions of Koch being in the camp as violating how SS wives and girlfriends behaved with regards to the camp (as seen in other books like Hitler’s Furies). Honorary recommendations include Arthur Williamson’s “A Empire to End Empire: The Dynamics of Early Modern British Expansion”, my professor’s book on pirates (a few chapters, and it’s called ), literally anything by Barbara Fuchs, David Harvey’s article “The Right to the City” (which I wrote an amazing response on) and every other article I read on theory or the topics we covered in my Brooks and Yeats (yes, reading the two poets TOGETHER), Cities class on Philadelphia, History of the Holocaust, Pirates course, Modern English Poetry from Tennyson to Eliot and a few others I forgot to mention (except Geology, but that was more lab work than anything).
Speaking of my thesis—in a way—I have over 100 articles and books to read. And those that I have got through have been a joy to do so, not just counting my Somerset Maugham books, which I will be writing about here. In my reading of Said’s Culture and Imperialism (which I did not intend to start the weekend after the latest conflict escalation in Israel-Palestine), The Empire and the Century, a 1906 British foreign policy review which is fascinating (and I think you can find online) edited by Sydney Goldman, Colonialism and Homosexuality, by Robert Aldrich, and so many other Zotero articles that would make this article a saga if I included all of them, I narrowed my topic from discussing Maugham, imperialism and homosexuality, with a subtheme about race, to discussing Maugham, the role of authority in the short stories I’m looking at, racism, in particular the role of denigrating plantation workers, often Malaysian and South Indian workers, in doing so, and homosexuality, in particular the belief by colonizers of the colonized nations having more liberal attitudes on homosexuality, which they did not.
In the final category of nonschool books, we have poetry and prose categories. I read a lot more poetry than prose, most likely because I am a poet and want to read from as many poets as possible. Many amazing poetry collections were released, from Terrance Hayes’s So To Speak to mimi tempestt’s the delicacy of embracing spirals. Hayes’s poem “George Floyd” is one of the best poems on his death and the BLM protests in the summer of 2020. Plus, some amazing wordplay. I got to see tempestt perform act two of their book after being anxious. I put the heat on the laptop playing her balm words which helped the churn in my stomach. Their words helped me with my anxiety attack, and I’d recommend reading Act 2, where, to loosely quote the summary “the staging of a play has life or death consequences.” Some other poets I liked are Sam Sax’s Pig ( a review out soon), Franny Choi's the world keeps ending, and the world keeps going on, mary alice daniel’s Mass for shut ins, saeed jones’s alive at the end of the world, and johnny francis wolf’s unapologetic. With regards to prose, it was a short list, given that I read a lot more poetry. I’d recommend Carl Phillips my trade is Mystery and care work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. This book changed how I think about community, not just online but in the “real” world. We are in many ways limited by disability and the shame around needs like toileting, accessing food, et cetera, and that affects how we give and receive care, plus preexisting identifiers like race, gender, etc.
May we have a better year than the one before us? Hoping for amazing writing this year and for this newsletter to grow.