What I read in February
February's online and offline reading recs. Including: Phoebe Stuckes, Johanna Hedva & lots of online bits.
Hello!
I read less IRL this month than I have for a while, thanks to a new glasses prescription that gave me a fortnight long headache and then needed changing because I still couldn’t see, but hopefully it’s sorted now and I can read and watch TV again without giving myself a migraine/holding my phone approximately three centimetres away from my face (those two things might be connected) BUT, also means lots of clickable reads (unintentionally 90% on substack) for you.
I’m going to Melbourne this weekend, and will be needing to do some shopping at my favourite favourite bookshop, Readings, so send me recs for things I should be on the lookout for (I’ve got a little list already, obviously, because I need to get some books on my empty shelves).
Books
Dead Animals, by Phoebe Stuckes
Sorry, sorry, sorry - this isn’t out until April and I read a proof v kindly sent to me by Sceptre. But if you liked Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, or Rose Cleary’s How to be French (which is entirely different, but I got similar *feral vibes* from), pop this on your list. A queer, obsessive, dark comedy, and at just over 150 pages, you can get completely immersed in it without getting sucked in yourself. (Fellow vegetarians, pls let me know what you would do to someone who tricked you into eating chicken fat-sludge, because I would be livid.)
The morning after a party, a woman wakes up bruised and uncertain of the previous night’s events. As the gaps in her memory begin to fill in, her anger - but also her anxiety - grows. She meets Helene, who has had her own experiences with the same man, and is planning her revenge. As she becomes more involved with Helene, strange things start happening around the woman: her coworkers at her waitressing job lose patience with her, her extra shifts at a catering company dwindle, a black mould spreads through her flat almost instantly, lightbulbs go out everywhere she goes. She feels out of place in Helene’s beautiful, expensive, West London flat and is constantly wrong-footed by her, but the two of them seem to be tied together, whatever that might mean.
Your Love Is Not Good, by Johanna Hedva
This is (maybe unsurprisingly, as its an & Other Stories book and also because it was recommended by
during the last Devotion workshops) a very cool read, but Hedva’s writing is very, very good, and I loved the way the chapters were set up so that it was easy to dip in and out of, when my eyeballs were up to it. It’s about art and power and love and desire, or something in between all of those things, and I loved it.Online reads
Sylvia Plath as a triple threat 💙💙💙 (Thank you for sending me this, Frances!) (
)
“The smartphone is soul-eradicating, personality-destroying, an inescapable reframing of every moment of waking life as a transaction within a market, it encourages us all to be huge fucking losers, it’s an individual poisonous mushroom cloud of surveillance and monetization pluming above us at all times, etc. There is nothing I actively like about my smartphone. Unfortunately, the pluses involved are essentially contractual requirements of being alive in the current moment: this thing that I abhor is also the object most essential to my functioning, deeply intertwined with everyone and everything I love and care about in the world.”
from Jia Tolentino’s 12 questions (
“The people I am surrounded by now are contributing to my writing in a myriad of ways, I‘m drawing a sacred circle around a collective consciousness, not everyone is allowed in.”
from Sophia Hembeck’s sacred circle (
And finally, women turning to salt - myth and autofiction from
That was a longer list than I expected! I’ll update you on my Melbourne book haul next month, but I think I need to track down a copy of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy as I keep seeing it everywhere (and I think in the UK that’s another & Other Stories rec?). Otherwise, I’m going to read Kaveh Akbar’s MARTYR! this month (I’ve been saving it) and It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over by Anne de Marken, both of which sound fantastic. They’re both out in March, so I’m getting closer to actually reading things at the right time. Thank you so much to Picador and Fitzcarraldo for sending them!
What did you read this month?
Terri-Jane x
If you were thinking of subscribing, a paid subscription is just £2 a month. Paid subscribers have access to all of the writing prompts and community posts, as well as discounts for our courses and workshops. This Substack is reader-supported, and paid subscriptions mean I can do more of it! Please feel free to share it with friends you think would enjoy it. Thank you for reading.
Thanks Terri-Jane, for the mention and the great reading suggestions! Hope you find lots of good books on your trip.