2019 JENNY IS FUN.

Now that literally everyone but me has done their best of 2018 post, I thought I’d enter the game. You have ceased to care but I CANNOT BE STOPPED. We’re breaking this business down by categories, so let’s get into it. First up: YA!

I read a ton this year, but somehow I don’t feel like I got in as much YA reading as I wanted! Luckily there were some standouts. The Summer of Jordi Perez is a doll of an f/f contemporary romcom, with a fat aspiring fashion designer MC, and plenty of emotional negotiation. It felt like reading an injection of sunshine. Seafire, by Natalie Parker, is the perfect ladies seafaring adventure that I needed to round out my year of reading. If you enjoyed Sarah Tolcser’s excellent Song of the Current series (I did!), Seafire is a good readalike. The girls in it are fierce, and their friendships are the book’s center. It’s also got marvelous worldbuilding. Hugely recommend. (Thanks to Charlotte for the rec!)

I have raved in this space a bunch already about Anna-Marie McLemore, but brace yourself for a bit more raving about her latest, Blanca and Roja. It’s about two sisters in a family that always has two girls; and when the younger one reaches a certain age that I cannot currently remember, one of the two girls is transformed into a swan. Blanca and Roja deconstructs the good-sister-evil-sister trope in ways that are consistently unexpected and lovely. The consistency with which McLemore produces these beautifully written queer Latina fairy tales blows me away. She’s one of those authors who makes me feel lucky to be a reader. (If you liked Sarah McCarry’s books, McLemore is similarly dreamy and gorgeous.)

(Hey, when is Sarah McCarry going to write another book?)

I’ve noticed that the less literary fiction I read, the fewer authors I read from other countries. I’m hoping to change this in 2019! I’d like to read more genre fiction by authors from other countries, even though I recognize that less of it gets published in America even than the heavily-American literary fiction genre. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, came to me via the Tournament of Books, which I was half-assedly trying to participate in by real-quick reading a short entrant before bed. I do not recommend this strategy. Fever Dream is incredibly scary — one of those horror books where you are deeply uneasy from the get-go, and the feeling of unease persists long after the book is over.

Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater reminds me of Helen Oyeyemi a little, in the dreaminess of the writing and the perpetual uncertainty about what’s real. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a Nigerian child who has more than one self inside her. I am not sure how else to describe this book. Trigger warning for rape. The writing is unbelievably gorgeous, the book is deeply strange, I loved it.

Occasionally someone will come to me asking for a book rec where the writing, the characters, and the plot are all superb. This is a very hard rec request to fulfill, and I pretty much just always shove Fingersmith at them. But now I have another book that meets these requirements, and it is Esi Edugyan’s wonderful historical novel, Washington Black. Though the first bit of the story is hard to read (it’s set on a plantation in Barbados in the early 1800s), it’s absolutely worth pushing through. Washington Black is a slave who gets taken on as a sort of apprentice and assistant to the plantation owner’s brother, a scientist and abolitionist who is working less on abolishing slavery than he is trying to build an airship. I was absolutely blown away by this book: It explores so many themes and ideas and histories without ever feeling overstuffed, and I wrote down approximately ten million quotes from it because of how insightful and interesting the writing is.

My most-recommended book of the year — although partly because I didn’t read Washington Black until December — is Tara Westover’s Educated. Recommended to me by the wonderful For Real podcast, it’s a memoir about a girl who grew up in a extreme survivalist Mormon family that didn’t get her a birth certificate or send her to school. I can’t overstate how bonkers this book is, and I 90% recommended it to people to ensure that I wouldn’t have to be alone with all the shit that went down in this woman’s life. It’s about the ways abuse can sit beside love in a family, and Westover does not downplay her ongoing trauma.

My other two best-of-nonfiction picks are about gender and race and how they function in our lives. Ijeoma Iluo’s So You Want to Talk about Race is a terrific primer on some of the most common questions and ideas that come up in conversations about race in America. She’s typically sharp and critical, exploring the many, many ways racism continues to shape American life in systemic ways. (If you haven’t yet read her interview with Rachel Dolezal, you should do so now.) Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an quite-academic book about sexism that’s worth plowing through if you can. I screamed YES so many times while reading it.

The wonderful Bridget put me onto Jade City with her relentless advocacy of it, and I am not sorry she did. It’s kind of a mafia/martial arts/magic story set in an alternate universe where jade gives you magical strength and a group of powerful families controls the country in a delicate balance. Fonda Lee’s worldbuilding is superb, down to gestures and phrases that make her world feel textured and real. I loved it and I can’t wait for the sequel. The Descent of Monsters, by JY Yang, is actually the third in its novella series, but my favorite in the series so far. It’s written partly as a bureaucratic report, which is — of course — the way to my heart. I’ve loved watching Yang grow as a writer over the course of the Tensorate series, and I remain perpetually in delight to see what they do next.

