librarygoblin2023

[librarygoblin2023]

Update Two

My dear, vast audience, 

Ugh! I Am Bad At Schedules! It’s been well over a week since I last posted, so I’m going to see if I can post every other week and then work up from there. I’m going to give us a nice clean slate update and tomorrow I’ll do my “real” post for the week - likely a short review. 

List Time!!!

Completed since last post:

- Binti: the Night Masquerade - Nnedi Okorafor

- Between Shades of Gray - Ruta Sepetys

- Dark Places - Gillian Flynn

- Eat A Peach - David Chang 

Currently reading:

- NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, Steve Silberman

- A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

- The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich

- Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler

- Vengeful, Victoria Schwab

- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

Near Future TBR:

- Grown, Tiffany D. Jackson

- Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley

- The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin

- Ariadne, Jennifer Saint

- Mixed, Chandra Prasad

- Black Enough, Ibi Zoboi

- The Power, Naomi Alderman

- Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Until next time!

Sincerely,

A Future Librarian of America

[librarygoblin2023]

Update One

Dedicated readers,

My initial posting schedule sure did unravel quickly, huh? I had something of a dry spell there. Do you ever start a book that you want to like so badly that you convince yourself you’re invested in it by dropping all your other current reads to focus on it and then spend weeks slogging through an incredibly disappointing 500-and-some-odd pages only to end up discouraged, dispassionate and -for lack of a better phrase- wholeheartedly turned off? Just me? Well, nothing to get you back on the horse than some good old re-reads. For the format of this post, I’m going to run down everything I’ve recently finished, everything I’m currently reading and my immediate-future TBR; then I’m going to deposit some thoughts on identity and proximity to privilege, and wrap up with a little section on diversifying literary access and library circulation. 

List Time!!!

Completed since last post: 

- Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

- Nothing To See Here, Kevin Wilson

- Hugged, Verity Ritchie

- Love, Love, Victoria Chang

- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V. E. Schwab

- Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

- The Black Kids, Christina Hammonds Reed

- The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern

- Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams

          Re-Reads: 

           - The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie

          - There There, Tommy Orange

         - Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler

Currently reading:

- NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, Steve Silberman

- A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

- The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich

- The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor

Near Future TBR: 

- Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys

- Mixed, Chandra Prasad

- Black Enough, Ibi Zoboi

- The Power, Naomi Alderman

- Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler

- Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Identity and authorship is a really difficult topic to navigate and it always brings us back to the question of how an author’s personal philosophy and politics affect their writing and the value of differing opinions. Specifically, right now I’m grappling with centering Black and Indigenous voices, preferably Black and/or Indigenous authors telling own-voices stories. But Black and Indigenous people aren’t monoliths, and a lot of people with positional power in book media communities have taken to erasing the diversity of lived experiences within both of these vast communities. This is shitty for obvious reasons, white people have taken a lot of this rhetoric to mean that we’re doing something right simply by picking up a book by a Black author, and it excuses us from actually investigating any underlying biases that exist in works by any sort of marginalized author. But what is the answer actually to only read “suitably radical” Black, Indigenous and authors of Color? In some ways that feels like taking an equally dehumanizing and racist path - implying that art by BIPOC is only worth consuming if it teaches us, does immense amounts of intellectual and emotional labor for us and aligns perfectly with our politics. People who will stroke their own egos and soothe their white guilt by reading books by BIPOC that pander to white audiences or only books by conservative and moderate BIPOC are obviously cherry-picking and manipulating voices of Color to suit their needs, but we white liberals and leftists are doing the same thing when we hold authors of Color - especially Black women authors - to astronomically high standards and center ourselves in their art. 

We as readers can be as individually conscious as possible, but it’s very hard to counteract the racist, transphobic and misogynistic publishing industry. Most people, to be published as authors will need to have some degree of proximity to privilege to begin with and I cannot help but notice how quick we are to become complacent in slapping a label of marginalization on someone and accepting them as the voice of any number of vastly diverse communities. With the example of Indigenous authors who are picked up by publishing companies and break through into “mainstream” bestseller lists, almost all of them are men, almost all of them have very light skin and most of them tell stories about violence. This isn’t to knock any of them, their art is moving and important and beautiful, but these are the faces and voices the industry chooses to reward and if we aren’t critical thinkers about the voices we center in our reading, we very much internalize these ideals and are liable to perpetuate this anti-Indigeneity. These are both deeply convoluted issues rooted in hundreds of years of white supremacy and genocide and are definitely things I want to flesh out my ideas on more, more importantly, when I come back to these topics I want to have opinions from BIPOC whom I can pay and cite for their work. If this were my final word on this it would be me acting on my own subconscious white supremacy by centering and valuing my own white ideas.  

