July Reading

This is my monthly wrap up where I talk about some of my favourite things from the last month. What I’m reading, enjoying, looking forward to—sort of anything floating my boat.

I have a bone to pick with manufactured slowness. It’s my impression that there’s a rise of people on the internet demanding we slow down. To be slow is to live well, they say. It’s almost like slow has become a currency.

While I get the idea there, and have attempted to produce slowness in my own life, it doesn’t always seem genuine. Breathing deep doesn’t feel good all the time. Sometimes you just want to pant, or yell, or hold your breath underwater to see how long you can last.

In July, I chose to reject slowness. Instead, I focused on not getting overwhelmed (a symptom of moving fast). I said yes to everything… really, so much… and I kept a cool head about it all.

Here is an overview of how my month went:

• Got a story published in Grain Magazine’s latest issue. It means so much to me and is my favourite published piece yet

• Went to Cape Cod and Boston, and made a video about it

• Got profiled in Fugues Magazine for their Pride issue…
  Fugues is a Montreal-based queer magazine that I grew up seeing plastered all around the Gay Village, so this is wild to me!!!

• Made so many cardamom buns it’s not even funny

  

• Started a new writing workshop! Very excited about it, the energy in the group is unreal

What I Read

Below is a rundown of every book I read last month. I’ll be adding a star next to my standouts, like a starred review where a star isn’t a 1 to 5 scale, it just means good!

Before the written ramblings, here is a video version of my monthly wrap up if you’re more of a visual person:

Tramps Like Us by Joe Westmoreland

Originally published in September, 2001, this novel is getting the second life it deserves with a team of queers bringing it back into print. It is a work of autofiction recounting a writer’s life growing up queer in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s.
I read this novel as I was trapped for three hours at a standstill on a tarmac. A storm passed over us and I was gripped by this hurricane of a novel.

It’s a very fast-paced account of a life from Missouri and New Orleans to San Francisco and New York City. We zoom through harrowing childhood abuse into a life of promiscuity and quest for love, connection, and drugs. At first, the breakneck speed felt like a challenge, and then became a rhythm to follow. I don’t think this will work for everyone, but it worked for me.

Built through snapshots of partying, fucking and falling in love, it feels like a new friend catching you up on their entire lore. It’s hazy, intense, and doesn’t coddle the reader—the first-hand account of watching your friends whither away at the hands of a virus will stick with me for a long time. This is like The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, but more matter-of-fact and more raw.

The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio (tr. by Ann Goldstein) ★

This novel is about a mother who was once a girl, her daughter who is no longer a girl, and a dark time in their family’s history when two girls died.

It is told through five parts, each one tracking a moment in the mother’s life: seeing her daughter go to college, her childhood making a best friend, seeing her daughter return because of COVID, and the unfolding mystery from when the mother was a teen.

I really love a mother/child story, and this does it beautifully. The disconnect, the misunderstandings, the way the mother’s history affects their relationship and the daughter feels like such a real product of their individual and shared circumstances. There’s also a through-line of violence or threat of violence at the hands of men that freckles the lives of these women and the women around them.

The writing is concise and sharp, the vibes are Italian countryside and unease… It’s a great summer read.

War of the Foxes by Richard Siken

I really loved Crush, Richard Siken’s first collection, so my expectations going into this were very high. That might be the reason I was slightly disappointed by this.

War of the Foxes is a poetry collection that is interested in the natural world, in the order of things. To me, that made this feel a little impersonal and like I was being held at arm’s length. There’s a lot of rumination and thought and search for meaning, but done in a way I thought felt like a half-truth. It was as if the layer underneath was being ignored.
Most of these poems didn’t make me feel and didn’t grip me through my body. This is something I was excited to get from reading Richard Siken.

I’m happy to say this comes down to personal preference. I like poetry that awakes something inside my physical form, that reminds me of it, that challenges it.

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns ★

This is my first read from this prolific English writer, and it’s a kooky one! I read because it came highly recommended by Malissa (the pinnacle of taste), she even states Comyns is her favourite author and I can see why.

The Vet’s Daughter feels like a 1950s take on “weird girl lit”—I know that sentence sounds so stupid and like I’m trying to box something in, but I only use it as a way to connect it to contemporary works.

The book is the coming of age of a young girl whose life is full of oddity. Her veterinarian and tyrant father is neglectful, and this only gets worse when her mother passes. What follows is hurdle after hurdle for our narrator as she finds a strange power within. She can levitate, but the story isn’t about that. It’s about her quest for love and belonging despite so many setbacks.

I was so taken by this novel’s style, the sharp writing, the darkness balanced with bright whimsy. I’m very excited to read more from Comyns.

Fox by Joyce Carol Oates

This 650 page brick was my return to reading enormous novels over the summer. It was one of the ways I fell in love with reading when I was younger, and I was glad to still find joy in it.

Fox is the story of a beloved and charming teacher in a prestigious academy, but it starts with his corpse being discovered. What follows is people in the town, students, parents and colleagues, as their lives weave together the before and after of his mysterious death. It’s like a big tree and we examine every branch closely until we can step back and see the whole thing.

I was surprised by the darkness in this. Mr. Fox is a sociopathic pedophile, and the novel doesn’t shy away from looking at that ugliness straight on. It also shows the very deep impacts on the young girls he sets his sights on.

As soon as I finished this book, I gave it to my mother-in-law. It’s a literary thriller for thriller readers. Still, I found it doing something very interesting in that genre and I am eager to read more from JCO.

