What I Read in 2023

January

Scattered All Over the Earth by Youko Tawada The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu Poems by Ahn Do-Hyun by Ahn Do-Hyun translated by Kim Jae-Beom

Scattered All Over the Earth is a wonderful and strange little novel. Japan has sunk underwater because of Climate Change, and memory of Japan seems to have disappeared along with the island. Most remnants of Japan in other countries, such as sushi, are now attributed to Finland. Every Sushi restaurant is just covered in Moomins. One Japanese refugee in Denmark, who speaks only in a conlang she invented which is a pidgin of the Scandinavian languages with Japanese, teams up with a Linguist to travel Europe is search of other Japanese refugees who might still remember how to speak Japanese, the mysterious language from a land nobody can remember. It's the first part in a series so there isn't n ending. There is a trans character who is misgendered a lot but who is still respected by the other characters and accepted fully. There are a lot of thoughts about diaspora, translation, and who we make ourselves into for others and for ourselves. It is a surreal dreamy literary novel. I really liked it for the prose. Simply the way it is written is so odd and satisfying.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a very long book I started reading back in October 2022 because a guy I went on some dates with recommended it, then I stopped reading it when we broke things off, then picked it up again when another guy I was hooking up with recommended it, and then after he got all weird I decided I just needed to finish the book for myself and to stop reading it for men. It's about how Jews invented the comic book superhero and how it relates to World War II. It's a very good but very long book about generational trauma and Jewish masculinity and a million other things because that's how literary novels of this length are. A marathon of a book but a good one.

Interior Chinatown was the 2023 One Book One Philadelphia. It was a very quick and good read. It's about Chinese people who basically live inside of a screenplay and exist only as extras and side characters for a low quality cop drama with a gimmick about how the two main cops are a Black person and a white person. The main characters dream of becoming the main characters in their own stories, and travel through various genres and worlds in that pursuit. There is a period of the story where our main character works very hard and gets to be a recurring guest star who occasionally joins the main cop couple in special episodes.

I discovered Ahn Do-Hyun's poetry through the Korean television show Extraordinary Attorney Woo. One of the poems in this book is read at the end of an episode. These poems are incredibly beautiful and really resonated with me. There is one about loving so much you burn yourself up like a briquette of charcoal. As beautiful as the burning is, I wondered if that is really a healthy way to love.

I also read a lot of talmud and halacha articles as part of writing a dvar for my synagogue.

February

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy by Jessiac Fern

Act Your Age, Eve Brown is a romance novel about an AuDHD girl and an Autistic guy running a bed and breakfast together. It gave me a lot of fluffy feelings and it was very sweet and good and reading the sex scenes knowing I was about to get GRS gave me interesting feelings different from other times I'd read romance novels about cis women where I'd feel dysphoria.

Polysecure, which was recommended to me by my then-metamor, is a book about attachment theory for non-monogamous people. Honestly, I think even if you are monogamous it is useful. It's a book that gets to what's important about attachment without positing the nuclear family as the only natural and healthy structure. The explanations of insecure attachment really resonated with me and made a lot of sense with experiences I've had and behaviors I struggle with. I started thinking about how I can become more self-secure and have a more secure way of relating to others.

While recovering from GRS, I spent a lot of time on drugs listening to a TJ Klune audiobook I remember nothing of and don't feel I can count as actually having read. I'll return to that again someday eventually.

March

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

The Terraformers is about an incredibly distance future where humans now live in harmony with nature and can commune with all living things, and a mega-corporation has settled a planet with people grown in a vat to have very long lifespans and to spend multiple generations terraforming the planet to resemble the ecosystem of the original Earth that humans originated from. Then, once it's ready, the corporation will sell off all the land for development. But wait, what about all the communities that already live here from the old terraforming project? This was my most anticipated book of the year and it did not disappoint. It's about colonialism, queer bodies, urban planning, trains, socialism, geology, geography, waterways, basically just a book laser targeted at me specifically.

