David Davis
(some of) what i've been reading in 2024
I’ve somehow made a dent in my list since last time, but the library holds, ARCs, and night stand staples continue to accumulate. There are too many books! And yet there isn’t enough money to go around for working writers, especially for those of conscience!
As the institutional divestment from writers of all kinds continues to accelerate, I hope you’ll keep buying books, going to readings, and patronizing your local library. It’s good for you, good for artists, good for everyone.
In the meantime, here are a few notes on some of what I’ve read this year so far.
Mobility, by Lydia Kiesling
Mobility, “a brief segment of the history of global capitalism and climate change,” per the Washington Post, is the story of the credulous Bunny, the white, elder-Millennial child of American diplomats who muddles her way from a dead-end degree into a career in the marketing branch of a Texas oil company.
Bland, docile, and only occasionally likable, the aptly-named Bunny is defined by a skin-crawling passivity at once alien and implicating. “The earth is getting warmer,” she gingerly offers in response to the regurgitated propaganda from one of her industry’s many shills. “It’s, like, a fact. Species are going extinct every minute?” But though she encounters alternatives to collaboration—like her sister-in-law, Sofie, a no-bullshit journalist who knows which way the wind is blowing1—her complicity is as inexorable as the capitalists she serves.
Like The Golden State, Kiesling’s debut novel, Mobility is powerfully readable. Unlike The Golden State, which only foretells of a more general American decline, Mobility presents a hair-raising timeline—one chillingly syncing with my own lifespan—of incipient climate collapse. Though a bildungsroman in the literal sense, Mobility can be read in multiple ways: as a clarion call to action, while there’s still something to be done; as an Acme-style DETOUR sign hovering like a mirage over a bottomless chasm; and as a cautionary tale for those who would choose momentary comfort over everything else.
An Honest Woman, Charlotte Shane
A lot of compulsive behavior can be understood as an attempt to learn the unlearnable, to teach yourself something you’re failing to learn. Whatever insight you’re chasing might be categorically unknowable, or beyond your specific capacity, or maybe you trap it but almost instantly lose it, and so track it down again, committing the same mistakes while you do. The mistakes can become an element of the sequence, the superstition. The mistakes might not be distinguishable as such. Maybe, no matter how inefficient or painful, they’re not mistakes at all.
With her new memoir, excerpted above, Charlotte Shane charts a through-line from her formative years as a girl among boys, to her adulthood as a lover of men, with all the intelligence, humor, and sensitivity we’ve come to expect from her. An unconflicted yet rigorously self-aware heterosexual, Shane and her refusal to apologize for herself—as a woman who desires pleasure; as a sex worker with an unquenchable interest in other people; as a person in pursuit of experience—has never been more refreshing.
Why do I want what I want? Do what I do? Be what I am? In seeking to answer these questions for themselves, the best memoirists offer a schema for those of us similarly preoccupied. This is why genuine honesty, of the sort Shane seems to effortlessly exhibit, is so profound: the truth is only known when someone is first brave enough to name it.
Koolaids: The Art of War and The Wrong End of a Telescope, Rabih Alameddine
Irascible in tone and intercrural, one might say, in form, Alameddine’s debut novel, Koolaids, is set in both San Francisco and Beirut, moving fluidly between characters shaped by the AIDS epidemic, American racism and homophobia, Western imperialism, and the Lebanese Civil War. A Christmas gift from Bambi, Koolaids’ arrival felt like a queasy stroke of luck, as both:
A welcome queer historicization of various twentieth-century Middle Eastern conflicts, about which I know very little, at a time when the Zionist entity had already slaughtered nearly 20,000 Palestinians since October 7.
A touchpoint for my next project. In his Rechy-esque novel of vignettes, conversations, diary entries, film scripts, and reportage, Alameddine produces a compellingly choral narrative in which it can be difficult to determine which character is speaking when. And yet it plays. I can’t be more specific about its use to me, but suffice it to say I was grateful for what this format does and reveals.
Thus Alameddine-pilled (who isn’t??), I rushed to Thriftbooks.com and ordered another of his books at random, without reading the synopsis (I like to surprise myself). When The Wrong End of a Telescope arrived in the mail, I dove in without delay. It was only when I realized that the first-person novel’s protagonist was a trans woman that I checked the endorsements—the most prominent from Susan Stryker herself.
