~*~**~*~**~*~MY FAVORITE BOOKS I READ IN 2023~*~**~*~*~*~*~~
DELIA RAINEY’S TOP 15
MEMORY by Bernadette Mayer
8: ALL TRUE: UNBELIEVABLE by Amy Fusselman
TELL ME I’M AN ARTIST by Chelsea Martin
THE UNREALITY OF MEMORY by ELISA GABBERT
FOR NOW by Eileen Myles
MINOR FEELINGS: AN ASIAN AMERICAN RECKONING by Cathy Park Hong
FRANK: SONNETS by Diane Seuss
HEAVEN by Emerson Whitney
I WISHED by Dennis Cooper
DOGS OF SUMMER by Andrea Abreu
THE PASOLINI BOOK by Stacy Szymaszek
COSMOGONY by Lucy Ives
THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken
HAPPILY by Sabrina Orah Mark
BIOGRAPHY OF X by Catherine Lacey
NOVELS
Tell Me I’m An Artist by Chelsea Martin
The premise of this book seems goofy as hell – a college student at a San Francisco art school spends a semester procrastinating on a final project for a film class, a “self-portrait”, which she will do by recreating Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, a movie she has never seen. There are lots of cultural references of the time (flaming hot Cheetos, “F*ck You” by CeeLo Green) and awkward mundane moments of interacting with new college friends, but also a ton of introspection through Joey’s point-of-view: at some point, everyone discusses the autobiographical elements of the singular films during class critique, but no one acknowledges the juxtaposition of their vastly different lives.
The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken
I had been borrowing my boyfriend’s airpods to listen to this, even though I am a staunch believer in over-the-ear headphones. This feels right. It’s a book of contradictions. At first it annoyed me that “The Hero of This Book” is written as fiction instead of memoir, as if it isn’t being fully honest with itself. This is a clear portrait of Elizabeth McCracken’s mother (and father), truly! But then I thought about fulfilling the wishes of our dead loved ones, how their privacy can be kept with certain rearranging and labels, and also our own.
Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu
The language here and descriptions of life stick slick into my mouth and bottoms of my feet, running; two best friends running around Tenerife in the early 2000s, abject sexual identity forming shit, making Barbies hump, the complexity of being a young girl with a body in comparison to another, and also, true love. DOGS OF SUMMER is from the point of view of a scrappy kid, held together by the innocence and spiky wildness of the almost-woman, about to change into herself and never come back.
I Wished by Dennis Cooper
The writing creates a hole where Dennis Cooper’s childhood friend George’s soul can hang out, disappear again. It’s a book burning for reciprocal love. My favorite part was the explanation of a lifelong secret wish for death: “-my wish had been completely understanding because it knew me, unlike my friends. / I felt like when I’d wish to die, I was being who I really was.” This wish relates to writing; a place where we can access our darkness, the end, more so than our outward selves.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
I listened to this book for months and it is kind of a mind-fuck. These are made-up archives that contain real artists I admire (Kathy Acker has to make a cameo, right) in a made-up America, although with similar political distraughtness. The narrator is finding pieces of her famous-artist wife’s life after her death, consulting old friends and lovers for the truth, only to find more unknowing. Gotta love fictional/semi-true art-literary world gossip!!
SHORT STORIES
Cosmogony by Lucy Ives
Cosmogony is about “other people”: their conversations, fantasies, and contradictions. Ives writes about a woman who stopped seeing her favorite bodega cat, and how that affected her life. It feels very philosophical, emotional. It’s revelatory that in a brief chunk of pages, I know exactly how she feels.
POETRY
Frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss
It’s a book of poems only in sonnet form, 14 lines. Even if these lines are really long, taking up the length of paper so that it needs to be folded up. Seuss is a rebel, taking the ancient formula and injecting it with real-life bullshit, real talk, and longing. I often look to poetry for wisdom, or to eavesdrop. In “Frank” I found the conversations I desire: about music and art, life and death. “how do I explain / this restless search for beauty or relief?”
