Worms Best Reads of June 2024

Enya Ettershank

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun by Jackie Wang

Jackie Wang’s collection of diary entries, zines, blog posts charting her journey of ‘girlhood’ (up into her late twenties) is aptly described by Wang as a field guide, travelog, essay collection, and weather report. What I love about it especially is Wang’s dedication to self-education and feeling. There is a vibrational energy buzzing and underscoring her writing and desire to live life, to learn, and to jump into new things, places, people and ideas. This book reflects that desire so well, managing to create an entire book that locks together all of the writing she was creating within that period. I like that none of it has been edited, staying true to how Wang felt at the time, being generous and forgiving of her naivety, embracing the tarot’s Fool. It’s a perfect read for those who want to revel in the pure joy of writing, something difficult for most of us, and writing’s power to help us metabolise our thoughts and experiences to make sense of the world. It’s also an ode to feminist autotheory: surrounded by Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson and Jamaica Kincaid who all taught or mentored Wang in numerous ways (be that literally teaching or through the power of reading).

CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion 

I spent a couple of sleepy afternoons in parks and on the thinning deck chair in our back gardening reading Play It As It Lays. I was floored by the devastating My Year of Magical Thinking and its follow up Blue Nights, but this is my first foray into Didion’s fiction. It’s written with the same disaffected coolness, the writing is spare but hypnotic. The story follows actress and model Maria Wyeth and the breakdown of her marriage to famous film director Carter Lang. Separated from her child, who has been institutionalised by her husband for some unspecified psychological disorder and with her parents recently dead, Maria quietly unravels her life, withdrawing from her work and social life, engaging in increasingly destructive and unhinged pursuits. It’s a pretty brutal read. A world in which extreme privilege meets nihilistic apathy (breeds it, even). The endless, empty highways where Maria spends much of her time aimlessly driving speak to the dissolution, alienation and loneliness of American society; the listless death of the American dream. It’s bleak that, though it was written and set in the 60s, there are moments that feel chillingly relatable to today. That’s both testament to Didion’s timeless prose and the distressing state of the world we currently inhabit. Her politics are, famously, somewhat dubious and whilst her fascination with unfettered individualism is very much evident here, so too is her understanding of its inherent shortcomings.

Arcadia Molinas

We Could’ve Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh

I picked this up at Ink84 after a coffee and a read in the fading afternoon light. What called out to me (asked from the obvious relevance in our present time) was the first half of the title of this book. Taking a look at the blurb, I discovered that within its pages was the author’s attempt to reconcile himself with his father, Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent Palestinian lawyer, after his politically motivated assassination. There was a touch of lament there for a relationship that throughout its duration felt veiled, opaque and incomprehensible. The book set itself out as the son’s approximation to his father, to better understand him and honour his life and work, something he felt he ha not one appropiraitelly while alive. I think this is a fear that many children share across the world: that they have not honoured their parents’ lives truthfully and respectfully as much as they’ve been due.

Reading it, not only do you get a sense of his father’s life but also a sense of Palestinian history during the early and mid 20th century. This biography is rooted in a place and time; biography of a person as a biography of their time. Shehadeh outlines the legal warfare that his father, and later he, waged against the Israeli and Jordanian occupation of Palestine. Detailing the various exiles that his father and his contemporaries were faced with, from political prosecution to occupation of their homes and being forced to leave everything behind, there’s a heartbreaking realisation that the lives of their parents will never find their iterations in that of their children, as territory, homes and possessions, are lost and stolen by occupying forces. The choice the Palestinians have is to have hope of its return, but faced with such a relentless enemy, that can seem unstoppable in the face of the law, international law and brutality, hope can be a hard-won hill to climb.

I was surprised to read about the role Jordan played in the ongoing occupation of Palestine, with its own stakes in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and how the Palestinian dream of an Arab coalition went up in smoke as Jordan snatched land and took away the rights of Palestinians, making them refugees and stateless - a state behind which they could advocate for their own rights. This means that often, it is Israel or Jordan who in the presence of international bodies like the UN represent the interests of the refugees. Infuriating.

There was an incredibly poignant thread throughout the book that made a distinction between political work and human rights work, with the former dealing with working on the politics to terminate the occupation while the latter deals with the consequences of it. It was hard to read the mental and spiritual challenges that Palestinians must overcome in order to find their way to live with, or struggle against the occupation. This book too, is an attempt at reconciling the two.