21 favourite books to say goodbye to 2021

Inspired by Anna Marie's "my 25 favourite books of all time at 25" because we have similar tastes and it's also interesting to see where you are at as a reader at different points in your life! I don't necessarily think these books are perfect - but they have been integral to my present self. I think through these books every day, my movements were made by them, my ways of living, loving, writing, talking. 

Note the absolutely chaotic politics suggested by the Non Fiction list, and the wildly contrasting dedications to sci fi, black histories, and Charlotte Brontë in the Fiction! 

In no order, but in some kind of mood:

Fiction

Tehanu; Ursula K Le Guin (ahhhhh!!)

To The Lighthouse; Virginia Woolf

The Left Hand of Darkness; Ursula K Le Guin

Lote; Shola Von Reinhold (pleasure, pleasure)

Villette; Charlotte Bronte 

Lucy; Jamaica Kincaid

Are You My Mother?; Alison Bechdel

Stone Butch Blues; Leslie Feinberg 

Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintergration; David Wojnarowicz

An Apprenticeship; or The Book of Pleasures; Clarice Lispector

Trumpet; Jackie Kay 

I Love Dick; Chris Kraus (I would apologise but I cannot)

Non Fiction/Theory

Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation; Eyal Weizman (simply the best introduction to not only Israel/Palestine, but to control of land, space, modern state and extra-state formations, and to the 21st century)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. Feminism and Technoscience. : Donna Haraway

Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership; Brenna Bhandar

 

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights; Juno Mac & Molly Smith 

 

Futures of Black Radicalism; edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson

 

Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; Donna Haraway

 

Wretched of the Earth; Franz Fanon (entirely necessary to think about colonialism in any way) 

 

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California; Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Capital: Karl Marx (literally lol but true)

Maybe one day I'll write a little about each of these, but for now my Goodreads is probably the best place to see my thoughts.