SL Huang’s Zero Sum Game rivals Seafire for making me just feel happy while reading it. It’s just a damn good adventure that reminds you why you like reading. Cas Russell is a math genius and minor criminal who gets sucked into a corporate conspiracy that goes far beyond anything she could have imagined. Grudging respect is built. Math is used to do fights. It fucking rules. (Sequel to follow in 2019 – yay!)

And that’s it for 2018! Did you read any of these? What were some of your favorites for the year? Are you going to read Washington Black or do I need to pester you about it some more?

The post The Best of 2018 appeared first on Reading the End.

1. Sometimes I am reading it for writing research, and I feel weird talking on here about my creative writing. For whatever reason. Probably deep feelings of inadequacy. Let’s not dwell.
2. Often it is very boring to people who are not me.
3. I don’t want y’all to know how many books I read about the aftermaths of historical atrocities.
4. A lot of academic nonfiction is inaccessible unless you have credentials with a university library; so a lot of folks wouldn’t be able to read the books anyway.
5. Reviewing nonfiction is harrrrrrrrrd.

So take it as a sign of how grimly fascinating I found Kate Manne’s Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Not only am I writing a kind of blog post I almost never write for all the above reasons, but I also read (in like, three days!) an entire work of moral philosophy.

Joke’s on you, Chidi! Sometimes Kate Manne is kinda talking about masturbation!

Down, Girl takes on the daunting project of defining misogyny in ways that align with its actual effects in the world. Manne argues that it isn’t a question of individual men hating individual (or all) women, but rather a system for policing gendered behavior that steps out of line with a given set of patriarchal norms. Misogyny is the practice; sexism is the theory. Or as Manne puts it: “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.”

Another striking — to me — argument that Manne makes is that a patriarchal society defines women by what they are able to give to men: Attention, sex, moral support, admiration, and so on. When a woman declines to give these things, misogyny is at work in the ways that she is corrected and punished. A woman who glowers at a catcaller is called a bitch; a woman who responds with hostility to sexual harassment in the workplace is a bad sport. And worse: Manne considers the case of the Isla Vista shooter, who resented not having a girlfriend so much that he went to a sorority, which he considered the metonymical representation of all the things (women) he was entitled to, but didn’t have.

She considers the habit of finding excuses for violent men while minimizing the lives, trauma, and existence of the victims of their violence. Manne calls this himpathy, which is perhaps a scootch too cutesy for me but otoh I expect moral philosophy could benefit by a little cutesiness so I’LL ALLOW IT.

The fact that the people who are liable to channel misogynist social forces have various anxieties and other psychological and social adjustment problems is hardly surprising. How is this supposed to mitigate the problem facing women though? When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it.

Yo.

One of the things Manne explores is the virulent hostility that Hillary Clinton faced when she ran for president, which was a balm to my soul. Throughout that campaign cycle, I remember feeling unmoored from reality: Was Hillary Clinton really genuinely that much worse than all the guy Democrats everyone seemed to adore? It didn’t seem like it! But the same people who cherished Joe Biden insisted on Clinton’s dishonesty and corruption, and I could not make it make sense. Here’s Manne:

I believe that, in much of our thinking and acting, we channel and enact social forces far beyond our threshold of conscious awareness or even ability to recover—and sometimes, markedly contrary to our explicit moral beliefs and political commitments. There is hence a risk of convincing ourselves on the basis of post hoc reasoning not to look too hard at the residual patriarchal forces operating in our culture, as the patriarchal forces themselves gather in the backroom to laugh at our expense and grow stronger in our absence.

Perhaps Manne’s most important project in this book — at least the one that spoke most eloquently to me — is the effort to show readers the banality of misogyny, its ability to quietly saturate our own minds and those of people we love in ways both obvious and non-. Though she explores several high-profile cases of violent men widely condemned as monsters, she argues that they are exceptional in degree and not in kind.

Monsters are unintelligible, uncanny, and they are outwardly frightening. What is frightening about rapists is partly the lack of identifying marks and features, beyond the fact that they are by far most likely to be men. Rapists are human, all too human, and they are very much among us. The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature.

Down, Girl is — as you can maybe tell from the excerpts and certainly from the genre — a dense read that required focused attention from me. I can’t speak to its position in the world of philosophical theory, but I can say that it spoke very, very eloquently to me. Recommended.

PS okay okay okay okay okay Kate Manne actually doesn’t talk about masturbation, that I can recall. But she could have.

The post Review: Down, Girl, Kate Manne appeared first on Reading the End.