I thought I would read more in my GRS recovery but I was just so tired and people were always around. I played a lot of Kirby. I started and didn't finish several books, which I intend to return to eventually. I ate a lot of Chicken Nuggets.

April

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis

The transition back to working full time was rough and I was not ready. KC Davis was a life saver and this book has changed so much about how I manage juggling all the household chores and things. "You can't save the rainforest when you have depression" is something I have told myself a lot this year, except instead of 'depression' it's been other medical issues. It's a short little book that's intentionally chunked out in ways very accessible for people with ADHD. You will truly get more out of reading this book than you can imagine.

May

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

Get a Life, Chloe Brown is another romance novel from the same series as Act Your Age, Eve Brown. I think the protagonist lady is still Autistic she's just to explicitly named as such. Chloe does however live with an unnamed chronic illness that seems to be POTS/hEDS/fibro/etc. and it was handled really well. I preferred Act Your Age, but this was still fun. I could really relate to how health issues and Disability affect Chloe's life.

I did not read as much this month as I'd like. Working full-time while still in recovery made it difficult to have the energy, and I spent most of my free time organizing to prepare for the Moms 4 Liberty conference visiting Philly.

June

I did not read anything for pleasure in June. My entire life was consumed by organizing in advance of the Moms 4 Liberty conference, as well as stepping into a larger role in union organizing in anticipation of our contract coming up for renewal soon. I became a steward-in-training and read required reading for that. I read some case studies on open bargaining and shop-floor organizing tactics.

July

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Codependent No More is one of the most famous self-help books of all time. It came at a very high recommendation from a dear friend and once you get past the AlAnon stuff it really does rewrite your brain. Pairing it with my reading of Polysecure really caused me to dig into a lot of long-time problems I've had to rethink how I relate to others and interface with the world. Insecurity had lead me to be a very codependent person. Working on this part of myself became my serious mental target.

Such a Fun Age is a sort-of farce thriller about a young Black woman who takes on a part-time job as a nanny for a white woman, and the white woman becomes obsessed with becoming her friend. It's about reproductive labor, how white people try to own Black people even after the abolition of slavery, and the struggle of caring for someone else's children and how that can make it difficult to leave a shitty job. I really enjoyed it as a book, it's very funny and has some strong emotional moments, although it seems to take place in a world of exclusively cisgender heterosexual neurotypical people where nobody has ever questioned the heterosexual script before. This year I have become fascinated with these heterosexual scripts. I had never really bothered to learn them before, and as they've started to become more relevant to my life they have turned out to be deeply layered and complex with all sorts of bizarre components that feel more like a compulsory kink than a normal way for humans to assume other humans will behave without talking about it.

The entire city of Philly turned out to protest Moms for Liberty and kept them mostly contained in their hotel. I had a feeling of extreme catharsis. Despite all the pain, I felt remarkably good about my life. I managed to let go of so much weight I had been carrying.

August

True Biz by Sara Nović A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emory's This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal el-Mohtar An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green I also began but did not finish Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas.

True Biz is a novel about a Deaf school facing closure and examining what the school means to people in the community. It's also about the cochlear implant debate, the social model of disability, and why some disabled people do not want to be cured. I really adored this book and the ending especially was incredible. This is a book I want every ignorant able-bodied person to read.

Sink is very well written but was crushingly dark in a way I felt unable to get through. I've met the author and he's amazing and his live readings from this book were incredible, but holy shit is it just heart-breaking. It's about a kid growing up impoverished in a very physically and sexually abusive household and using anime and video games to cope, understand, and escape the world. Unfortunately every single person he encounters outside his household also takes advantage of him. I ended up just not being able to handle it. The prose is so beautiful and captivating while still describing experiences that make even some of the worst households look healthy.

