Hi all,

Hope you’ve had a good fall.

I’ve been busy with too many things to summarize, including a presentation on covering LGBTQ+ rights in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for the Global Investigative Journalism Network’s semi-annual conference and a launch of the Trans News Initiative, a data-driven project that prompts viewers to explore how U.S. national news organizations have covered transgender communities since 2020. (More on all of that at a later date.)

This week, I’ve just got some good recent reads.

In December, I’m doing a semi-informal trans readathon in conjunction with The Transfeminine Review. Join me?

nonfiction

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner is a gargantuan historical effort to detail how exactly water management in the U.S. got messed up by greed, bureaucracy, and manifest destiny. It’s several decades old at this point, but the revised edition includes some neat updates, and the history hasn’t exactly aged.

The Art of Access: Strategies for Acquiring Public Records by David L. Cuillier and Charles N. Davis. A book club read — the 2nd edition, in particular, has lots of tips, tricks, templates, and food for thought from practiced FOIA experts. Well worth the read.

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion by Kevin Guyan. I meant to read a book about documenting queer rebellions instead, but this was relevant to all of the data work I’ve been doing. An interesting expansion of Guyan’s previous work, where he seemed more ambivalent about the downsides to queer data collection. This is a more mature piece of scholarship with a clear ethical framework around the double-bind of “inclusive data” vs. the violence that data can do, told through a series of case studies.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A brilliant, thoughtful book that also echoes Angela Davis’ work in the ways it wraps challenging the apartheid in Palestine into a moral imperative for U.S.-based journalists, activists, and writers. A nice chaser to the Ezra Klein/Ta-Nehisi Coates conversation on Klein’s podcast.

novels

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Darker yet also somehow tamer and more focused than her other books that I’ve read; it feels more restrained on a number of levels, to great horror and emotional affect. Working on Talents now, and… yes, it is all eerie. Also feel like this skirts and complicates all of the issues I’ve had with other popular postapocalypse narratives that dwell on sexual violence, social decline, and widespread depravity (do not get me started on how much I hated Year One by Nora Roberts).

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. A lot going on here, largely related to eugenics. Appears to thematically propose what the book positions as an ethically bad vs. an ethically good version of community bloodline management, with body autonomy as a throughline, told through the juxtaposition between two immortals. Not entirely sold on this one. Did lead me to an interesting body of scholarship on Butler’s fascination with eugenics.

The Ballad of Beta-2 by Samuel R. Delany. Wacky, wacky book about a student anthropologist in space who begrudgingly pieces together the last days of human civilization. A neat little tale. Lyrical, fun… dark if you think about it for five seconds.

Strange Houses by Uketsu. Spooky horror story with ghost energies recently translated from Japanese. A nice diversion.

Spread Me by Sarah Gailey. Gailey is one of my favorite contemporary writers, but a bit of an “every other book” author for me. I think this book was on. Fits neatly into the mycological/parasitic horror trends, with some eerie queer elements and a nicely desolate landscape.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I listened to this in audio, and I’m glad I did; the narrator captured the characters’ dialect in a lively way that felt more poetic and intuitive than it would on the page.

bite-sized small press books

Goodbye Stranger by Mergo Petrichor and 7-11 Shooting Star by Beck T. — the Wiggle Bird Mailing Club is a t4t micro-press that publishes tiny comics. It’s a recurring joy.

The End, As Seen from the Tip of the Indian Peninsula by M.L. Krishnan. Provocative queer horror poetry about the end of the world, full of striking imagery involving body horror elements like skin swapping, from a south Asian cultural context.

Query by Zilla Novikov. Blackout poetry told through a series of increasingly erratic query letters that reflect attempts at selling a novel. The author starts narrating her own life (or a fictional one), joins a local organizing group, falls in queer love, gets arrested. So it goes.