I almost certainly now have more books than I have life remaining to read them in. My laptop looks back at me beneath a shelf of books; to my right, three full shelves, labelled, from top to bottom, 'Activism', 'Plays' and 'Writing' struggle under the weight of more books; behind me, two more, taller sets of shelves carry my science, sci-fi, philosophy, history, biography, and some random books. On top of my wardrobe sits a large, stuffed tub of books I've read already.
And then there's all the books downstairs. I've annexed most walls of my family's dining room for my volumes on politics, all my general fiction, and my poetry. There's also a few hardbacks that wouldn't fit anywhere else.
The defence "well at least I don't smoke" is becoming less and less effective.
The cliché line of most addicts is: "I can quit any time I want." I'm not even going to try that one. I can't quit. I will pile up books until the ceiling caves in, and a tsundoku tsunami pulls me under.
Top 10 of 2023:
10 - Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
On December 31st, 2022, I went to London, without booking a place to stay. I was travelling to the Netherlands on January 1st, so I needed to find somewhere in London to rest overnight. It turns out, finding a random hostel at midnight on New Year's Eve in London is impossible, so I had to spend the night in the entrance to King's Cross St Pancras. And I had luggage with me, so I had to stay fully awake.
Fortunately, I had a James Baldwin novel. This wonderful, expansive, breathless book kept me awake and made me completely forget the cold, hard train station floor. An unbelievable first novel, the prose is a clear product of the Black church that is so central to the story - whole chapters seem to sing and dance from the page. The book ends with a rapturous sequence that had me - sleep-deprived and shivering - almost jumping up and shouting. There is so much joy, and pain, and faith, and humanity in here. I read the whole thing in one night, got my train, and started 2023 asleep under the English Channel.
9 - Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
New Year's Eve wasn't the only night I lost sleep. 2023 started with the end of my degree; many reading sessions, and sometimes even studying sessions, lasted well into the night. As the months went on, other complications piled on top - in February, I was in court for 4 days, and found guilty of 'aggravated trespass' for blocking an oil refinery. Some personal difficulties made me immensely anxious, and it was difficult even getting to campus most days.
I needed to learn how to rest.
Late one night at the library, I came across the title of Tricia Hersey's book, Rest is Resistance. After a year with Just Stop Oil, believing rest and resistance to be mutually exclusive categories, I couldn't resist picking the book up, and spent the rest of the night eagerly absorbing it. Hersey's argument, that white-supremacist-capitalist grind culture has indoctrinated all of us into believing a day is only worth living if it's 'productive', shook me. It sounded so obvious when she said it that I couldn't believe I'd ever felt any other way. Of course, in a system that demands our constant participation, our labour, the simple act of withdrawal, of self-care, is an act of resistance. Her book's solid grounding in the real work Hersey has done with The Nap Ministry helped convince me that I couldn't afford to ignore this wisdom any longer.
I'm getting much faster at knowing when I need to slow down.
8 - The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Much of Hersey's book is aimed at those most marginalised and overworked by capitalism. Her argument is that even those whose lives are dominated by the necessity of constant work are able to make time to rest. Her book draws a lot from historical accounts of how enslaved people survived life on plantations. It's been a privilege to rest as much, and as deeply, as I have this year. I could not have encountered a clearer example of this privilege than when I read Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman.
Spiralling around the real-life story of her own grandmother's struggles against the 'Termination Bill' of the 1950s, Erdrich's novel is a heart-rending tale of survival in the face of extreme violence. The 'Termination Bill' was the American government's attempt to finally undo all treaties signed between themselves and the Native people of America. If it went into effect, it would spell the end of what limited legal protections Native Americans had at the time. On top of this account of a people's fight to survive an ongoing genocide, Erdrich follows the story of "Pixie", a Native American kidnapped by white people on her way to find her missing sister. The entire novel is saturated with brutality, and the characters rarely get a break - but, somehow, in a testament to the power of Indigenous healing and human endurance, they make it through triumphant.
I read that book from the comfort of my girlfriend's home in Holland, in summer, grateful for the life I've got, awestruck at the ability of people to flourish in lives unfathomably worse, and bitterly, deeply angry at the systems that put such strain on us all.
7 - None of the Above: My Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza
What I love most about Indigenous literature is how far it is from my everyday reality. Most Indigenous philosophies and perspectives were formed prior to, or in response to, white-supremacist European invasion. As a result, they offer whole modes of thinking that run counter to the worldview I've been socialised into. But we don't need to go all that distance to find thinkers who operate 'outside the box' of normative Western perception. Travis Alabanza, a non-binary artist from Bristol, demonstrates how radical it can be just to play around with gender in the UK.
Whenever I talk to people about my gender identity, they 'correct' me. This mainly happens with cisgender people, but usually the ones who are most vocally supportive of trans rights. I identify, largely, with Alabanza's account of their own gender in None of the Above:
"I believe my transness is a reactionary fact, not an innate one. I am trans because the world made me so, not because I was born different."
