Favorite Books I Read in 2023
Not including rereads and in no particular order, here are the books I loved the most this year.
Titles & Authors, from top left to bottom:
Fluids by May Leitz
Nevada by Imogen Binnie
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Perfume: Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
Valencia by Michelle Tea
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Summer by Edith Wharton
"The Echo & the Nemesis", "Life is No Abyss", "The Interior Castle", "Bad Characters", and "In the Zoo" by Jean Stafford
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Crash by J.G. Ballard
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Conde
Erasure by Percival Everett
Persuasion by Jane Austen
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, & Lost Futures by Mark Fisher
Girl Flesh by May Leitz
Here's to a new year, full of great reading!
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Re/search - Complete Volumes of Zines and Extra Texts : V. Vale : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
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An Elegy for Jerry
by Robert Hunter
Jerry, my friend,
you've done it again,
even in your silence
the familiar pressure
comes to bear, demanding
I pull words from the air
with only this morning
and part of the afternoon
to compose an ode worthy
of one so particular
about every turn of phrase,
demanding it hit home
in a thousand ways
before making it his own,
and this I can't do alone.
Now that the singer is gone,
where shall I go for the song?
Without your melody and taste
to lend an attitude of grace
a lyric is an orphan thing,
a hive with neither honey's taste
nor power to truly sting.
What choice have I but to dare and
call your muse who thought to rest
out of the thin blue air
that out of the field of shared time,
a line or two might chance to shine --
As ever when we called,
in hope if not in words,
the muse descends.
How should she desert us now?
Scars of battle on her brow,
bedraggled feathers on her wings,
and yet she sings, she sings!
May she bear thee to thy rest,
the ancient bower of flowers
beyond the solitude of days,
the tyranny of hours--
the wreath of shining laurel lie
upon your shaggy head
bestowing power to play the lyre
to legions of the dead
If some part of that music
is heard in deepest dream,
or on some breeze of Summer
a snatch of golden theme,
we'll know you live inside us
with love that never parts
our good old Jack O'Diamonds
become the King of Hearts.
I feel your silent laughter
at sentiments so bold
that dare to step across the line
to tell what must be told,
so I'll just say I love you,
which I never said before
and let it go at that old friend
the rest you may ignore.
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“For Vaughan, events have no meaning and do not even seem to be phenomenologically present until they are captured and mediated by some means of mechanical reproduction. The image is at the hands of the text's characters thus the subject of both fetishisation and exorbitation: nothing is more real than the image, and without the image there is no longer any real.��
Andrzej Gasiorek on J.G. Ballard and Crash.
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“For several minutes I gazed at this wrecked car, reassembling its identity. Terrifying events rolled through my mind on its flattened wheels. What most surprised me was the extent of the damage. During the accident the hood had climbed over the engine compartment, hiding from me the real extent of the collision. Both front wheels and the engine had been driven back into the driver’s section, bowing the floor. Blood still marked the bonnet, streamers of black lace running towards the windshield wiper gutters. Minute flecks were spattered across the seat and steering wheel. I thought of the dead man lying on the hood of the car. The blood rolling across the bruised cellulose was a more potent fluid than the semen cooling in his testicles.”
- Crash, J.G. Ballard
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