i fetched these from my local library today. they’re both abortion-related books.
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we’re often asked how we find books for @abortionbooks - sometimes it’s recommendations or chancing upon something. most times it’s scouring lists and bookshops and libraries. i have an ‘abo books’ list on my @richmondlibraries account so I don’t lose track of what’s in the library.
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we’re reading Ditlevsen for @abortionbooks ’ july meeting. it’s categorised as fiction (I double, triple checked) but it’s also considered an autobiographical novel (or a set of novels- it is the ‘Copenhagen Trilogy’).
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Stirrings is a memoir, also grappling with working class experiences; of coming of age against a time of great social, economic, and political upheaval.
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I think this’ll be an interesting parallel- fiction and memoir, both autobiographical, both grappling with class.
we were meant to read this in 2024, but life got in the way of @abortionbooks and we never got around to it. i don’t remember much of it so a re-read, refresh before we meet on the 15th!
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pro-abo folks welcome, even if you haven’t read the book but want to chat abortion in fiction! more: otherabortionstories.space
I was sold at ‘sexy space heist’, but then a dedication to ‘spite’ (one of my own motivating influences) followed by a SPRINGSTEEN epigraph? These are some of my favourite things.
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I worry the bar has been set too high and I am going to be deeply disappointed in this book.
this is an abortion book as much as it is about gender and violence and sisterhood and love. it gets so much ‘right’ about abortion experiences- many of the things @abortionbooks points out is missing in the fiction we read. but it also has some grappling to do with internalised stigma (don’t we all?).
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I was asked if I’d recommend it. I don’t know. It made me sick to my stomach; livid; absolutely enraged to read about the callousness of this person. I cried at her insight on why we don’t trust ourselves. I saw myself in this book, in so many ways.
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I don’t know if I’d recommend it. The writing is of a very particular style- one that’s absolutely for me but many are put off by. It’s the confessional, the one all ‘I know early-2000s LJ’ can recognise (and are perhaps, like me, programmed to love). It’s beautifully written (I’ve read Suleyman’s work for years now) and moving and heartbreaking and raw. But, it also overuses some of its devices: the italicised ‘he’, the overuse of ‘The Chain’ so it’s stretched too far (although I loved the Fleetwood Mac commentary).
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this book will stay with me.
1 of #52bookclub, prompt 16: ‘deus ex machina’.
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I really dislike deus ex machina in storytelling, & I particularly dislike it in spec-fic. Granted, this book is not quite spec-fic, not quite climate disaster, not quite disaster futurism, not quite sci-fi…but it didn’t mean I didn’t groan out loud when it was introduced.
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An intriguing synopsis and an unusual narrative structure, it demands -from the get go- a lot of trust from the reader to see whether it’ll all start to make sense, if the uneasy chapters will link together, if patterns will emerge.
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It asks an interesting question in this time of (very legitimate) climate anxiety: what if humans are nearing extinction? And in this big, existential question; it plays with time in an almost epochal way- jumping generations, backwards/forwards in time, linking and fracturing storylines simultaneously. It’s an interesting device, keeping you unsettled. To me, however, the question it’s trying to answer is ‘what does it mean, as a species, to be alive; to be human?’. While it slips into the individual in parts, it is in many ways, asking about the collective; about ‘us’ as a whole. Does our relationship with nature, technology, each other, other species… fundamentally rely on our ‘humanness’ or are there other ways of being & understanding? What would it look like, feel like for ‘us’ to end? What would we do?
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On a ‘you’re wrong about’ episode from years ago, something Blair Braverman said has stayed with me- I’ll butcher it here, but the gist of it is that nature doesn’t care about us. The elements are the elements, they aren’t ’out to get us’ and long after we are gone, it will continue to be. We are tiny specks in its vastness. Our arrogance to think we could control it, is staggering. That’s what this book reminded me of.
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If it wasn’t for the damned deus ex machina, this would be a four star read (out of five).
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#booksintranslation #bookerprizelonglist2025 #52bookclub2026
it’s time for my annual ‘rearranging the bookshelf’ ritual, (re)discovering books I’ve bought/been gifted & I forgot I had.
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I’m not allowed to buy any (non-work related) books this year. There are far too many books on my bookshelf that I keep meaning to read & we’re fast running out of space. I can’t give away a book I haven’t read (unless it’s my partner’s & they don’t want to hold on to it).
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perennial questions: Do I organise these by author or genre (ish?)? Do I do a broad fiction/non-fiction breakdown? Do I alphabetise?
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How do I do it so I know what we have, so I won’t forget about a book when I have a particular book itch that needs scratching?
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This is one of my favourite covers- it feels painted on; an illustration by Appupen for an encyclopaedia on the ghosts, monsters, & demons of India (yes, a @blaftpublications book; with that distinctive yellow @blossombookhouse sticker). I can’t remember when I bought this, but I think I bought this intending it for my office bookshelf instead.
J bought this for my COVID birthday.
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I’ve resolved to read it every year since & I just haven’t managed to crack it open.
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As with a lot of other books turned into films (Small Things Like These, everything Stephen King has ever written…), it’s prompted me to read it before I watch it. It’s an imagination thing, as everyone says: I’d like to imagine it on my own, before it’s imagined for me.
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I know they’re different mediums and I try not to compare them- it’s hard for a film to live up to your own imaginings anyway, & it’s hard to turn page into visual cues, or to show you an interior world (though Small Things Like These does it so beautifully). But, I’d rather try and read it first- even if it means the tv show/film gets left on the ‘to watch’ list (sorry, Shogun) for far too long.
I picked this out for J’s birthday a few years ago, based on a bunch of glowing reviews. That and because it’s set in Deptford, my old neighbourhood. The vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade are still present, no matter how much time passes; no matter how much people try to hide it. It also holds a lot of important history: Olaudah Equiano & his links to Deptford; the abolition movement and its prominence in the area; how sugar filters through it all.
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There aren’t any statutes or blue plaques marking these areas- and there should be. There’s no longer a port- hard to believe it ever was one when you look at how bougie Deptford High Street is now. It’s easy not to know; to look away.
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It’s odd that the maritime museum in Greenwich- which tries to grapple with Empire; doesn’t really engage with Deptford’s prominent role in the transatlantic slave trade.
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The Deptford Museum of (en)Slavement and Freedom is trying to make us keep looking, to learn these histories, to hold fast to it. If you don’t know the name ‘Olaudah Equiano’, you should.
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Lately, when I introduce my work and locate myself and my feminisms in the Global South(s), I’ve been explaining what that means- what it means as a political articulation, imagination. Not some denatured idea but something rife with political consideration and position, as imbibed with a politics of liberation. I’ve found myself doing this because I want to be clear about what I mean when I say this, what kinds of political organising and thinking I am defending when I locate myself in it. I have also been doing this as a response, even if they don’t recognise it, to those who have (without an understanding or appreciation of these legacies and commitments) dismissed these articulations as purely colonial or somehow bereft of theorising. As though we haven’t thought about our language or our framings, as though we haven’t pushed back or put forward.
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This short excerpt from the preface to ‘We are each other’s liberation’ articulates this feeling so succinctly.
i read this book in pieces- a chapter so I can cite it, or fragments to help build an argument I was trying to make or use to respond to a reviewer. It’s not how a text is meant to be read, it’s probably not how an academic is meant to read either (this too is a response to the time-shortness of the neoliberal academe). Attempting to rectify this, starting from scratch.