The Pasolini Book by Stacy Szymaszek
To be honest, reading Stacy Szymaszek always feels like a creative awakening for me and a reminder of poets living and walking and talking to each other through writing. I read this book in two sittings, and during the final 10 pages I was sitting outside in public on my brick stoop on one of the first days of 70 degree weather in springtime but I still felt full of dread and like I was rotting. I was holding the Pasolini book and realized I was wearing a t-shirt that says "lesbian poetry" on it.
MEMOIR / ESSAY
8: All True: Unbelievable by Amy Fusselman
I left this book under a blanket in a hotel in Ohio on my way to my best friend's house in Philly. On the way home, we had to go back to the hotel to retrieve it. My sister and I walked into the hotel and used the bathroom and filled our water bottles, but the receptionist was nowhere to be found. People started lining up behind us with their suitcases. Finally the hotel receptionist came out very flustered. She asked me a lot of questions about my missing object and walked over to an office cabinet and rifled through it. She pulled the book from a shelf bubbling with plastic bags of people's stuff they had left. The book was tucked in there like a line of mortar between the bricks of people's stuff. When she handed it back to me, the book had a piece of paper taped to the cover, over the "8", with the date I had left it and our old hotel room number: #333. On the back of the slip of paper was a snowman but I don't know why. “8” is written in fragments and the pieces all float together in a collage or like the seasons going by and sometimes the transitions are stark and you have to think more about it later. This book is very life-like. This book makes me want to write and it makes me want to live.
HEAVEN by Emerson Whitney
I don’t know how Emerson Whitney does this: remembering crisp details of their childhood, or at least knowing how to recreate the image of it, even the color of people’s clothes, the smells hanging in the air. There’s acidic feelings of abandonment, performances of gender and school that children are supposed to uphold, and deeply wanting to be close to his mother and his grandmother. I read a chunk of HEAVEN while at the county jail, where I have been tutoring writing every Friday for the past month. In between tutoring the residents, I was reading this. HEAVEN is an interesting memoir to read while inside a jail. Something felt related, maybe the idea of feeling trapped inside somewhere where you cannot be yourself.
Happily: A Personal History with Fairy Tales by Sabrina Orah Mark
The chapters, short and sweet and prickly, work with mirrors of storybook characters and real people. In the book's strangest moments, reality's description starts to blur into fantasy and dreams and magical objects that will make the spell of life go away. Writing the story down, Orah Mark is honest when she is afraid of her writing, when she is worried for the safety of her loved ones, when she does not understand how to go on. Like a splash of cold water during an anxiety attack, her mother's snarky dialogue chimes in: "Who the hell cares?"
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
This book goes deep into Asian American history, a history that is truly invisible and denied relevance, the pain and trauma of it pushed away as the idea of “minor feelings” ~ feelings of minorities that are minimized by the white population who cannot see or imagine their reality. She admits that this relates to Rankine’s listing of “microaggressions” in Citizen. Like Rankine, Hong is a poet first, and essay collections by poets are always so good, so expansive, self-aware of the duality of the personal and historical, and reckoning with the interconnectedness of language.
The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays by Elisa Gabbert
The Unreality of Memory contains essays about living in a world of pain and recall: recent and past disasters, happiness, memory, empathy, perception. Maybe it's comforting to declare that memory is not enough. Empathy is not enough. News coverage is not enough. Neither is language to describe experience. "In this way, memory itself is an alternate reality - an unreachable place we can somehow see." A definition for writing, maybe: trying to see the unreachable place.
For Now by Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles' writing is their puppet, emitting their voice but it's fake but it's real. In For Now, time frays out and out and bends and meets many places. Time feels endless. What's great about reading Eileen Myles is that their writing feels so unserious and like they are just talking to me but it also feels like the world, something spiritual. "A radiant hole."
UNCATEGORIZABLE
Memory by Bernadette Mayer
Can we really remember a day, fully? I don’t know if this is the question Bernadette Mayer was trying to answer with this work. I wonder if the in-depth act of describing the day took over her living it: she photographed one roll of film a day and then recorded audio and writing about each day for a whole month, July 1971. Oftentimes I had to skim through Memory’s rubble of words, a dumping ground of language, and other times I was hypnotized, pulled into the fantasy of imagining Bernadette’s brilliant mind’s eye. I found myself most drawn to the self portraits she took in mirrors, and I took a lot of pictures of them, as if searching for her and archiving her, too.