The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz ★

This book has been sitting on my shelf for close to a year. I eyed it every so often, but felt I wasn’t quite ready for the darkness I’d find in its pages. When I finally picked it up, I was glad to find it balancing pitch black darkness and moments of lightness effortlessly.

The novel follows a queer man as he is faced with the opportunity to sue the people who abuse him and trafficked him when he was a boy. The dormant trauma is shaken off by this possibility and burning his insides like never before. His husband and his friends are slipping further and further away from him as he feels the gap between who he is and who he was shrink.

The Lookback Window really resonated with me because of the way it portrayed healing from trauma. It wasn’t corny, it wasn’t sanitized. It was messy, scary, jagged, and all of that made it feel cathartic. The narrator contains so many truths: he walks into rooms trauma first, he pushes everyone away, he’s destructive, but he’s also brave, honest, with so much heart.

I recommend checking trigger warnings before going into this, it really makes the reader face horrifying situations, but they all feel warranted and earned. I loved this.

We Think the World of You by J.R. Ackerley

This is a forgotten queer classic from the 1960s. While it is a queer book, it’s not really about being queer. The main characters happen to be two queer men.

Frank is a middle-age queer man with money, brains, and a lot going for him. He’s in love with Johnny, a married working-class man who is sent to prison for petty theft. The entire novel is essentially Frank orbiting the people in Johnny’s life who, as the book goes on, tolerate him less and less. They don’t seem to care that he is Johnny’s lover, they’re very happy to take his money or accept his help, but it is clear that he isn’t ever really part of their circle.

The main plot is focused on Frank caring for Johnny’s dog while he’s in prison. The dog isn’t treated well by Johnny’s family, and Frank wants her to have a better life. It’s quirky, weird, but wasn’t exceptional to me. The most interesting part was a clash of classes between Frank and Johnny’s family, and I think this could’ve been explored even deeper.

My Death by Lisa Tuttle ★

This is a slim novel that I found completely mesmerizing. It’s odd, dizzying, eerie, and as soon as I set it down I wanted to read it again. I won’t give away too much here, but I promise it is worth a read.

It starts with what feels like autofiction: a writer with some success is recently widowed and in need of inspiration. On a whim, she throws herself into an biographical project about a recluse artist and writer. The two meet and as the recluse recounts her past, the threads of their lives start to feel tangled.

The novel sweeps you in from there, and takes you down a very strange road. I didn’t expect it to be quite what it was, but I was very satisfied with where I ended up.

À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert

This is a pillar of French queer literature, published in 1990, by a critically acclaimed novelist. It’s the first in a series of three autobiographical novels that recount him living with HIV.

The novel is a diaristic depiction of life as AIDS looms over the narrator and his world. It discusses the realities of the diagnosis, the way the virus takes hold of the body, watching friends whither away, and the struggle to find meaning in the looming face of death.

It’s sad, brave, bold, scary, it’s written plainly but the words carry so much. The narrator discusses his writing as he is writing, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching someone dig their heels in and wanting to leave this true depiction of what it was like to slow descend into the tight hold of HIV.

Bolla by Pajtim Statovci (tr. by David Hackston)

This is a queer novel set in Kosovo right around the time of the Yugoslav wars. It jumps between different timelines and narratives, but the through-line is a relationship between two men on opposite sides: an Albanian family man and a Serb.

Two men meet and fall in love in a time and place where they can’t do this openly. One of them is married with a child on the way, and the ethnic groups to which they belong are on the brink of war with each other.

I found the tension in this novel to be very well done. You can feel the political climate, the looming war, and all of it through this love story. However, I found the novel hard to feel griped by because the main character is just an awful person. Selfish, unlikable, does horrible things, treats people badly.
The book really relies on you feeling for him, which I just couldn’t do.

I’m interested to read more from Statovci, because I was very interested in the cultural context of the novel and think this could be present in his other works.

Come If You Want by Brendon Holder

I couldn’t close out this month without shouting out the serialized novella of the summer! In this four-part story, we follow Palmer as he faces the plight of, well, being a person today.

Hellish group chats, mesmerizing TikTok fortune tellers, puppets, dating men… There’s so much going on in such a short time and it’s all done so well. The novella kept twisting and turning, never predictable, and ends in the kookiest of ways. What a ride. Not to mention, it has such sharp writing. I never wanted it to end.

I have to say what impressed me most was how accurately this portrays what it’s like to be online. The scrolling, the texting, all of it is written so well and is never ever corny (texting in books is always corny!!!!). Brendon is a brilliant writer, and I can’t wait for more fiction from him!

On My Bedside Table

A dispatch from my bedside table and the books that litter it, hoping to be read soon.

• Colony by Annika Norlin (translated by Alice E. Olsson), a woman on burnout leave from a stressful job meets a group of misfits defining their lives in a new way.

• Dead Girls by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott), a true crime recounting of the gruesome femicide of three girls in Argentina in the 1980s.

• Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg), a week in a rural cabin in Denmark where a group of friends from university reconnect.

• On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), the first of seven volumes about a woman stuck living in the same day, November 18th.

• Abigail by Magda Szabó (translated by Len Rix), a headstrong teenage girl growing up in a boarding school during WWII.

Have you read any of these? Are any of these non-negotiables? Are any of them skippable?

What did you read and love in July?

Tell me what you think in the comments!

That’s been my month! Typos (if any) were made on purpose.

Until next time 🤠