Despite Stryker’s sign-off (which includes her name in the acknowledgements), I was ultimately disappointed in Telescope’s use of transness. To be sure, the story of Mina, a lesbian Lebanese doctor who journeys from America the island of Lesbos2 to help the refugees fleeing the Syrian Civil War by boat, is sensitively rendered; there is no explicit transmisogyny, that I can clock, on the part of the author. What’s more, the cis characters, most of them refugees—particularly Sumaiya, who under Mina’s care conceals her terminal cancer diagnosis from her family so as to ensure their safe passage to Europe—feel painfully, complexly real, their lives rich with hope, fear, humor, resilience, and righteous outrage at their unjust deracination from everything they know.
But because Mina’s transness has almost no bearing on her life (other than her estrangement from her natal family, a process that mostly remains in her past), I began to doubt the authenticity of Alameddine’s other characters, who otherwise felt so real to me. Though Mina came out in 1980s America, the garden variety anxieties of trans life, particularly for women, never really materialize. We get the sense that she doesn’t always pass—a safety concern for any trans person, particularly one who is away from home alone—but the only instance that she’s clocked seems like more of a setup for another character’s (incidentally quite moving) anecdote than a slice of the transsexual experience.
I finished Telescope with so many questions about its main character: what does Mina’s trans community in the States look like? How do her medical needs inform her time in Lesbos? Does she worry about hopping planes, crossing borders, and negotiating aid with police, bureaucrats, and disaster tourists? Perhaps Alameddine didn’t want to include these details for fear of distracting from his other characters, the casualties of a brutal civil war, whose stories are the novel’s primary focus (and rightfully so). Perhaps he did not want to risk stereotyping or 101-ing an experience he does not share. Perhaps there’s another reason I haven’t thought of.
In any case, I finished the book wondering if Mina’s transness is a plot device rather than a facet of a fully realized character—and in my humble opinion (my apologies to the great Stryker!), Telescope suffers for this uncertainty.
Horse Crazy, Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana’s third novel is about a white gay writer, age 35 and living in New York (like me 👀), who is plagued by Gregory, a beautiful younger man who may or may not be straight, may or may not be a junkie, may or may not have HIV, and may or may not return our protagonist’s increasingly desperate affections. They never fuck. They often fight. Meals go uneaten, books unread, and work undone, and yet nothing really happens except for our protagonist’s exquisite dissatisfaction, the potency of which becomes more poisonous by the day.
After reading Indiana’s Do Everything in the Dark last year, I told Jade that he and I are the same, which is what I always say when I enjoy another author’s work. After reading Horse Crazy, plus Indiana’s recent interview with the Times, my sense of identification has only grown. A fag obsessed with hustlers, true crime, and unattainable beauty, a Truman Capote meeting Thomas Mann? Like, bring bring, hellooooo? Who can introduce me to Gary???
Cuckoo, Gretchen Felker-Martin
Following the runaway success of her debut novel, Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin is returning this June with the vivid, relentless, hair-raising Cuckoo, about a group of queer and trans kids escaping the conversion camp from hell. A Carpenter-meets-King fantasia made all the more horrifying by its relevance to American LGBT youth at this moment, Cuckoo pushes queerphobic notions of monstrosity and contagion to their limits with gratuitous violence and terrific feeling.
I have a LOT more to say about this remarkable book, but I’m hoping that someone will pay me to say it. My completed review is cooling on the windowsill as we speak, so if I don’t get any bites, I’ll share it here for all of you3.
A Painter of Our Time, John Berger
My new book, Casanova 20, is about a painter at the end of his life. To prepare for the editing process, I returned to this epistolary4 comfort read, a pellucid—though only occasionally transparent—meditation on the meaning and purpose of art, artists, and art for the people.
Despite the ghosts that haunt protagonist Janos Lavin, a Hungarian communist exiled to London following the Second World War, Painter always soothes me; it has a quality that my friend, Liz, calls coziness, which often characterizes quiet novels about domesticity and process5. Perhaps this is because Painter is about an artist, like me, while also being about a painter, unlike me. As Janos writes in his diary:
I am a painter and not a writer or a politician or a lover because I recognize a climax in the way two hanging cherries touch one another or in the structural difference between a horse’s leg and a man’s leg. Who can understand that?
