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zielenna · 4 months

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hi :) 3, 12, 14, 25 for the book ask?

Hi!

3. What were your top five books of the year?

There isn't an obvious answer - my first instinct was to say Moby-Dick, which I read in 2021…

I spent most of the year following up on my interest in "workplace novels," or "labor fiction" (which emerged when I started looking for a job - incidentally, while reading Moby-Dick, possibly one of the first workplace novels?), and I enjoyed all novels I read as a result: Zola's Germinal, The Dragon's Village, Olga Ravn's Employees… The novel that stands out from these is Bibiana Candia's Azucre: una epopeya (which I read in Polish, but as far as I can tell it has not been translated into English). It is an experimental novella about the Spanish men 'hired' by Urbano Feijóo Sotomayor to replace the more expensive slaves on Cuban plantations. The designation as 'epic' helps to make sense of this - the novella recreates the experience of the workers, but also the cattle they work with, the objects… Like an epic, it is interested in a communal experience, but it writes it from the bottom up.

I obviously enjoyed Esther Yi's Y/N, but it might be the recency bias.

Another book that made a strong impression was Ronald Syme's Roman Revolution, a 580 pages long account of the collapse of the late Roman republic which I read over the summer. Syme finished it in 1939, with the rise of fascism in Italy as the obvious point of reference. The combination of the eloquence typical of early twentieth-century scholarship with barely restrained fury made it a very compelling read. It's not the best introduction to the period, as Syme assumes a passing familiarity with various figures, offices, and events, that I simply did not have, but the book has been, and remains extremely influential, which is why I chose to read this rather than anything else. I still catch myself thinking about it when watching the news sometimes - it is very clear about the consequences of creating states of exception in politics.

12. - just answered!

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

I am not sure that I will finish anything within the next couple of days - I am in the middle of several books. Mostly, I am listening to the audiobook of James Frankie Thomas's Idlewild, which so far has been a novel about an intense queer friendship at a New York private school in the immediate wake of 9/11. A part of what it does is answer the question of why so many teenage girls* become obsessed with gay* men. It's unpleasantly real about all this; Thomas knows really well how to make the readers cringe. (The reader for the audiobook is very good, too).

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

I have a list of fiction books I want to read this academic year, but I am not sure whether I will be able to stick to it. A specific goal I have and want to keep is to read more contemporary poetry, which I started doing late this year. I am now surrounded by people who care about it more than I do, so I want to know what is it that they are talking about. I would say that rather than be interested in all of recent poetry, I have been drawn to works that seek to capture a community's experience of a specific historical moment - essentially, more formally experimental historical fiction. I got M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony and Hardly War from the university library, so hopefully I will be able to read them in a not too distant future...

#thanks!#pninism #readings #if anyone has contemporary poetry recs... let me know. i know nothing and i am not asking people obsessed with The Lyric

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