For many, being trans is an innate part of who they are. That is not the case for me - I feel that my own gender identity is a 'reactionary fact', a politically-constructed performance. Alabanza's book was immensely validating, after all the conversations I'd had with well-meaning friends who tried to 'remind' me that actually, I'd always been 'this way' - I just 'didn't know it'. None of the Above is essential reading for those who wish to understand the truly radical nature of life beyond the gender binary. It's the book I wish people had read before I talked to them about my gender.
It helped me to be more 'myself' through 2023.
6 - The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
As wonderful as it is to better understand yourself, and your own place in the world, sometimes it's just as necessary to escape yourself, and travel to another world. And if you're not sure which one to start with, Kim Stanley Robinson makes a pretty good case for Mars.
These three thick books carried me through the year; their dense plotting, huge cast of memorable characters, and the painstaking 'world-building' Robinson achieves of Mars made this trilogy perfect escapist fiction. In stark contrast to the billionaire escapist fantasies of Mars that Musk and Bezos zealously cultivate, Robinson's vision for the Red Planet is truly utopian. Each book builds to a revolution, and each revolution makes Martian society more equal, more radical, and more habitable. This is fundamentally a story of how to build a viable alternative to capitalist society while capitalism still exists - basically, Robinson argues, it takes a bit of space.
5 - Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton
Perhaps, following Robinson's argument, we should start trying to be more "down to Mars"; the phrase "down to Earth" doesn't mean what it used to. In the Anthropocene, the 'Earth' is a site of extreme violence. Weird things happen all the time, and are becoming more frequent. It takes an ambitious thinker to make sense of a time like this. Fortunately, we have Timothy Morton.
Morton's concept of a 'hyperobject' fascinated me so much that I attempted to explain it in my own defence statement in court, to a perplexed judge. Hyperobjects are things like global warming, oil or plastic - things "massively distributed in time and space relative to humans". By describing global warming as an "object", as opposed to a process, Morton is able to fully articulate the unfathomable weirdness of what is happening to the Earth. A book that draws on pop culture as casually as it does quantum physics, this is phenomenal philosophy, and as earth-shattering as the hyperobjects it describes.
4 - Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Speaking of perplexing, this year was not a year of light reading. For better or worse, almost everything I read was a challenge, and took considerable effort to make sense of. I find this helps with immersion - in order to keep track of what's going on in the book, my brain tunes out the rest of the world. And nothing perplexed me more than Nabokov's masterpiece, Pale Fire.
The pinnacle of unreliable narration, Pale Fire is structured as a long poem with extended commentary. As gorgeous as the poem is, the real substance of this book is in the notes; a whole novel, part fantasy, part thriller, part mystery, part satirical joke, spirals out of control in the bizarre tangents of each annotation. I was never sure, while reading it, what was real - nor even who was real. My search to solve the 'truth' of the mystery led me to forget, for a brief and surreal moment, that the book itself was in fact fiction.
3 - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
Entirely the opposite was true of Tolstoy's gargantuan Anna Karenina. At over 800 pages, this book maintains a level of realism that reality itself can't often match. Every character has a deep, complex psychology. Entire pages and chapters follow the inner thoughts of characters, and it is these passages where the novel really displays Tolstoy's literary ability - chapters where characters sit and think, or write letters, flow with the same energy as the bigger sequences of tragedy and conflict. It took me a full year, on and off, to finally read the whole thing. But I'm so glad I did. This is the best example I've found yet of how fiction can transplant you "into someone else's shoes".
2 - Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson
One of the last books I read in 2023 was Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson, a book that I wasn't even expecting to finish until the year was over. A thick book on history, Marxist theory, anthropology and literary analysis, this book is hardly a conventional 'page-turner'. But within a fortnight, I'd worked my way through the whole thing.
Robinson dismantles myth after myth throughout the book, critiquing everything from white supremacy to Marxism to even some Black revolutionary thinkers. His overview of the birth of white supremacist capitalism is so expansive, and considers so many factors, that it's extremely difficult to keep up. But this book, published in 1983, still retains the power to surprise and subvert, as all revolutionary texts should strive to do, and the chapter of the book which details all the plantation rebellions, 'maroon' communities and acts of everyday sabotage is the perfect rebuttal to anyone who still believes abolition was primarily achieved by benevolent, non-violent European campaigners like William Wilberforce.
1 - all about love: new visions by bell hooks
The greatest gift of 2023 was how much it taught me about love. Love was the reason I spent a night on the floor of Kings Cross; I was travelling to Holland, to spend time with my girlfriend, Elise. Love was the reason I learned to rest; love of myself, of my body, of my time. Love led me to learn about other peoples in other places; love led me to validate my own gender, to live on other worlds, to learn about the Earth, to appreciate the withdrawn mystery of Nabokov and the clearsighted realism of Tolstoy; love led me to research unfamiliar traditions of radical activism... and love was the reason I read 94 books in 2023. I just love reading.
