january dispatch
Welcome!!!
This is the first of these newsletters, so hello! I’m going to do a brief introduction so you know who I am (though my guess is you know me from twitter…)
My name is Ai Miller, and I’m a 25-year-old graduate student studying history; more specifically, I think and write about queer and trans death, dying, and the political uses of death in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Because of this, I’m essentially paid to read. So right off the bat I will say: this is not about shaming you for not reading more, nor am I going to like talk high theory (I hope.) I ALSO do other stuff! I tweet too much (@closesandopens), I watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts and watch the Star Wars prequels way too much.
I try to read widely, and I rarely do not finish a book I start. I take recommendations, but I also, at the time of this writing, have a “want to read” list on goodreads of 2046 books. I read for 30 minutes in the morning and about an hour at night, separate from the daytime reading I do which is primarily for school. I also uh semi-obsessively log book information because the numbers make the good dopamine happen in my brain and it feels good.
So with that all out of the way… let’s get to the real book shit.
Doin’ the Numbers
In January, I started eight (8) books and five (5) articles/excerpts, and FINISHED six (6) books and five (5) articles/excerpts. The things I COMPLETED (not counting things I’ve been reading but haven’t finished) amounted to 1,409 pages, 1,277 of which were from books.
So far this year, I’ve split fiction/nonfiction right down the middle at three each, and read five books written and/or primarily edited by women, and one by a man.
Biblical Dispatch
One of my resolutions this year was to read the Bible. I’ve never read it before (the Beginner’s Bible apparently doesn’t count,) and I figured I probably should at some point, so I’m doing it! And I thought it might be fun to update you month to month as I work my way through it.
At the time of this writing, I’m in 1 Samuel, so I’m making fairly solid progress tbh. I just tonight read the story where Samuel hears the voice of God and thinks it’s Eli and for some reason it’s like one of my favorites; there’s just something about the image of little Samuel coming back again and again to Eli to be like “you called?” that makes me laugh so hard. I was also a kid who often was not in bed when I was supposed to be, so it’s also very #relatable.
So far my least favorite book of the Bible is Numbers or Leviticus. Exodus was also a MASSIVE disappointment; it’s like 1/3 actual exodus, 2/3 hot deets about building the ark of the covenant not once but TWICE. IT REPEATS ITSELF. Exodus needs an editor. My fave book is Ruth, because for like a solid 50% of it there’s no men and that’s just ideal.
What I Actually Read
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly.
I’m EXTREMELY late to the game on this (though in my defense I did buy it right after the movie came out, it’s just that I’m uh just now getting around to it, which explains so much about where I’m at as a person/why giving me a rec is good but does NOT mean I’ll actually read anything.) I have a weird relationship to books like this; as a person who fundamentally does not believe in like incorporative multiculturalism, the underlying uplift narratives. It’s not that it’s a bad book, it’s just that I wonder what books like this DO to our ability to think about different kinds of futures, if we insist on focusing on these kinds of pasts specifically. Yeah, I think too much.
Really I feel like I should just put “late to the game” on like 99% of the books I read, as I’m just always behind. This was just an incredible book that I couldn’t put down for like the last 1/3; I’m like a Very Stupid Reader, so the plot twists were SO shocking to me as they came, and it was thrilling and wonderful. If you, like me, are constantly behind and haven’t read this yet, PLEASE check it out. It’s probably the book I would recommend the most out of everything I read in January. I don’t even want to talk about it too much because I don’t want to spoil it for you! Just read it!
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir K. Puar
So this is the first academic book this year that I finished; I read excerpts of it for a class, and then decided to read the entire thing for my own work because the concept of “debility” as Puar writes about it is something I really have to grapple with in my own work. For all that language, it’s actually a really good book—kind of dense, but also when things click they click and you’re like “of COURSE” (which is really the way that theory works, right—it describes the world that we exist in and just kind of ignore most of the time. It takes sometimes complex and dense language to approach the parts of our lives that are just there. Anyway, that has been my Teaching Rant.) The chapters about Palestine in particular are worth reading, even if you’re not super familiar with the Israeli occupation.
Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England by Jean M. O’Brien
This is a book that is like wildly cited (if you’re read a book about indigenous history written after this was published, odds are it’s cited) and for a good reason: the framework is like VERY usable and SO useful for thinking about not just New England, but other landscapes that narrate indigenous disappearance (like where I grew up in the Midwest! Or maybe where you live!) It felt kind of repetitive sometimes, but that was also effective in just showing how pervasive the whole thing is. If that’s not something you’ve thought about, I strongly recommend you pick up this book and then spend some time thinking about it!
Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn #1) by Brandon Sanderson
This was recommended to me by a TON of people, and I did enjoy it, but I also HATED some parts of it (RICH PEOPLE ARE EVIL, HARD STOP, SORRY KIDS, GUILLOTINE IS HUNGWY.) I have no idea if that’s a spoiler or not, but if you’ve read this, I’d love to talk to you about those spoiler parts of it. I will maybe read the next books, but that will probably be in about 15 years, so.
Skull and Pestle: New Tales of Baba Yaga edited by Kate Wolford
I have an account on LibraryThing (hmu if that’s a place you’re at!) and I participate in their Early Reviewers program, where I get copies of books in exchange for a review. Some of them are real duds, many many many are just middling, and some are surprisingly fun. I wasn’t familiar with Baba Yaga before I read this, but it was kind of fun!
Perusin’ Periodicals
Of the five articles I read, nothing really jumped out at me as HUGELY phenomenal, but I will give an honorary mention to “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Gender, Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages,” by Jennifer L. Morgan. I’ve read a lot of things about the violence of using the typical archives to talk about slavery (many of which are records of transaction that reduce enslaved people to products to be bought and sold) and the issues of it, so in that regard it’s not wholly new. This article, however, has a really interesting moment where Morgan talks about the role of poets in doing this work with the archive, or a number of archives, to draw together slavery’s horrors with Black life, and it’s these kinds of things that make me excited about history’s possibilities and what we can do to expand the field and reconceptualize how we do our work. If the article sounds interesting to you, let me know and maybe I can access a copy for you. ;)
And that’s what I read this month, friends! Thanks for your interest. If you want to talk to me about things I’ve read, or you have recs, please feel free to hit me up on twitter or to reply to this email! Happy (EXTREMELY BELATED AT THIS POINT, I KNOW) February!