Hello Readers,

Ahead of the October 18 #NoKings protests, I did a BlueSky recommendation thread for the store. I always feel a little…I don’t exactly know what I feel when I do reading lists. On the one hand, I believe far too many bookstores & booksellers confuse making reading lists for activism, but on the other hand “shelf-making” which reading lists, recommendation threads, and displays all are, are a primary if not the primary vehicle for bookstores and booksellers to express their politics. On the one hand, we’re on the other side of another Banned Books Week where, fewer than in years past I would say, but still far too many displays centered 1984; but on the other hand (with Stephen King trying to get in on the action), we’ve all got to start somewhere and bookstores are often great places to start an intellectual journey.

Which is, I guess, a long way of saying, the reading list can’t really be assessed as a general practice. We need to assess how it is being deployed and what books are included, as well as who the audience is. Dosage and technique often being the differences between palliative and transformative care. I think I did a pretty good job with the thread and I try my best with these newsletters. Perhaps the hardest part about working for a better world is too often you have no idea how much your specific actions helped, if at all. Which brings it back to the choice between doing something and doing nothing which I don’t see as a choice at all.

Well, another month of me doing something.

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YESTERDAY

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

Of late, I have really struggled with taking breaks. Between childcare, full time at the bookstore, reading for the bookstore, work with Authors Against Book Bans and now the Mass chapter of Authors Against Books Bans, the mental & emotional space the fight for a just world takes up now, and my own writing (which is absolutely vital), I have been terrible at carving out space to fucking chill. Before Alyce, I would usually have at least one video game going, usually an RPG of some kind (Witcher 3 forever!) that would I would play a few hours a week. I would also watch a lot of sports after midnight, when I would still read & write, but often projects or tasks or books with less of a demand. Furthermore, with more time to read in general, it was easier to read books that weren’t directly connected to the my work as a bookseller. There was a whole thought process I’ll spare you, but the result is that I’m now watching hockey and reading mysteries on Monday nights.

I have been recommending Attica Locke by reputation for years so it will be nice to finally have one of her books under my belt. (Ok, really all reading is potentially bookstore reading, but I’m trying here!) In some ways, there are two types of mystery/detective novels; ones in which the mystery is the point and ones in which the people solving the mystery is the point. Black Water Rising is the later. Furthermore, in Jay Porter, Locke has created a protagonist that isn’t so much an avatar for our society, but whose place in society makes him the focus or target of a number of political, social, and economic forces.

After radical Black power activism brought him dangerously close to a life sentence in prison, Jay turned mainstream, becoming a lawyer and focusing on raising a family and taking care of his own. Despite some early initial success, (or perhaps because of it) he is barely eking out a living. When he tries to give his wife one last nice birthday night out before they have their baby, they end up crossing paths with a white woman who might have committed murder. Throw in an escalating labor conflict, some complicated family dynamics, and another case that might embroil Jay in another brewing political catastrophe and you’ve got a story that’s able to speak to broad, national, historical forces, without losing focus on the individuals living through them.

OK, that’s still not doing a very good job of chilling, but I’ve got the new Yokomizo on deck, and now you have a recommendation for one of the heirs of Walter Mosley.

Buy Black Water Rising from Porter Square Books

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TODAY

To the Success of Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans

Man, there is just something about a big old history book, right? I mean, I can’t be the only one that stumbles onto an 800 page book on, I don’t know, how the economics of millstones shaped the European economy or something like that, and thinks, “Awwwww, yeah. I bet this is FASCINATING!” A part of picking up To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause was that general History Tome Lust and the other part is, well, the history of fighting against authoritarianism is a touch relevant to my interest.

The Soviet Dissident movement started with an almost absurd inversion. In order to compel the authoritarian government to follow the rule of law, act like the government follows the rule of law. The Soviet Union had a very democratic constitution and so the radical idea that founded the movement was basically: publicly ask the government to follow its own laws, starting with making the trial of two writers accused of anti-Soviet activity public and transparent.