Especially when the books are as phenomenal as bell hooks' all about love. Possibly the greatest left-wing voice to understand the necessity of the self-help genre, hooks gives a clear, passionate, and no-bullshit guide to living that I will return to until I am no longer alive. This is how we chart a course through the treacherous ground of 'personal responsibility' versus 'systemic change'. Love. The vision of love captured in this book is fractal - it looks the same when applied to intimate relationships as it does in relation to global politics. It's an ethical framework that demands integrity, honesty, faith, the ability to speak up, and the ability to forgive.
It's the most difficult book I've ever read, because it was so easy to understand, and so impossible to argue with. It taught me that I do not know how to love - that none of us really do, and that we need to learn to, if we are to save ourselves. It's a tough pill to swallow, but the medicine heals like nothing else.
What's Next?
The last book I read of 2023 was, appropriately enough, Emma Dabiri's What White People Can Do Next. I plan to take her advice through 2024 - particularly this chapter title:
Full list of 2023:
James Baldwin - Go Tell it on the Mountain
Toni Morrison - The Bluest Eye
Sam Ward - We Were Promised Honey!
Martin Mcdonagh - The Cripple of Inishmaan
Gillian Greer - Meat
Henry Fielding - The Tragedy of Tragedies
John Dryden - The Conquest of Granada
Claudia Rankine - Don't Let Me Be Lonely
Eve Ensler - The Apology
Tricia Hersey - Rest Is Resistance
Alan Moore and David Lloyd - V for Vendetta
Richard Powers - Bewilderment
Michael Frayn - Noises Off
Rob Drummond - Bullet Catch
Rob Drummond - Quiz Show
David Mamet - Glengarry Glen Ross
Albert Camus - Create Dangerously
Timothy Morton - Hyperobjects
Peter Shaffer - Equus
Bertolt Brecht - The Threepenny Opera
Roy Mullarkey - The Wolf From The Door
Terrence Rattigan - The Deep Blue Sea
Toni Morrison - Recitatif (with Zadie Smith introduction)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - We Should All Be Feminists
debbie tucker green - random
Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
Percy Shelley - Queen Mab (from Percy Shelley Collected Works)
David Mamet - Oleanna
Timothy Morton - Dark Ecology
Toni Morrison - Sula
Percy Shelley - Prometheus Unbound (from Collected Works)
Lee Hall - Wittgenstein on Tyne (from collection of short Live Theatre plays)
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
David Edgar - How Plays Work
Alan Ayckbourn - Just Between Ourselves
Percy Shelley - Hellas (from Collected Works)
Bertolt Brecht - The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Martin McDonagh - The Lonesome West
James Baldwin - Dark Days
Margaret Atwood - Surfacing
Max Adams - The Prometheans
William Morris - News From Nowhere
Ursula K LeGuin - A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Herman Melville - Bartleby the Scrivener
Frederick Douglass - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself
Brian Friel - Translations
Louise Erdrich - The Night Watchman
Mary Gaitskill - This Is Pleasure
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
Emma Dabiri - Don't Touch My Hair
David Hare - Obedience, Struggle and Revolt
Stella Feehily - This May Hurt A Bit
Paul Harrison - Pantheism: Understanding the Divinity in Nature and the Universe
J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
bell hooks - all about love: New Visions
Ric Renton - One Off
Travis Alabanza - None of The Above
Slavoj Zizek - Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours
Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton - Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
John Godber - Crown Prince
Len McCluskey - Always Red
George Monbiot - Regenisis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet
Paul Schrader - Taxi Driver (Screenplay)
Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
James Meek - Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
Terry Eagleton - The Idea of Culture
Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister, the Serial Killer
Jonathan Martin - The Life of Jonathan Martin, of Darlington, Tanner, Written by Himself
David Graeber - Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina (Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
bell hooks - the will to change: men, masculinity and love
Lesley Nneka Arimah - What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (collection)
bell hooks - Outlaw Culture
Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire
Lester R. Brown - World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse
David Hare - Stuff Happens
Frederick Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Independent Jewish Voices - A Time to Speak Out
Sandra Newman + Howard Mittelmark - How Not to Write a Novel
Kim Stanley Robinson - Green Mars
Clean Break Theatre Company - Charged (anthology)
Emma Dabiri - Disobedient Bodies: Reclaim Your Unruly Beauty
Peter Singer - Animal Liberation Now
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
Gary Gutting - Foucault: A Very Short Introduction
Kim Stanley Robinson - Blue Mars
Cedric J. Robinson - Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Toni Morrison - Home
Margaret Atwood - On Writers and Writing
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Louise Erdrich - Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling the Land of My Ancestors
Emma Dabiri - What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition
(Roughly 94 full books over this year)
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