#charity heartscape porpentine

[stinkybreath]

hello

do you trust me to recommend you some books

I read ~170 this year and here’s reviews of my top ten, written for fb and crossposted under the cut in case you’re interested

1: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch

-I know it’s not obvious from the way I conduct myself here, but I have a very large vocabulary. I was a kid who read the dictionary and also any thesaurus I had access to. So, that said, consider how much it means to me personally that this book taught me 30-50 new words. This isn’t a huge part of the reason I loved this book, but it is a very impressive fact about it that I think will grab the attention of people who might otherwise not read it. This book changed the way I read, the way I think about literature, and the way I evaluate what I have previously read. It’s offensive to me that I lived 30 years as an avid reader and culture sponge without hearing about this book. I cannot recommend it enough. I give it top spot on this list for a very good reason. I’d like to avoid spoiling any of the plot because while I called the twist easily, discovery of each point was so delightful that I want you to have that same experience.

2: Cockatiel x Chameleon by Bavitz

-You all have plenty of experience with me recommending works of fiction published online in formats that deter most readers. This is a normal Najwa activity. I know how it sounds and I know, therefore, that this plea will go more or less unheard, but I BEG you. Look past the fact this was published on AO3. This is one of the most remarkable books I’ve read, period. I mentioned in my worst of how much it bothers me that most writers can’t plausibly write about the internet. This book is the FUCKING ZENITH of writing about being online. It is the absolute peak and I will be shocked if I ever encounter another work that overtakes it. This is a book about people who are so strange they are barely human, but in ways that will be instantly familiar, intimately true, to those of us who grew up on the internet. There is violence and abuse and love and beauty and Chatroulette. There is art and gore and exploration of identity and apocalypse. There is fucking POSTING.

3: Serious Weakness by Porpentine

-Charity Heartscape Porpentine is one of our greatest living authors, opinions of snide Twitter users notwithstanding. I am an evangelist for her Twine game poetry because it is so singular and so affecting. Even a decade on, I can play through Their Angelical Understanding and feel freshly stabbed in the gut. Imagine the thrill I felt when she posted about her completed novel. I would (strongly) recommend this even to people who (somehow) bounced off her games, because her prose style is very distinct from the voice those are in (yet still recognizable). This is an incredibly violent, sick, stomach-turning, difficult, ugly, terrifying book. It’s also ultimately asking the reader a question about love and compassion. If you are sensitive to any trigger in written word about any violent action one person can do to another, skip this book, but if you feel like you have the strength, give her the nine bucks or whatever that she’s asking and devour it like I did. A hook for you: our protagonist has a chance meeting with an embodiment of pain. What follows includes torture, gender, climate disaster, and Columbine. Gorgeous. This book almost convinced me to start doing video essays so I could explain to people the incredible factors at play in it.

4: Negative Space by BR Yeager

-I have been trying to read this book for free for so long that I broke my streak and paid actual money for it. It was one of the better purchases I made all year. Thanks to finally reading some Stephen King this year I now have the requisite foundation to see how heavily his style inspired Yeager in this book, but I would die on the hill defending my position that Yeager does King better than King ever did. There is evil seeping out between the lines of this book. Have you ever had a nightmare that made you feel doomed the entire next day? Have you ever felt you were trapped in your shitty, dying home town? Have you ever been seduced by the excitement of activities that you know might actually kill you? Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and looked at your own dark reflection? Go back to the deepest point of your teenage depression here.

5: We Who Are About to by Joanna Russ

-One of the shortest entries on this list and so one of the easiest sells, but it is just as full of meaning as any other that made the cut. There is so much implied and unsaid about this protagonist. She feels whole, like this is the last chunk of chapters in a series centered on her, but she represents something universal. She is one member of a group from a crash-landed spaceship, a group small enough in numbers that there’s no way for humanity to last on this planet more than one more generation. Any attempts to do even that are so plainly cruel and self-deluding that she wants no part of them, but the others with her don’t see it the same way. Her story is womanhood under patriarchy, it is life and death, it is self-determination. Brutal. I read this at the airport and cried in public.

6: Carrie by Stephen King

-As much as I hate to say it, I gotta hand it to Uncle Steve (or really to Tabitha). This book very nearly justifies the rest of his career on its own. I thought had picked up most of it from cultural osmosis, but there was a truly shocking depth that I couldn’t have found without experiencing it firsthand. Maybe it’s funny to use this word here, but this book is humanist and compassionate and sincere in a way that King never finds again, particularly with the women he writes. Carrie is so vivid that I felt a protective instinct for her throughout the book even though I knew she was about to discover her own power. She reflects parts of me about as well as Lindqvist did in Little Star, which is the work of art that is THE most personal to me. A classic for a fucking reason.

