just a place for readings and notes on such readings

Currently Reading

Cover of Nora, Nora

Nora, Nora by Anne Rivers Siddons

In much of the spirit of my Zora girl Summer of 2022, where I read Zora Neal Hurston all summer, I am now
getting into Siddon Girl Summer. She's really captured my attention, and brought me much out of myself.
So far this book is tropey but but utilizes the presence of the "manic pixie dream girl" in a way that is
quite refreshing to me from a book published in 2000. But also maybe intentionally, a tender study of queerness and
coming of age. Hill Towns very deliberately and causually includes significant queer characters
and doesn't shy away from "queer" southernness, that is, the rich history of liberal southern culture and
the on going cultural resistance to assumed "proper southern values"; It's given me an expectation that all
supposed queerness is deliberate. And I am so down for that

Past Readings

Cover of Hill Towns

Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons

Random library pick. The synopsis on the inside covers slip really got me. Southern gothic, beach read,
really gets you in the psyhe of mid-century neurotic white women, in the best way. Anne Rivers Siddons is if
Faulkner was a libbed out white lady from Atlanta. Hot beach read for the sexually liberated southern women
who's never taken a mirror to her own clit. I highly recommend it. She really allows you to live in the scenery.

Cover of Model Home

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

read Summer 2025

I had been waiting for the release of this book since it was announced and boy did it deliver.
There are a lot of reasons to be grateful for being black and queer at this time in the world,
but one of them is definitely being alive while Rivers Solomon is writing. This is such potent, heartbreaking,
and unsettling horror that will make you occilate between wanting your mom to read it immediately and
never letting her touch a copy of this book, ever. Fae touches the body of my shame in ways only
the deep holler of the night has ever done, only to show me it is something I can also do, though it is scary to do,
but you should do it, you should be free. we should all be free.

let's go home.