#books -- I See / You Mean by Lucy Lippard: Yes THAT Lucy Lippard! I love her work curating and documenting the conceptual art movement and she also wrote a novel in the early 70s. What's particularly striking about it is how it feels like it is so lucidly doing what a bunch of “small group of twentysomething friends has fluctuating complicated relationships” contemporary lit novels, especially those with a slightly experimental edge and/or vague political engagement in their format, are trying to do, but better and with a ton more depth and compassion for its characters, who are also way more interesting, actually bisexual, have goals and desires and history etc, even if I didn’t think all of the choices re: how all this played out were necessarily good. I still enjoyed it a lot.

#books -- Love and Gymnastics by Edmondo de Amicis: Back on the erotic novella and this one really reminded me of why I enjoy these things! Like Venus In Furs they're fun in their unbridled enthusiasm, this time over a lady gymnast who is repeatedly described as huge, alluringly masculine, powerful, etc (and she doesn't end up having to become demure and feminine in the end to be "tamed," that the protagonist would just be like a wimpy little guy who follows her around is portrayed as perfectly fine lol) but also always cuttingly political in a way that more deliberately "political" fiction often is not, in this case on the role of health and physical education in the rhetorical formation of an Italian nationalism that would, in a few decades, become fascism. Really interesting stuff.

#books -- Aliens and Anorexia by Chris Kraus: A reread but a much needed one! I still love it; it's influenced my own work so much but also I first encountered it at exactly the right time, when I most needed failure and alienation to be alchemized into self-understanding, confidence, decoding and following what I really want, into the community of aliens all across the world.

#books -- The Employees by Olga Ravn: Again one that I felt myself getting into over the course of the middle due to some killer imagery and ideas but ultimately had trouble connecting to because I found the particular style of writing so artificial and annoying. In this case it's what I have seen elsewhere called trendy-evasive mixed with a bit of the SFF mystification (truly two of my least favorite things) resulting in texts presented as in-world documents where people speak both more poetically and more vaguely than you would expect them to, with both Proper Nouns and vague terms loaded with implication... Sure the vagueness between the human/oid crewmembers was thematically important but a lot of the time I just felt like it would have benefited from spitting it out and saying what was going on BECAUSE that theme is so interesting to me, and like a lot of non sf writers dabbling in sf it kind of wound it down in a pretty overdone way re humanity accidentally creates a new autonomous intelligence plots

bias report: it's written by my spouse, but he is objectively the best at writing about games