#Another Country by James Baldwin

[luthienne]

James Baldwin, from Another Country [ID'd]

[over-fen-and-field]

Okay, so I've had A Hell of a Year beginning with a sapovirus around this time last year that turned into a fun new autoimmune disorder that basically knocked me off my feet for six months (in two three-month rounds.) (I'm doing pretty okay now and the autoimmune thing does actually resolve for some people within a year or two, so fingers crossed). So, I didn't end up setting a formal reading goal, and instead basically just read whatever, whenever, and decided not to be embarrassed about how much potato chip sci-fi I was reading. It was fun! Below I've asterisked all the rereads and bolded the ones that I liked the most.

The Incarnations by Susan Barker

The Golden Compass* by Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

Monster Theory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Cat’s Eye* by Margaret Atwood

Frankenstein* by Mary Shelley

Dracula* by Bram Stoker

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

The Four Things That Matter Most by Ira Byock

Dying Well by Ira Byok

Praying with Jane Eyre* by Vanessa Zoltan

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Devil House by John Darnielle

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

This World is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Educated by Tara Westover

Longbourn by Jo Baker

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland* by Catherynne M Valente

Deathless by Catherynne M Valente

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M Valente

This coming year, I've decided that I want to read more classics. If you have a favorite classic (broadly defined), please let me know! Bonus points if you tell me why it's a favorite of yours and, if it wasn't originally in English, if you have a preferred translation that I should check out.

End of year reading round-up! Woo-hoo!

My reading goal for 2023 was to read a book a week – while using very broad definitions of “book” (includes things like plays, novellas, and graphic novels), “read” (audiobooks and radio recordings count, not just written texts), and “week” (sometimes I read multiple short things in a week, sometimes it took me two or three weeks to get through a longer book).  I’m also defining “finished” as when I’m done with the book, but not necessarily when I’ve read every word on every page – I picked and chose chapters a bit from the essay collections, for example, and bounced off a few books halfway through if they just weren't for me or weren't for me at that time. Anything with an asterisk is a reread.  I have these roughly in chronological order of when I finished them, but I tended to be in the middle of several books at once and didn’t keep a good spreadsheet to keep track, so it’s a bit cobbled together from my memory and library records.  Also, please note that just because I read a book, doesn’t mean I agree with or endorse all or even most of the ideas in it.

The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Flight Behavior* by Barbara Kingsolver

The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making* by Catherine M Valente

Deerskin* by Robin McKinley

Holy Silence by J Brent Bill

You Don’t Have to be Wrong for Me to be Right by Brad Hirschfield

A Letter in the Scroll by Jonathan Sacks

Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

One Nation, Indivisible by Celene Ibrahim and Jennifer Howe Peace

Chalice* by Robin McKinley

Braiding Sweetgrass* by Robin Kimmerer

Dracula* by Bram Stoker

Hamlet* by Shakespeare

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Here All Along by Sarah Hurwitz

This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Alan Lew

The Scientist’s Guide to Writing by Stephen B Heard

Everything is God by Jay Michaelson

The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible* by Barbara Kingsolver

The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile

Unsheltered* by Barbara Kingsolver

Pride and Prejudice* by Jane Austen

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner

No Cure for Being Human by Kate Bowler

Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved by Kate Bowler

Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte

Praying with Jane Eyre by Vanessa Zoltan

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brooks and Rebecca Ann Parker

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Staying with the Trouble* by Donna Haraway

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Incarnations by Susan Baker

Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock

The Anthropocene Reviewed* by John Green

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

My Promised Land by Ari Shavit

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel by Ian Black

Dragonflight* by Anne McCaffrey

The Masterharper of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

Dragonsdawn* by Anne McCaffrey

Overall, I’m feeling pretty good about the list!  There are definitely some themes that pop up again and again, but there’s a nice mix of genres, fiction/nonfiction, length, tone, first-time reads and rereads, etc.  I haven’t set a formal goal for this coming year yet, but I’m hoping to get some off-the-beaten-path recommendations from friends for things that I wouldn’t otherwise have heard about – so, if you have any favorites, I’d love to hear about them!

[quotespile]

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived — nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died — through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life.

James Baldwin, Another Country

[fadeintoyou1993]

so james baldwin said the face of a lover is a mystery containing like all mysteries the possibility of torment.... okay.

[overthegardenwirtt]

top ten books I read this year, ranked:

10. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (pub 1939)

Honestly this wasn't the most mind-blowing or memorable book, but it was my first Christie and my introduction to this genre. It got me out of a slump too which was great. Christie's style is so very british but I thoroughly enjoyed this as my introduction to this kind of mystery, and I found the reveal to be surprising and well done! This book definitely made me want to pick up more Agatha Christie in the future, but I'm not in any particular hurry to do so.

9. Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (pub 1939)

This was actually my most recent read. I picked up this book knowing that it was the inspiration behind the musical (and film) Cabaret. This book feels much more of a piece of creative nonfiction/memoir than a novel, but it tells different stories in vignettes of people in Berlin in the 1930s. Between dancers and artists like Sally Bowles, queer people in Berlin, and Jewish people living through the rise of the Nazi party, these true stories were incredibly touching and really made me think about the way we talk about fascism today. The modern way in which people spoke in Weimer Germany, and the extent to which they knew what was going on in Germany at this time and still just let the Nazi takeover happen, is terrifying and all too real, and I am glad this book exists to highlight that.

8. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin (pub 1953)

My first Baldwin of the year and third Baldwin book overall. I really enjoyed this book, as it was an exploration of a Black family in Harlem, and each family members' relationship with one another and with God. I loved the way the story was told, through flashbacks and memories of each character as they sat to pray in a church. Each story was both incredibly humanizing and devastating, and the ending was surprisingly somewhat hopeful.

7. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (pub 1976)

I read this after the second season of the amc show aired. Honestly, this book was so much better than I was expecting it to be, given what I know about where Anne Rice takes the series in the future. In this novel, the prose is so beautiful and breathtaking. Anne Rice also delves into such deep and thought-provoking discussions about God and religion, goodness and evil and monstrousness, through her characters and their philosophies, and how they deal with their vampirism. I fully feel that this book deserves to be called the modern Frankenstein.

6. Babel by RF Kuang (pub 2022)

The youngest book on here by far. I am often weary of the trendy new books and the 'booktok' books, especially those that seem to be fulfilling some kind of aesthetic. So, my expectations going into this weren't the highest, I was expecting, as is true with most 'dark academia' books, a rip-off of The Secret History. However, I was so pleasantly surprised by this book! This book is an anti-colonialist response to The Secret History and the like, and explores how academia always serves the institutions in power, and how specifically British academia has driven, and continues to drive, imperialism. This book was also very science-fictiony, and completely deserves its Nebula award. The magic system in this book is so interesting and novel to me, and i truly think Kuang is a genius. Also, I personally loved the footnotes. It's so clear how much work and research went into this book, and it adds so much to the quality of the book.

5. Animal Farm by George Orwell (pub 1945)

This was technically a re-read, since I read Animal Farm with my mom in elementary school and didn't understand it at all. So, I finally got back around to reading this and it was great. Just so perfectly told, the story of revolt from one authoritarian regime and the decline into another, arguably worse regime. It was also incredibly heartbreaking, and made even more so by making the characters farm animals. It is truly a perfect book and I know it sounds cliche, but everyone should read it. George Orwell is well-known for a reason.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (pub 1969)

This one was unexpected! I have owned Slaughterhouse-Five for years, I think it has been sitting on by bookshelf for over five years untouched. I finally got around to reading it a few months ago and it was incredible. Kurt Vonnegut has a witty and to-the-point writing style that was difficult to get used to at first, but I definitely believe it worked in this book's favor. The childlike, simple way of writing and speaking, combined with the grim topic of WWII and PTSD, really highlight the sadness of Kurt Vonnegut's situation and how young he, and Billy Pilgrim, and all these soldiers really were. I absolutely loved the sci-fi interludes as well. It worked both creatively, to provide an allegory for war and PTSD, and literally to show just how dissociative Billy Pilgrim would get after the war. This book left me feeling incredibly sad, and I know that was just the point.

3. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (pub 1969)

And the book that beat Slaughterhouse-Five for both the Hugo and the Nebula! This book is not one that I would typically read, but I am so glad that I did. It is considered a seminal work of feminist science fiction, and tells the story of a human man named Genly who goes to a planet where all the people are genderless. It is a beautiful story of finding love and understanding with other people, and learning that there are strengths in our differences, and those differences can bring us together. This is a truly great novel, and left me feeling the way the protagonist felt, having gained a new empathy and love for human beings, no matter how different we may be.

2. Another Country by James Baldwin (pub 1962)

My fourth and final James Baldwin novel to date. I absolutely loved this book. The writing style, the beautiful vibes, and the beautiful and devastating story of a group of friends in Greenwich Village, New York was so compelling. This was one of those books that I could not just put away after I finished it. I had to read and reread the book, go over it in my mind for a while afterwards. This book explores Black masculinity and Black womanhood in America, it explores queerness, and specifically Black queerness during this time, and it explores the complicated dynamics between a multiracial group of friends in 1960s America. It feels so shockingly ahead of its time.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (pub 1949)

yeah yeah, this is cliche, but it's so well-known, and so spoken about, for a good reason. This book, outside of its talk about authoritarianism, was actually just a thoroughly enjoyable and effective work of psychological horror. The way that language and history can shape our current really was so brilliantly done that it had me questioning whether O'Brien was telling the truth to Winston at times. I feel like this is a controversial opinion, but I felt that many of the characters, including Winston, Julia, Syme, and even O'Brien to a lesser extent, were humanized in a way that I felt terrible for these characters. This book had such incredible world-building that I would have been okay with reading 300 full pages of Winston's day-to-day life, that's how interested I was in this horrifying world Orwell created. However, the plot was equally as compelling! I truly felt like I was there with Winston through every step of his journey, and that made this novel feel so sickeningly horrific, and so effective.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[chantssecrets]

[albertserra]

Another Country by James Baldwin, 1962.