7: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

-This year, lots of the books that I read had strange echoes of each other. In this, I can pick out shades of Carrie, of Camp Concentration, of We Who Are About To, and even of Serious Weakness. Rarely if ever are these references by each author, but it has enriched my experience by having unofficial interlocking intertexts for all of them. This book has been very divisive with reviewers, and I understand why, because it is cruel and the prose is extremely stylistic. This is somewhat experimental and fully literary and sincerely philosophical. I get it. Not for everyone. But it was for me. A clan of inbreds at the end of the world with their eyes on their scapegoat, nonverbal and disabled Dolores. It shocked me and it challenged me and I loved it.

8: The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink

-These short stories did the exact opposite of the thing that pissed me off about The Florida Project. These are about people who are varying degrees of sympathetic but the same degree of desperately, penny-scrapingly working poor. The easy pull quote is “unflinching,” because it turns an eye on very ugly parts of real life for so many of us. I think people who grew up middle class will find some voyeuristic, prurient pleasure in these stories, but they’re not written for you. They’re written for us, the people who have lived this way.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 9

-I don’t need to tell you how great this book is, because the whole of booktok has told you this all year. Instead, what I will say is that it is much stranger and less tidy than you’re imagining when you hear the blurb. It’s a short read and it is one of the few times I haven’t regretted following booktok’s advice.

Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis 10

-This barely squeaked onto this year’s best of, because I started it before 2022 ended and finished it early in the new year. As I read it, especially in the first 20% of the book, I was confused as to how it ended up on my TBR. But toward the end, and throughout the year as I’ve continued to think about it, I understand more instinctively than intellectually that this is a remarkable work. A short synopsis: in the 80s in the UK, there is an epidemic of suicide, but only by adults. The teens left behind forge their own path.

[everycorner]

Trianon 10 minutes before his face is smashed in, if we're being honest

[alexanderpearce]

had a great time cosplaying god‘s most kidnappable autist

[thecolorsfucked]

This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash.

This is in defense of the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death, those who came looking for safety and found something worse than anything they’d experienced before.

For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.

I was one of these people.

- Porpentine May 11, 2015

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Psycho Nymph Exile by Porpentine Charity Heartscape

goodreads

gurowave novella about a disgraced biomech pilot and her girlfriend, an ex-magical girl

Mod opinion: I've read it and it's great. Also I love the term gurowave. Be aware that this does get dark and fucked up though.

[foundfaker]

so that serious weakness book huh

[salvatriceaverse]

[metamatar]

wait

[serketinewillfulness]

I just finished reading Serious Weakness. This is one of the best books I've ever read. I bought a physical copy and I might be buying another just so I can cut it up and burn it, to see what delight that'll spark in me. This book has a sort of oil-slick quality to it. You digest it and you can feel its wrongness seep into your bones, poisoning you and making you worse while you chug. Rainbow iridescence spilling across your front as you can't quite swallow correctly. It's a life-altering read, in the sense that it will always be there, like radioactive decay lingering in your mind. I really fucking liked this book.

[everycorner]

new @xrafstar arrived early !

[alexanderpearce]

trianon and insul from serious weakness by @xrafstar which had some kind of extremely profound effect upon me

[fruitsoups]

me listening to gravity weapon: some seriously psycho nymph exile ass vibes to this huh

meanwhile on twitter:

lmao

[makorays]

No need to answer but I saw Low Kill Shelter and Serious Weakness in your(?) library :) nice nice. Just wanted to reach out for those two

serious weakness hurts a lot. i prefer low kill shelter because SW was honestly too much for me, but it was still extremely well written and is actually what inspired me to start writing hopeless organic. SW has almost nothing in common with HO (i would NOT put melial through anything that horrible), but porpentine just has this...vibe. this "i'm not supposed to be strong enough to accomplish anything, but fuck you, eat my avant garde twink literature that i managed to scrape together out of discarded pencil shavings and force of will" vibe.

porpentine once said something in response to an ask, i can't remember the exact phrasing but i'm stealing the message and phrasing it in my own way:

if you can't run, walk. if you can't walk, crawl. if you can't crawl, wriggle.

my mental illness has incapacitated me to the point that i feel like a walking corpse around 50% of the time. i don't have anywhere near the work output of normal people, and i probably never will. so seeing someone who had to adapt that "just do what you can, even if what you can do is barely anything" mindset, seeing that they managed to put together something as well-written and gut-punchingly effective as serious weakness...

i started to wriggle.

[bdor1995]

you know what people say about how sometimes content warnings on a piece of media can be of themselves an endorsement? well

very excited to learn how all of this comes into play in a novel i bought on itch.io