What I've been reading - April 2024
I thought it might be a good idea to start doing a monthly post about the books I read/finished reading over the last month. I've got three books I finished in April, I have a feeling there will be more in May (April was a slow month for reading tbh).
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde
Baedan 2: A Queer Journal of Heresy
The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation, Priests for Equality
These are three, quite dramatically different books. My mind isn't in a great place to talk about any of them in detail, but to get a general idea across: Sister Outsider was an important read. I've heard "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" many times, and it was good to read the essay it came from. I also enjoyed the exploration of the erotic and its political potential, which is something that's been on my mind for a while in other contexts (including some explored in Baedan). Her thoughts about poetry and how meaningful poetry had been for her throughout her life was also fascinating.
The most important and impactful part of Baedan 2 was the essay Against the Gendered Nightmare, which explored the general idea of domestication through the lens of gender as an institution. Becoming engendered is something that is done to us, something painful and destructive. Someday perhaps, we can escape it and become wild once again. The faces of the nihilist bits were also gratifying in how it named and described aspects of myself and of other people I've met who were similarly disillusioned with the world.
The political urgency is hard to relate to anymore: I've become so much of a shut-in, I don't connect with anyone much anymore. I feel hopeless and burnt out. I don't have the energy to do anything about these issues I spend so much time reading and thinking about. It feels bad, on the whole. But then everything feels bad these days.
I spent about seven months reading through the Inclusive Bible. It's the first time I've read the Bible cover-to-cover in several years. I'm not sure what I'm looking for in it. I still usually think of myself as a Christian, at least in a cultural and philosophical sense, but I don't think I believe in the supernatural. And my sympathies to leftist politics and anarchist ethics makes it hard to see religion as a positive force in the world, at least not in the form of an institution or a system of moral laws. I'm now reading David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament, too. It's like I'm searching for something I remember being there, that just isn't anymore. It feels empty.
Anyway. Reading is what keeps me alive, so I'll definitely have more posts about books.