[theglasschild]

"The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” ― James Baldwin, Another Country

[uchicagoscrc]

James Baldwin at 100: Archival Encounters at UChicago’s SCRC

Born August 2, 1924, in Harlem, New York, James Arthur Baldwin rose from the harsh conditions there to become a major figure in American literary arts, a key voice for African American civil rights and social justice, and a tireless witness and advocate for humanity. His life, ideas, and works have had a significant impact on many. His fiction and essays made real the human condition and shamed those who failed the test of time and love, critical themes found at the heart of most of his work. Today marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.

An interesting history of events found in the  Student Government Records, with James Baldwin at the heart of it. A single folder concerning a little-known incident with Baldwin’s novel, Another Country. Students organized to intervene in the dispute over the removal of the novel from a required reading list at Wright Junior College.

Interestingly, in the end, the novel remained on the list, an option was made for students who did not want to read the book, a new instructor was assigned to the course for the next term, and the previous instructor who assigned the book was given a two-month vacation. There was also mention in the news reports that depending on how this issue was resolved, the college could have lost its accreditation.

Other collections at SCRC that contain archival materials created by or composed about James Baldwin: Campus Publications, Chicago Review Records, David Ray Papers, International Association for Cultural Freedom Records, Layle Silbert Papers, and Robert W. Spike Papers.

[morepeachyogurt]

another country by james baldwin

[afterthegoldrushes]

i got a library card i did my housework and then sat outside eating pomegranates and reading i made a coffee i like my room im going to ren faire on sunday

[quotespile]

We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them — to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That's very important. If you don't forgive yourself you'll never be able to forgive anybody else and you'll go on committing the same crimes forever.

James Baldwin, Another Country

[fadeintoyou1993]

i can't highlight the library copy i'm reading it from so i had to download the pdf just to save these specific parts of reverend foster's sermon at rufus' funeral in another country by james baldwin

[overthegardenwirtt]

books

there are a few books I've read recently, like in the last year, that no one ever talks about. they're not the booktok or tumblr darlings so it's hard to find other people who are interested in them. anyway most of these are at least subtextually queer and written prior to 1970, and those vintage queer vibes go so fucking hard. like once you read pre-1970s queer lit it's really hard to read a modern LGBT romance.

Another Country by James Baldwin. James Baldwin was an actual icon. He lived between New York City and Paris and wrote profoundly human books about race, gender, and sexuality while also being an American civil rights activist and orator. Another Country is Baldwin's third novel, published in 1962. It follows a group of artists in Greenwich Village and their various relationships with one another. It looks at racism, Black masculinity, interracial relationships, homosexuality, and bisexuality, and it explores all of these societal issues through the microcosms of different romantic and sexual relationships between the characters. Baldwin's writing is like Jazz. It is rhythmic, smooth, and breathtaking. If you liked Giovanni's room, read this. It is much more nuanced in its exploration of both race and sexuality.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. Le Guin's mind is revolutionary. She is everything jk r*wling is credited for, except far better as her most famous books center people of color and androgynous people. She published the first The Earthsea Quartet, a series about a boy wizard at a wizarding school, in 1964 and was never credited as inspiration by r*wling. The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969 and won both the Hugo and the Nebula that year. The book follows a human who visits a planet where he finds that its inhabitants are all completely androgynous for the majority of their lives. It is a beautiful exploration of love, trust, and the ability to see past societal conventions to truly love and understand other people.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is perhaps best known for her short story The Lottery, or unfortunately for the incredibly unfaithful Netflix TV adaptation of this novel. Published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House follows Eleanor Vance, a woman in her early 30s who has about the maturity of a 19-year-old, as she is recruited along with a group of others to live at the mysterious Hill House. The book is essentially psychological horror and follows Eleanor as she is driven mad by her own feelings of otherness and isolation from the world. There is also some incredibly lesbian subtext in the novel between the two female main characters which adds really interesting layers to Eleanor's feelings of otherness. It's a quick and compelling read and gives interesting insight into the lives of two women in the late 1950s who cannot adhere to the standards of womanhood set for them in society.

[eunuch-besties]

Nothing gives me chills like this