The first time I read this passage a few years back, I wrote Who indeed! in the margin. In 2024, the annotation stands. I can understand that, and yet I can’t! The older I get, the more I find myself in artists who are not writers; Berger’s contrast generates a voluptuous charge that never fails to give me pleasure.
A Short History of Transmisogyny, Jules Gill-Peterson
Gender as a system coerces and maintains interdependence, regardless of anyone’s identity or politics. Trans misogyny is one particularly harsh reaction to the obligations of that system—obligations guaranteed by state as much by civil society. The more viciously or evangelically any trans misogynist delivers invectives against the immoral, impolitic, or dangerous trans women in the world, the more they admit that their gender and sexual identities depend on trans femininity in a crucial way for existence…The collective power of trans-feminized people, including trans women, lies in how many others rely on us to secure their claim to personhood.
In the last year or so, I graduated from dog-ears and inky exclamation points to a more grown-up version of marginalia: shredded bits of Post-Its slid lengthwise into pages I’d like to return to later. Nowhere has this change been made more evident than with my copy of Gill-Peterson’s latest, which now resembles the flank of a multicolored hedgehog.
Despite the slimness of this volume, there is so much in A Short History to consider—not just Gill-Peterson’s insights into the global structuring logic of transmisogyny here and now (as well as there and then), but how this logic might be reimagined within a post-scarcity feminism in which exceptional femininity is no longer suppressed.
These innovations are already happening—Gill-Peterson offers Latin American mujerísima, a trans-feminist identity/affect/movement that envelops trans-feminized people while resisting white supremacist, imperialist, cis-centric transness, womanness, and legibility—but they will require more from us collectively, including a radical abundance mindset. “How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity,” Gill-Peterson asks, “not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?”
Phew!
While I don’t have the time to blurb all of the ARCs I receive, I do my best to promote the interesting ones, especially if they’re by other trans people. Here’s what’s next on my list, including a few to look out for this year:
Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, by Avgi Saketopoulou. I’m way behind on 2024’s hot-ticket item for sex nerds. It’s been languishing in my stack, but I have a feeling I’ll be getting to it soon. If I’m a good girl, I’ll finish it before wrapping up my current series on vetting.
Failure to Comply, by Cavar. This “epistolary, time-flipped dreamscape” follows I, a biohacker on the run from an authoritarian government hell-bent on mining their memories. By all signs ambitious and original, Cavar’s newest is sure to be of interest for anyone into “trans dystopia carceral state ~vibes~ and themes,” as they wrote me.
Feminism Against Cisness, ed. by Emma Heaney. Heaney’s new collection of writing resists a fallacy that most take for granted: that assigned sex determines sexed experience. “To say sexual experience is material is different than saying sexual difference is natural or eternal: far from it,” she writes. Featuring work by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Kay Gabriel, Marquis Bey, Jules Gill-Peterson, and more, Feminism Against Cisness is bursting with promise. I’m excited to read it.
Still Life, by Katherine Packert Burke. If the gorgeous cover is any judge, Packert Burke’s debut is sure to be a breath of fresh air. As I wrote above, I love a novel about process, and Still Life is about, at least in part, a writer grappling with her next book (not to mention her stalled career). There’s plenty of transsexual drama, too. Make sure you pre-order, girlies.
The Song of the World, by Jean Giono. A recommendation from the aforementioned Liz. So far it’s reminiscent of a French Cormac McCarthy—right up my alley, in a way I never anticipated. Liz is good for that.
New Yorkers are probably already aware of this fundraiser for a local woman who was grievously harmed by her partner. If you have any cash to spare, please send it her way.
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Which the WaPo reviewer refers to as the book’s “necessary but exhausting leftist,” which I think is so outrageous considering its subject matter. Moderates really do view people of conviction as tiresome, I suppose.
Say that five-times fast.
That’s the nice thing about having a newsletter. If no one wants to publish me, I’ll do it myself :)
I consider diary/journal novels epistolary but I actually don’t know if that’s true.
It’s also the least sexually awkward work by Berger that I’ve yet come across. He was so progressive in terms of sex, and yet non-cringe lovemaking was often beyond him, IMO!