So what are you reading?
Fanfic is my ultimate comfort read-slash-coping mechanism, and my relationship to it is not always super healthy. Where I used to read fanfic to participate in fan communities, when I’m depressed, I consume it for the quick hit of dopamine it delivers—like doomscrolling on Twitter, but with more smooching. It’s a functional bellwether for my stress levels and overall mood. Do I have more than fourteen tabs of it open on any given device? Am I losing sleep because I opened AO3 at midnight? Can I remember any details of the 100,000+ words of fanfic I read this week? When my reading habits are the equivalent of channel-surfing at 2 AM purely so I don’t have to be alone with my thoughts, things are probably not great. This is not the fault of fanfic, but of my own depression.
So I always celebrate when I’m able to start reading for pleasure instead of compulsion. I will never, ever, ever write a take that denigrates fanfic, but I’m extremely happy that I’m able to read other things again.
Favorite recent stories
“Las Girlfriends’ Guide to Subversive Eating” by Sabrina Vourvoulias in Apex Magazine. We all know that I am a sucker for novel narrative structures. Vourvoulias, an award-winning journalist whose best known fiction is her immigration-focused dystopia Ink, created a multimedia story that maps onto Philadelphia’s food scene, and the immigrants and organizers whose magic infuses it. It will make you hungry as well as angry; satiate the spirit and strengthen your willingness to fight.
Sins of the Cities series by KJ Charles. This was a recommendation from my BFF, and was exactly what I needed to read in the midst of trying to manage my depression. Charles’s Late Victorian queer romances delve into class politics and complex identities. It makes them the perfect catnip for my brain, which can’t process fluff that’s not grounded by the weight of realistic complications. (If you’re looking for other romance recs, I’ve also been loving Alyssa Cole’s Off the Grid series and Rebekah Weatherspoon’s Treasure, but haven’t finished them yet.)
“Bride Before You” by Stephanie Malia Morris in Nightmare Magazine. This is a story that keeps peeling back its own layers: you think it’s a story about a haunting, then about revenge, then about the terrible consequences of supernatural temptation. In its final turn, it becomes about the violence of trying bring back what has been lost. Does it work? Can you reach through your own suffering, and someone else’s? Morris avoids easy answers; this is still a horror story, after all, one about haunting, revenge, and terrible consequences.
And essays
“30 years in, The Silence Of The Lambs’ Jame Gumb still deserves better” by Harmony Colangelo in The AV Club.
“The Dolly Moment: Why We Stan a Post-Racism Queen” by Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Both of these essays peel back the glory that’s been heaped on popular icons and rummage through the messy implications beneath. Cottom (who recently won a MacArthur Genius Grant) dissects Dolly’s rise from Appalachian poverty to universal unproblematic fave, and how her genius has always been at least partially rooted in deflection and reflection; what does our common love for Dolly say about American culture, and what do we want it to say? What lies in the distance between those points? (A lot, as it turns out.)
Cottom is writing as a fan of Dolly’s music, just not an uncritical one. Colangelo takes the opposite route, as a trans writer whose first line about Silence of the Lambs mentions “three decades of unhappy marriage to this film.” Colangelo argues that, despite its director’s and fans’ claims otherwise, the film’s transphobia is inherent and inextricable, and proceeds to lay out and contextualize the damage it’s done. Against a backdrop of rewriting trans identity as a mental disorder and the skepticism that treats all claims of being transgender, Colangelo concludes, “Essentially, this movie is hovering its finger over all of the things it is denying, while chanting, ‘I’m not touching you,’ over and over.”
Both of these essays are infinitely quotable. Go give them a read, and if you like them, consider signing up for Cottom’s newsletter or listening to the podcast Colangelo co-hosts.
And hey: what have you been reading? I would love some recs, especially for short fiction and longform cultural essays. (Or some especially good fanfic; I haven’t totally weaned myself off it yet.)
A quick reminder that my book FINNA is eligible for the Hugo and Locus Awards, so please nominate/vote for it if you can! You can also pre-order its sequel, DEFEKT, or support me on Patreon if you like what I do.