2022 Best Reads October
BEST READS OF OCTOBER
Pierce Eldridge
I’m Open to Anything by William E. Jones
A very *explicit* coming of age story, yet still as gentle as any other I’ve ever read. Moving from the ‘wasteland’ of the midwest by tracing a large 500mile circle around the centre point of his hometown, William E. Jones decides anything within this radius is alienating. So, he moves to Los Angeles and along the journey meets friends and sexual counterparts that reveal a world of intense festishes that he soon comes to enjoy. With intricate practice and persistence.
Building intimate relationships with favoured partners, fisting them (yes, entangling hand in intestine) to getting tackout tacos and talking about life and death, Jones’ story is set to a pace of ‘wandering’, slowly striding thoughtfully through questions of his religious upbringing, the role of technology in pornographic cinema, and immigration by his partners experiences; emplaced along the backdrop of a homophoic, racisit and stigmatsing America.
*explicit image content*
Caitlin McLoughlin
The Buddhist is a collected series of blog posts where Dodie details a failed relationship and her subsequent heartbreak. ‘The buddhist,’ the former lover in question is cold and manipulative and her blog documents in real time the ups and downs of her coming to terms with her mistreatment at his hand and her grieving of the positive parts of the relationship they shared. The unfilteredness of Dodie’s thoughts become an exercise in reclaiming one’s own shame. In making it something public, rather than something private, in detailing her hurt and vulnerability she attempts to refute the ways in which the buddhist has made her feel small. Though this isn’t always so clear cut, as Dodie grapples with what the purpose of her blog writing is and the embarrassment she feels when someone tells her they’ve read it. It’s funny and sad and thought provoking and the minutiae of Dodie’s day to life, her colds, dinners with friends and trips to cafes to sip ‘genmai cha and miso soup’, never become tedious but are instead a real source of comfort and intimacy (something her relationship with the buddhist was lacking). There’s such joy in the profundity she finds in the quotidian.
But The Buddhist is as much about the buddhist and as it is about the act of writing itself. It becomes almost meta as Dodie describes how she was approached by Colter Jacobsen of Publication Studio to publish the series of blog posts as a book. I loved this passage towards the end as she attempts to understand the transition from blog to book: “Writing about the buddhist has done much to release my anger towards him. Words transform him from person to character. Still, as Colter notes, like the blog he goes on and on, and yes, we all have so many of these incessant flows of psychic charge. Thus the appeal of the narrative arc, its seductive fantasy of resolution, termination. The narrative arc fuels our longing for a meaningful death. The narrative arc doesn’t just slam into a wall and end. It ends in a way that makes sense. Thus my attempts over and over to write an ending to the buddhist—the blog, the book, the person.”
Clem MacLeod
King Kong Theory by Virginie Despentes
Really hard to decide what has been my best read of this month, there’s been many… boiling it down to one, I’d have to go with ‘King Kong Theory’ by Virginie Despentes. I’d seen the opening lines of this book on Instagram before, “I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh” but only indulged in it after quite a fiction-heavy month.
As a blanket description, the book is about gender and sexuality. It’s really about existing outside of the male-written brief of what it takes to be considered a good female, but also the risks that that entails. I drew similarities with Glitch Feminism, not because it has anything to do with being online, but because it’s written for those that aren’t usually given the space on the page. The glitches. The exclusions.
Some of the book was difficult to get through. The chapter on sexual assault was hard to swallow. As someone that luckily hasn’t been a subject of sexual assault, it was really difficult reading about Despentes’ experience of being gang raped, and knowing how that would feel from the perspective of someone who had experienced something similar. As with the rest of the book, she offers a perspective that is not easy to come by.
