What I read in 2020, a thread.

(I’m sorry.)

Five otherworldly embodiments of nature converge on an island to scupper a bomb test. The imagery shifts like ferrofluid, as do the characters. A forestful of ideas packed into a single, 83-leaf tree. Beautiful, psychotic and the most sane thing I’ve read in a while.

It’s straightforward, dry, uncluttered and, as the dedication points out, it’s already too late. There’s tactics in here I’ve seen deployed by anonymous TERFs and Prime Ministers alike. Think, ‘A Modest Proposal’ rewritten as a cookbook. Eat your heart out, Jonathan Swift.

This passage stood out. Minorities are constantly accused of “playing the victim” - snowflakes, crybabies, fragile. We don’t choose those words, our enemy does. Fascism needs us to appear weak because *they need to appear weaker.* If we’re strong (AND WE ARE), we’re a threat.

So while I wasn’t going to do resolutions in 2020, I think I’ve just found one: be strong, and bring out the strength in others. If the fascist tide thrives on convincing us we’re weak, remember: Queer *is* Power.

To quote @HRFMichael - “I would, actually, choose to be gay.”

Easily my favourite @Gutter_Magazine so far. The writing here is of course great in its own right, but literature opens doors to experiences beyond our own, and every single page of #21 was (for me) an education. I can’t thank @ScotBAMEwriters enough for working with us on this.

This was also my last run as the prose reviews editor (typesetting and designing a whole mag is quite enough responsibilty, thank you very much) and I’m so glad for my final spin on the decks we got to hand the entire section over to writers of colour reviewing writers of colour.

On A Sunbeam reminded me, I don’t know how to read comics when the images aren’t vessels for the words. Of course, a queer speculative sci-fi about rebuilding ruins and doing crimes, I enjoyed it immensely, but so much is told with empty space and silence, which I sped through.

It took 33 years to realise its best to read cookbooks like actual books. I love Indian Vegetarian’s spreads of full dinner tables. Anna Jones is full Midsommar Minimalism but also more adventurous, if a bit dependent on food processors and double-podding peas, whatever that is.

(If you want a seasonal supply of cookbooks, work in a bookshop over Christmas. They make for easy gifts, which means they’re handled, and dropped, much more often, meaning shops tend to have trouble returning them to the publishers, and you can save them from the recycling bin.)

Cishet nonsense from long ago. Gave up on page 23. This is why I don’t read the “classics” any more.

Abandoning this one early too. You’d think a Pre-Lovecraft Lovecraft vibe without the racism would have me hooked but all the stories I’ve read so far suffer from a lack of direction - weird stuff happens, then people die or go mad or go mad and die. They’re not *about* much.

Like trying to read Woman on the Edge of Time, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and the seminal Internet 1.0 text Timecube simultaneously. That’s not a good thing. Even trying to read it as an autobiographical account of PKD’s reality-epiphanies was tough - it’s mostly nonsense.

There’s about 5% story for every 95% druggy psychobabble, which is a shame, as “Secret society of stoners stumble across alien probe exposing fabric of reality to those already mad enough to see it” is a great hook, and vivid flashes of humanism could have grounded it, but, no.

Look, if I’m going to make the effort to concentrate on reading during a lockdown I’m damn well going to lean the fuck in and pick a claustrophobic masterpiece, okay?

I think the mastery here is how long you’re kept waiting to see what sort of story is being told - is it a murder mystery, a dark comedy, a domestic invasion? - and always by the time you realise it’s something else, more groundwork has been laid for the reveal: an origin story.

Everything I liked from the first in the series (subversions of subversions of superhero tropes) there’s less of, and everything I disliked (clunky prose, repetitive characterisation, needless plot jumping and head hopping) in abundance. Do *not* know how it got good reviews.

To the extent that I gave up on page 120 (of 570) and skipped ahead to the 3/4 mark and it was as if I’d turned a single page - one of the main characters hadn’t progressed at all. Even accounting for the timeline hopping, that’s not great. Another on the Bad Reads of 2020 pile.

Dave Brandstetter is a genius creation: rich white masculine gay insurance fraud detective with a secret dead lover and a media-savvy black boyfriend in the seventies in 70/80s LA, socially liminal walking privilege surrounded by folk who want to hate him even as he tries to help

Hansen is a fairly reliable read: I know the story’s twisty, the dialogue’s sharp, another character enters halfway through almost every chapter prompting a change in pace. But the covers. Jeezo. Unrepresentative and boring and absolutely hiding the fact that it is GAAAAAAAY

Now, something completely different.

Published 1981, and very slightly updated for 2015, After Man is like an Attenborough documentary set 50mil years in the future. At the time it was accused of scaremongering, as if humans had a right to the future. That seems laughable now.

In 2020, the illustrations are ripe for “WTF tag urself” memes, which is a shame, as a lot of the wackier animals (and their Pokemonesque names) are meant as a reminder, evolution doesn’t give a fuck, and survival of the fittest has never meant survival of the most predictable.

All the same, tag urself

Also, true to life, a lot of the smaller animals are constantly screaming.

There’s something to be said about books finding you at the right time. If I’d read this ten years ago, I’d have had the stamina but not the patience to finish it. Right now, I have the patience, but I am exhausted. Back on the to-be-read shelf you go, Whitman. Someday!

My turn as reader for @Gutter_Magazine came around again, and my personal stand-outs from Issue 22 are @AndresNOrdorica @samlwalton, @RhiannonAGrist, @HeatherParryUK, & @miriamvaswani - all dark and delicious in their own way - but the whole issue’s once again full of pure gems!

It’s funny, I had slacked somewhat on updating this thread (for no reason other than distractedness) and it now feels deliberate, because I’m pretty certain I could design a literary studies course on post-postmodern bodies around these four books without really trying.

@jamieredgate brought it all together with his piece in @extrateethmag on how, after a century or more of technology abstracting our bodies, Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love started us on a journey back to bodies as unavoidable - albeit malleable - truths. Great stuff.

Which of course came to mind when reading Emma Barnes in This Gender. “The eyes in your face” is so perfectly awkward, it reminds you, you too have a body, but also says: you have other ways of seeing. And the poem is all about those other ways which are so unavoidably bodily.

The collection plays around with reclaiming the messy reality of a body from the intellectual ether without simultaneously breaking that connection to mutability: you can change your mind, and you can change your body, but you can’t change one without also changing the other.

Then this! @JulianKJarboe quotes keeps going minorly viral because their book is fucking excellent. I can’t think of anything I’ve read that feels so *now*, both jaded and manic, where the only way back from bone-tired might be through a divinity you no longer believe in. Get it.

Finally, bringing it full circle: @HRFMichael’s collection about an ageless goddess of death discovering a final form in the body of a fracking, apocryphally murderous, televised drag superstar, who despite everything bestows life, is exactly as unhinged as it sounds. I love it.

I haven’t managed to read very much this Summer (there are more calming ways to avoid The Unpleasantness than interrogating the intersections between the reality of the body, the unreality of death until it’s on your doorstep) but these last four entries have been absolute joys.