I love to read about tech bros so that I can get in touch with my inner tutting mechanism. They’re such narcissists, with their compulsive monitoring of follower counts and body-fat index! Of course, I am just as obsessed, albeit about different things. For many years I have kept a list of the books I read, and less systematically of the other bits of culture I enjoy.
Why do I do this? It’s a free time-travel device! Scanning the list of books I read in a particular year, I can almost always remember where I was, what I was doing at the time, and who I was with. I wish I had such clear recollection of the books’ content! Glancing at the list of books I read in 2023, trying to identify a book title I could barely recall, I was transported to a July holiday in Crieff. I couldn’t tell you much about that book (contestants in a reality cooking competition fall in love—honestly, it was decent), but I remembered the group dinners we ate while I was reading it and a trip to an amazing tourist spot. (See below!)
I promise I’ll stop navel-gazing soon, but the last couple of weeks have been prime reading time, and I added a few excellent books to my 2023 list since the last newsletter. Since I’ve already confessed to being a wee bit self-absorbed, there’s nothing to lose by linking to the full list, and providing some bonus pie charts. (One note: The “other” category in the gender chart represents books written by mixed-gender teams or nonbinary authors.)
I do want to change some things in 2024. This year I read too few books by authors of color—the number may be as low as 5—and I’d like to read more physical books. I don’t really have strong feelings about format—well, I say that, but I probably wouldn’t have bought physical copies of a couple of books whose audio version I enjoyed if that were completely true—but I have a bad habit of buying books after seeing references to them and feeling intrigued ... and then ignoring them. This feels like a process failure as much as anything else. I really do want to read them, but I haven’t been making enough time for reading physical books, so I’ll fix that in 2024.
What else happened in 2023? Oh, yes, I finished my first book! I was a massive amount of work, but I enjoyed it more than I thought possible, and I’m already thinking about what I hope will be my second. The U.S. edition of A PLACE OF OUR OWN: SIX SPACES THAT SHAPED WOMEN’S CULTURE will be published by Seal Press on May 28, 2024, and Virago will publish a UK edition on June 6. I’m planning to do events in New York, D.C., and Edinburgh, hopefully more, and YOU KNOW I’ll be plugging them here. I’m also heading to Athens, Georgia, in April to give the 30th Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies, a huge and slightly terrifying honor.
I promise that this newsletter won’t only be a June Thomas Promotion Project, however. There’ll be more lesbian history, less me in the coming months.
RECOMMENDATIONS: As teased above, in July I visited The Library of Innerpeffray, which is one of the strangest places I’ve ever been—in a good way. Deep in rural Perthshire, it’s Scotland’s first free public lending library, founded in 1680. The collection of books gathered by the Drummond family is remarkable, but more astonishing is that they were shared with local residents, most of whom were farmers. That version of the library came to an end in 1968, but if you can make it to Innerpeffray (the journey does require a car), the very kind volunteers positively push visitors to examine the books. As in hold them, page through them, and read them. One of the people in our party happened to be an academic specializing in Early Modern English, so she knew the important volumes of the period and seemed as surprised as the rest of us that we were allowed to be so hands-on with them. If you’re into old books, it’s well worth the schlep.
LISTEN TO ME: I went back to The Waves for its last episode, where I talked with Cheyna Roth about how it’s still strangely difficult to define what it means to be a feminist. On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I talked about how freelancers should think about paying specialists to take on some creative tasks so they can focus on other priorities, and for Working we repeated what has become an annual ritual, our Creative New Year’s Resolutions episode.
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