Feministing Reads: What We’re Reading

Happy September! Check out what we’re reading.

Dana: I just finished Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. It’s an 800-page book about trauma (what else would I read) and, although it veers into the trauma porn-y at points, there are also moments of such joy and beauty as Yanagihara’s wonderful characters fall in and out of friendship, build new ways of relating to each other, and (try to) construct meaningful lives. It’s a book about abuse and how we witness each other’s pain — which is to say it’s a book about how we build a home for the people we love.

Mahroh: I’m working through The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison and am so grateful I took Dana’s suggestion on this. It is a remarkable series of essays framed around a few basic questions—How do we care for one another? How can we feel another’s pain? Can we recognize someone’s trauma while disagreeing about its roots?—that especially resonates given my work against gender violence (but I’ve already recommended it to friends in med school, friends who are organizing, and friends, literally regardless of what they do). It’s sharp, vulnerable, self-critical, and easy to read in sections. Give it a try, please!

Barbara: I also just finished Empathy Exams, and I would 10/10 recommend! [Ed. note: We also reviewed it here.] In it, Jamison asks what it means for women to be openly wounded in a “post-wounded” age that dismisses “anything too tender, too touchy-feely.” She closes the book by encouraging women to keep bleeding, to feel pain, and to embrace our feelings, even when they run the risk of being fetishized and even when we are labeled a stereotype. “I think the charges of cliche and performance,” she writes, “offer our closed hearts too many alibis, and I want our hearts to be open. I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.”

Sam: I’m slowly making my way through Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s debut poetry collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, because it’s a book worth lingering over. Willis-Abdurraqib is both a storyteller and a craftsman at the level of line and sentence. His book is full of breathtaking poems about masculinity, blackness, and violence, but also often about music, which is to say, about joy. After checking out his poetry, do yourself a second favor and follow him on Twitter.

Ava: I just finished Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, which was supposed to become a cult classic when it was first published in the 80s. If it wasn’t then, it will be now. New Directions reissued the novel this May. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts but it’s also about single parenting, the sidesplitting narcissism of Great Men, and the Circle Line.

Senti: I’m currently reading Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. It’s a collection of columns from the online magazine The Rumpus, with “Sugar” later revealed to be Wild author Cheryl Strayed. The columns are a blend of memoir and self-help, covering everything from recovering from heartbreak to coming to terms with child sexual abuse to learning how to rely on and love yourself. The essays are refreshingly intimate, honest, and nothing like any advice column I’ve ever read–it digs deep while avoiding cliches, and has reminded me to be compassionate.

Cassie: I’m reading Nathalie Saurrate’s Tropismes which is a series of barely-contextualized vignettes. The writing is incredibly disciplined, and the prose at once loose and tight, with the air of being unconcerned with itself. I’m also delighting in the experimental nature “stories” like these, which deal with sensory reactions and stimuli, a subject of which I’m very fond if you haven’t already noticed from my writing! Anything that disrupts the rules all while maintaining pristine form seems like an impossible achievement. But here it is.

Alexandra M.: I’m currently reading the gorgeous The Sabbath World by Judith Shulevitz. It’s about the forgotten history of the Sabbath in the United States and her idea of “morality of time” through a sociological perspective. Also, I’m a nerd for anything involving Jewish history so I love it.

Quita: I’m reading Octavia’s Brood, edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, and The Solidarity Struggle: How People of Color Succeed & Fail at Showing Up For Each Other in the Fight for Freedom, edited by Mia McKenzie. Both are powerful collections of beautifully written essays by writers, artists, and activists of color.