There is probably far more that’s different about the Soviet dissident movement than is the same with our moment, and, given the state of Russia today one would be hard pressed to consider their movement successful, at least at this time scale, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can learn from them; what small successes they were able to achieve, what their personal lives were like throughout the struggle, how their project ultimately failed. Watching the protests against ICE in Portland starting to employ clowning as a resistance tactic (all hail Wizard Frog!) with what seems to be some success, it’s clear that, even though we need to stick with proven tactics, we also need to think creatively, try new things, be prepared to fail, play around with the idea of resistance. (I’m wondering about the potential efficacy of Read Ats, where protesters read things, everything from the constitution to one of Chunk Tingle’s Pounded in the Butt novels) at cops. What reaction would that provoke? What story does that tell? ‘Would that get other people to ask important questions?)

What the book shows is that, even in established authoritarian regimes, there are always cracks in the armor, there is always space somewhere to push back. And, like flowers, growing out of the sidewalk, whether it is explicitly activist or not art will always find those cracks and always open them further. That’s why fascists work so hard to uproot art and that’s why we all need to keep making it.

Buy To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause from Porter Square Books

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TOMORROW

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements

I suppose I can’t send out an October book recommendation newsletter without at least one horror title. (Although, I think you could stretch this month’s Forever book into a horror book.) And I can’t pass up an opportunity to hype a LittlePuss Press book.

I haven’t gotten to the aspects of it that are highlighted in the publisher copy as its horror aspects and already Persona is a tough book. We open with a disturbing mental health crisis in the present of the book and then flashback to…another disturbing mental health crisis. The former features our narrator as an adult, the second seems to feature the narrator as a preteen whose fantasy of being a singer has a full speed head on collision with the material fact of her voice. Something snaps in this moment and she flees the house and runs screaming through the neighborhood until her father has to grab her and throw her in the car. Both scenes depict emotional..woundings that left me a little shaken.

And I have every expectation that it ain’t gonna get any easier as we encounter the narrator discovering pornography that seems to feature themselves, the coked-up seance, and the endless staircase.

One of the vague critiques of literature you’ll encounter in a bookstore or on social media is that too many books are too depressing. On the one hand “too depressing” is wholly subjective and if what you want is something with a guaranteed happy ending you need to learn to ask for romance novels and cozy fantasies. But on the other hand, outside of those genres that are defined by warm fuzzies and happy endings…it can be tough to think of “literary” books that don’t have at least a strong current of sadness and strife. The thing is, we use literature to work out the sadness and strife in our lives. We write about hard shit to understand it, contain it, prepare for it, redeem it. (Now find myself thinking about another tough book from LittlePuss, Faltas.) No one wants to read hard stuff all the time (not even me), but I do believe we need to read it sometimes because we will all experience hard stuff. Would you rather encounter it completely unprepared?

Preorder Persona from Porter Square Books

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FOREVER

Schattenfroh by Michael Lenz translated by Max Lawton

Did any of you guess, Schattenfroh was going to be the next “buy then immediately consider it a Forever book?” I bet some of you did! Schattenfroh is an absolute unit, officially clocking in at 1001 pages, all of it, or the vast majority of it, is one person, in an oddly constructed form of isolation, thinking about…you know Schattenfroh ‘n shit.

I’m not too far into it yet (Lords knows how long it will take me to get “far” into this beast) but the book seems to be, at least in part, about…books! Or at least, it seems to be set in the specific intellectual space in which we write and read them, a space that is tightly constrained by the words of the text itself but also totally open through interpretation or free play or inspired thinking. Already there have been some really solid turns of phrase (praise be to Max Lawton!) that evoke or gesture towards the creative process. The description of how the narrator’s eyes function seems to be a pretty direct exploration of the idea of artistic “vision.”

And there is also direct engagement with and leveraging of the German language’s ability to create new words. It is the type of engagement with an idea that is likely to bend, warp, even break over time, especially given that the narrator, the one giving us those words, is being kept in isolation. I suspect, those fun compound German words are going to get stranger, more difficult to interpret (even for those who read this in the original German) and, perhaps even more troubling to our understanding of how meaning is made and conveyed through language.

Schattenfroh isn’t for everyone. Who knows, maybe, ultimately, it isn’t for me! But I want there to be big, ambitious books and the only way I can guarantee that happens is by supporting big, ambitious books.

Buy Schattenfroh from Porter Square Books

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