Okay, let’s wrap this up with some geeky thoughts on how we get our books. Now, there’s plenty of places I’ve gotten my books before: libraries, bookstores, amazon and kindle, The Internet, free audiobooks, free PDFs, pirated audiobooks and PDFs, goodwill, yardsales, free boxes. But I’m trying something new, I have a new job that pays more and with some of that money, I paid for a book subscription box. I still get to choose the book they send me, but it’s of a certain selection and I am Very Excited. The first book I’ve received is Winter Counts, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden and I’m making myself work through another library book before I open it, but it arrived today and when I tell you I am beyond stoked... ugh, there are no words to describe my enthusiasm. Lately I’ve also been taking out three books from the library every week and giving myself one week a month to catch up. I imagine I’ll have to slow my roll, as the kids say, pretty soon since I can no longer read on my lunch break, but I am determined to get to know all my librarians before the summer is over. 

I’ll aim to post updates twice weekly, one of them is just going to be a list and review post of what I’m reading, what I’ve finished, what arrives for me and how it was. The other should be a more long-form post, discussing a social phenomenon either tied to literary access or rooted in something I’m reading. 

Until next time! 

Sincerely, 

A Future Librarian of America

[librarygoblin2023]

I am officially making a bookblr G-d save me

hello, 

I regret to inform you I am starting a piece of unabashedly self centered media wherein I talk about the books I’m reading, uniting themes between pieces of literature I have opinions about and the effects of art and life on each other and boost the opinions of other people on literature-related topics where my lived experience should be de-centered. 

So, without further adieu, a book blog from a future librarian of america. 

Currently reading: 

- Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson

- Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

- Love, Love, Victoria Chang

- NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, Steve Silberman

- A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

I’ll aim to post updates twice weekly and as I finish books. I work a full-time job, so that may not happen, but eh, it is what it is. 

[librarygoblin2023]

All my classes have become essay writing and I feel disconnected from everything, enjoy my ramblings into the void about Richard Siken

So, in my life lately, I’ve been re-examining the ways I think about love and consent within the LGBTQIA+ community, which, as it always does, brought me back to Richard Siken. I have a copy of Crush, which I love to death and go back to all the time, but it’s fundamentally a collection of books about being in such a constant state of panic that you normalize it to yourself. Therefore, the fact that it’s one of my “comfort books” is not a sign that I am a well adjusted human being. But I was going back through it yesterday, and I think that something that isn’t discussed as much in the introduction is the fact that it also brings into discussion a lot of concepts of violence and misunderstandings of consent. Part of what makes it so impactful to me personally, is this relation of violence to queer love and lust. Because of the miseducation around and erasure of queerness/LGBTQIA+ identity in childhood and in the traditional education system, we learn by doing in a vastly insufficient way, and because of that, a lot of people get hurt or hurt themselves. We have an association from mainstream media between our love and subjection to violence, and a lot of miseducated queer people’s misunderstanding of consent leads to trauma, and because these experiences teach us to expect violence or hurt, we normalize and re-perpetuate it. A lot of Siken’s poems depict this violence, not as a contradiction of the love or lust that exists between the people in the poems, but as a part of it. And even more of them employ violent language to describe sex and romance. To me, this has meant more about the way that queer people experience and learn love, sexuality and violence as intertwined and how we need to break that association than it has signaled Siken endorsing this as a way of loving people. Because this writing is tied to a collection on panic and normalization of feelings and realities of unsafety, it seems that he is including this part of queer existence and interaction as part of that building fear and anxiety which surrounds us until we are numb to it. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about un-learning what I know about consent lately, because I met someone who’s lovely and easy to communicate with and the way that we’ve approached setting any sort of boundaries has provided some much needed contrast to previous relationships and hook-ups. And what I’m reflecting on and beginning to learn is that it’s not just when something feels wrong that boundaries need to be set or enforced, but when something doesn’t make you feel anything. Because so much of what I and many others don’t engage with emotionally comes from numbness and repression as opposed to a lack of opinion, I’m learning that it’s healthy to deconstruct apathy and question whether that comes naturally or whether it’s a product of desensitization. 

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk

[librarygoblin2023]

Happy TDOV, help a GNC black trans woman survive this quarantine 🥰🥰🥰

[librarygoblin2023]

[librarygoblin2023]

you ever just hate jk rowling so much that it completely ruins Harry Potter for you?

[librarygoblin2023]

I’ve caved

screaming into the void part 1: 

i wanna rant about books somewhere, this is gonna be that place, nobody is ever going to see this and i can vibe with that

it was going to be a book tumblr, a booktube or a fucking podcast and g-d knows this is the least of many evils

sorry