_I’m going to be putting out short little newsletters for paid subscribers with book reviews of some titles I think my readers on Substack and over here on Bindery might enjoy. I really appreciate your support. More than you can know. _https://open.substack.com/pub/onl00p/p/book-rec-round-up-01?r=1l6xza&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Onto the books. These are all sapphic titles, in the sense that lesbianic things do in fact go down in all of these. I’m thinking I’ll have different themes of book recommendations per edition of the newsletter. And of course, we had to start with novels for dykes.

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Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)

A Harlem Renaissance classic that I’ve heard is the Barnard girlies’ first-year required reading. There’s a reason why this isn’t assigned in high school, and it’s because it’s too gay. Just kidding, it’s probably because most teenagers can’t really conceive of a world where the color line was so rigidly enforced, yet so seemingly casually and easily manipulated. Ultimately, what drives this story is secrecy, desire, and repression– shit that we as lesbians are intimately familiar with. The novel follows the reconnection of two women who were once childhood acquaintances, one of whom now lives in and socializes with the upper-middle class neighborhoods of New York City, the other being someone who has crossed the color line and lives as a white woman. Both of them are Black women with light skin and features; but only one of them ‘passes’ as white, full time. It’s a compelling and fraught tale with an explosive ending. Nella Larsen as an author has only recently been brought into the Anglo-American canon. Her work was underrated and not widely recognized for its genius during her time. I highly recommend this book. It’s also not too long. I’m not a huge enjoyer of novels that are too long. You’ll notice this if you follow along with me on this paid-subscriber newsletter journey! Or if you watch my videos and already know the deal.

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One’s Company, Ashley Hutson (2022)

For sitcom enjoyers, insane women, and people who have fantasized about what they would do if they won the lottery. Because yes, the main character of this novel is all of the above. Though this book heavily deals with the television show Three’s Company, a 70s sitcom I have no interest in, the fact that I had never watched impeded my reading experience not at all. In fact, I probably enjoyed it more for that fact. This book tells a trauma narrative, but in a way that is so immersed in its own world of delusion that the rest of the world might as well not exist. A strange book with a delightful cover. I love when a novel delightfully sprinkles some lesbianism into the narrative, and this book did exactly that. It’s a third act twist that I did not expect, and the lack of anticipation only increased my delight with this story. Easily readable or listenable in one sitting. I could not have been more engrossed. Real and true and genuine sufferers of mental illness will heavily resonate with this one, I think. It exists at once in a contemporary landscape and one that almost lives outside of time itself, in its own insular little bubble and capsule of human experience. That’s all television is though, isn’t it?

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I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman. (1995)

Apparently, this is a hot title right now. (According to the book buyer at the bookstore I work at.) It’s also the most recently read book included in this newsletter. My good friend Anna (pronounced Aw-Nuh by the way) highly recommended this book. Because I’m a good friend and I take my friends’ book reviews seriously, I knew that it was going to be good. And it was! Kind of has a similar vibe to The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa in the sense that the book presents a lot of questions in its representation of a dystopian reality, set vaguely in the past, present, or future, but rarely answers any of them. The satisfaction of understanding or not understanding the dystopias of the world portrayed in Harpman’s novel feels less significant than the fact of our main character’s odd existence. Her alienation and thus alienness of her character is reemphasized in the actual writing of the story, the distance you feel as a reader from the narrative. It also helps that this book was written originally in French. The author, a Jewish Belgian woman, contends with senseless violence, institutional isolation, and the reality of unfreedom in a way that speaks to a generational familiarity with these things. This book is an interrogation of the conditions of womanhood in a void of a world, a liminal space where time and identity mean very little. Until they do.