Some days, you wake up and all you want to do is make zines. I made this one for my publishers to send to booksellers. (My publishers are very indulgent!) Because it will be sent as a PDF and will need to be printed by the recipient, it is in black and white rather than my usual red and blue, so I hand-colored a few copies. (This is the U.S. version—the U.K edition has a different pub date, and Brits have bookshops.) Apols for the image quality/size. I don't have a scanner.
READING: At the end of 2023, I vowed to read more books by and about people of color and to engage with more physical books in 2024. I read 27 books in the first quarter of the year, of which five were by or about people of color (still not good, but better than 2023) and only one of which was a physical book. Two were PDFs that I read on a Kindle, in that format so I could interview the authors of upcoming titles. I really am an audiobook addict these days. I turned to audiobooks for a couple of reasons—the first was because my eyes were worn out by book-related reading, but I’ve always had an irrational dislike of and inability to cope with big books, and I really wanted to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It was a revelation, and now massive tomes are as nothing to me. (I think I’ve now listened to all the volumes of Caro’s LBJ biography, but I also listened to three massive slabs by Tina Brown in the last few months, and they were fabulous, too!)
Thanks to Libby and Everand (formerly part of Scribd) and the ability to listen at 1.5 speed (it seems terrible until you do it, and then you start to wonder how we can all stand to talk so slowly), audiobooks are also incredibly efficient. I did start a couple of “paper books” in the last couple of months, both of which I really want to read (Dorthe Nors’ Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, and Diana Souhami’s Greta and Cecil), but it’s so much easier to put them aside and forget about them, and I keep doing exactly that. I need to get over this, though, because I am still buying physical books, and I don’t like feeling that I’ve lost the ability to “use” them.
RECOMMENDATIONS: The Secret Life, a collection of three London Review of Books essays by Andrew O’Hagan, is so good it induces feelings of despair in anyone else who writes nonfiction. (Well, me, anyway.) The first essay, about O’Hagan’s thwarted effort to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s autobiography is a total mic drop—O’Hagan sees and supports Wikileaks’ potential to change the world, but the man himself is vile—lazy, selfish, careless, and rude. (Just as I’m sometimes embarrassed to fixate on pets in books about big issues—for example, I remember the dog in Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between with much more clarity than his discussion of the geopolitics of Afghanistan—here I was so appalled by Assange’s table manners that I just knew I couldn’t have stood to be in a room with this middle-class Aussie who ate with his hands and licked his plate.) The final essay, about Craig Wright, another Aussie, who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous developer of Bitcoin, was extra-interesting to read in March 2024, because Wright’s claims were dismissed by a British judge just a couple of weeks ago. (O’Hagan has a new podcast about the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War, which promises to be Slow Burn with a Scottish accent.)
LISTEN TO ME: For Working, I had a lovely conversation with the Sun Valley Museum of Art’s Courtney Gilbert, about the work of curating a small, non-collecting gallery. On Working Overtime, Ronald Young Jr. and I talked about the importance of identifying your artistic purpose.
EVENTS: I’m glad to say that I have some book events on the calendar. I was recently invited to an amazing-seeming outdoor festival in the Oxford area that seems like something straight out of Midsomer Murders (only with lots of bookish attendees and without the murders). I don’t have the date pinned down yet, but watch this space!
Friday, April 12: Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. 12:30 p.m.
Monday, June 3: Washington, DC. Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue, 7 p.m., in conversation with Christina Cauterucci.
Wednesday, June 5: New York City. P&T Knitwear, Lower East Side, 7 p.m. Exciting news about my conversation partner coming soon!
Friday, June 14: Edinburgh, Topping & Company, 7:30 p.m., with Alison Bechdel.
Monday, Aug. 19: Minneapolis, Magers & Quinn, with Krista Burton, 7 p.m.
Wednesday, Aug. 21: Chicago, Women & Children First, 7 p.m.