A Half-Built Garden is a first contact story where humans must argue to aliens that we have the ability to live sustainably and in balance with the planet, or else the aliens will "forcibly evacuate" Earth "for our own good" and mine the planet for its minerals. I absolutely adored this book for so many reasons. Just read it. It's got so much to say about ecology, gender, political change, exploitation of Autistic people by the tech sector, intercultural communication, symbiosis, chosen family, and so much more.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a very fun little novella about two time traveling spies from enemy empires falling in love while they try to set traps for each other. It's very good but also felt... sort-of like I would've enjoyed it more in 2018. I think that says more about how I've grown and the person I've become than it does about the book.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a first contact story where aliens run a big ARG to observe human behaviors and a bisexual girl with unmedicated bipolar becomes an internet celebrity for being good at the ARG. The ways it deals with the thrill of attention felt deeply relatable to me and it was overall a fun romp around a topic you can tell comes from Hank Green's own experiences making first contact with aliens.

You can tell that I got my concussion in August because I just started listening to so many audiobooks while out of work.

September

The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

The Echo Wife is about a woman who invents a new way to make very good clones and then her husband leaves her for a clone he made of her and then the clone murders him and they have to work together to hide the body because if the existence of the clone became public it would ruin her career. It was an amazing book which was gut-chillingly terrifying and made me have a lot of feelings.

The Only Good Indians is a book I've had on my TBR for forever and finally read. It was decent but maybe I would've enjoyed it better if I wasn't concussed. It has a bit of a Slasher format which I think might be more fitted to screen than page, but there's also a lot that would be lost on the screen that it's in the literature. It's about the spirit of an elk who hunts down the families of some Blackfoot men who killed her without proper respects, and so seeks revenge. It's sort of an environmentalist ghost story where acting like Europeans results in the land's indigenous ways of the world working coming back to haunt and hurt you.

Then, I got into the Cosmere. It turned out this was the perfect way to always have an audiobook without spending too much of my limited brain power on deciding what to read next. The Cosmere is a meta-series of serieses of books that all take place on different planets in the same universe with consistent special laws of physics between them but each planet with its own unique hard magic system that basically works as a sort of law of physics that is being discovered through science. There's a meta-narrative carried between all the books with lots of crossovers, but each book/series still works on its own. It's like the MCU of books but good.

October

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson The Eleventh Metal by Brandon Sanderson Elantris by Brandon Sanderson The Hope of Elantris by Brandon Sanderson White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson illustrated by Rik Hoskin A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor by Hank Green Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell by Brandon Sanderson Sixth of the Dusk by Brandon Sanderson The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson Allomancer Jack and the Pits of Eltania by Brandon Sanderson White Sand Volume 2 by Brandon Sanderson illustrated by Rik Hoskin White Sand Volume 3 by Brandon Sanderson illustrated by Rik Hoskin Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Yeah so like, I really got into the Cosmere. I'm simply not going to summarize all these books. They're Cosmere books. You read them because you're reading every book in the Cosmere not because of their individual qualities.

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is a fun sequel that didn't age very well. While I really enjoyed the way it fleshes out the side characters from the first book, the book is very concerned with The Metaverse which now feels like a forgettable fad.

November

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson Mistborn: Secret History by by Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

Yup. Still just reading the Cosmere.

December

Decodependence: A Romantic Tragicomic by Lila Ash

Decodependence is a mediocre comic memoir seemingly written by someone who had just read Codependent No More. While there was a lot of relatable moments that made me feel like boring normal people can have the same problems as me, it still didn't really have anything particularly interesting to say about codependence.

I returned to work this month and haven't been reading as much because I've been working. I've been hacking away at A Natural History of Transition by Callum Angus but it's been very slow. When I read at work, I need to do eyeball reading and not audiobooks, which is still a bit more difficult for me with my concussion, even though I'm able to work.

My holds also just came in for two Emily Henry romance novels, which is surely a part of my continued anthropological research into the ways of the heterosexuals.