Good evening!
There was no newsletter from me last week because I was bidding adieu to a friend from work who was going on maternity leave. I had a nice evening but I did actually miss not writing this. I must also confess that I hadn’t read a lot so it wouldn’t have been particularly interesting anyway; I got stuck in a bit of a reading rut for a short while but I’m back on track now. That’s despite being struck with The Illness that every other person has -- I had planned a lovely day off yesterday mooching and taking things slow but it was ruined by the feeling that my throat was stuck together. Anyway, despite all that I’m feeling festive! I love an excuse to lounge around.
There has been a myriad of ‘best of’ reading lists by lots of people that I know, like and admire (not necessarily all at once) (I Am Joking), but I’m saving mine until a little later in the month because I read right up until the end of the year and could miss something off. I’ll send it out in a separate newsletter to you all, along with other stuff I’ve enjoyed in 2023. I did, however, contribute to the i-D 2023 reading list along with a fair few other writers, talking about one of my favourite reads of the year (Inside Daisy Clover by Gavin Lambert).
I am also in Dazed, talking about the 10 fiction books that I think you should be excited for in 2024.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I finished Ka Bradley’s The Ministry of Time and don’t have much more to add to my comments on in the last edition of this newsletter, except to reiterate that it’s extremely fun with stellar characterisations and an ending that made me cry. This is a really special book and I really do encourage pre-orders for its release in May next year.
I then picked up Emily Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow (1930), a book I’m still yet to finish. It’s a very slim novel with pared-down prose, but it packs quite an extreme punch. It’s about a woman in an asylum as she suffers from post-natal psychosis, flitting between straight-forward prose and stream of consciousness narration. I like it for what it is, but it’s emotionally difficult to read so I’ve put it down for a while.
I decided to pick up something I knew would be pacy so I could get back on track, and ended up picking the perfect text. It was an advance copy of Elle Nash’s Deliver Me, which is out in June from Verve Books. It’s a horror, specifically a body horror, about reproduction and religion, while also encompassing a myriad of other themes like the meat industry, jealousy, repressed queerness and an insect fetish. It centres on Dee-Dee, a young woman who works in a meat processing factory, who lives with her perpetually unemployed boyfriend Daddy. Dee-Dee has suffered a string of miscarriages and begins the novel with another positive test, resolving that she will do whatever she can to keep her current pregnancy. She takes the view that if she can visualise her baby strongly enough, she will not lose it, so she reads everything she can about motherhood, enrols in prenatal classes at the local hospital and starts building a community around her that is centred towards her child. Her life becomes somewhat disrupted when a childhood friend re enters her life and because of the pressures put on her by her Pentecostal mother.
Reading the synopsis of this, I did wonder if there were perhaps too many things going on for this to be a convincing story, but Nash handles the balance extremely well. In her preface to the proof edition, she talks about growing up in the rural American South, where pregnant people are treated like ‘first-class citizens’, but are abandoned socially and economically once they actually have the baby. Nash places this at the feet of a culture that allows religious fundamentalism to flourish, and in her novel she identifies several hypocrisies that allow the events of the narrative to happen, albeit this is the extreme end of what can happen in this context. What I was particularly impressed by was how Dee-Dee shows a degree of naivety and vulnerability that doesn’t sit awkwardly with the criticisms that the book has as a whole. She is aware of some things, she is not aware of others, she reads situations incorrectly or she is blind to things -- we as the readers, however, still gain a clear picture of what the novel is doing and saying. It also doesn’t lose momentum at any point, which is a hard thing to do for a book that covers a lot of ground. It’s a great entry into the Southern Gothic genre, and put me in mind of Ethel Cain a lot.
I’m now nearly finished with (yet another proof copy -- sorry!) Jason Okundaye’s Revolutionary Acts, which is out in March with Faber. Now here we have a BOOK. It’s a modern history text on Black Gay Britain, particularly those who have passed through or currently reside in Brixton, an epicentre of queer Black culture. I have absolutely raced through it so far and it’s definitely going to be one of my reads of the year. It is based around Jason’s interviews and social meetings with elder Black gay men on their lives and activism in queer spaces, ranging from nightlife to living conditions to the AIDs crisis, among the many other things that make up a life. I want to do this book justice so I’ll write about it properly next week when I’ve finished it but I already have so much to say.
Have a nice Christmas!
Books on my radar
The library’s cafe have started doing these really delicious cinnamon lattes so I have been haunting the premises like I have a vendetta against Big Cinnamon. On my last visit I took out a couple of books -- Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023) and Tremor by Teju Cole (2023). I have also been gifted some books by friends for Christmas -- Sara, who introduced me to Gavin Lambert, sent me another novel by him, this time Running Time (1982), and Daphne, who always sends me great novels (previously Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1929) and Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight (1937)) sent me Antal Szerb’s Journey by Moonlight (1937). Excited to get to all of them!
Merry Christmas. I have been saving your newsletters as a treat. I will be reading them this week. Thank you 😘
I also started The Shutter of Snow and, similarly, set it aside to return to another time. Short but dense and I just didn’t have it in me but I’d like to give it another go at some point.