2023 was a mostly internally-developing year for me. Shifting to longer-form, fictional writing for the most part, alongside having a full time day job, meant that most of my time writing and editing was for things that are still a long way off and not announced yet. It feels slow, but compared to short form writing, it means I'm still doing a ton.
There are a few things worth highlighting though! First, I wrote about my favorite David Cronenberg films for the free Murdered Futures zine. This was a really fun topic and the other art in the zine is gruesome and lovely. I also introduced a few more zines to the Plaintext Distro catalog, and tabled at Edinburgh Zine Fair and Glasgow Zine fair this year.
I released two more abstract narrative games through Domino Club, and stretched myself by working with new engines or using ones I'd worked with before differently. The first is Choir Medals, a shoegazey museum-date-crawler and my first experiment with the first person 3D features in RPGMaker MV. The second is Dust Breeding, an atmospheric linear VN about obsession, body horror, and gross romance.
On a personal level, I was really happy to take my first proper, traveling vacation in years this June; my partner and I went to Crete, and got to swim in a fantastically clear ocean, see some amazing archaeological sites, and eat excessively basically every night for a week :d . In general, I'm trying to take more time off and be more protective of time spent both on straight up resting and also refilling my mental energy, which reading a ton, especially more fiction, has been an important part of.
I round up my reading list on my masto account as well, if you want to keep up in real time from now on. Here's what I read this year:
- Tomihiko Morimi - The Tatami Galaxy
- Paul Lafargue - The Right to be Lazy
- Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience (*)
- Ann Druffel and D Scott Rogo - The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (reread)
- Alessandro Delfanti - The Warehouse (reread)
- Clarice Lispector - An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
- Fritz Leiber - The Silver Eggheads
- Henry SF Cooper Jr - A House in Space
- Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
- Alan Dean Foster - Nor Crystal Tears
- Peace Camp Members - Faslane: Diary of a Peace Camp
- Melinda Cooper - Family Values (*)
- Jodi Dean - Aliens in America (*)
- Alasdair Gray - Something Leather (*)
- Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh (*)
- Andrea Lawlor - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
- Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
- Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
- Kathy Acker - Empire of the Senseless
- Izumi Suzuki - Hit Parade of Tears (*)
- Tom McCarthy - Satin Island (*)
- Alasdair Gray - Poor Things
- Clarice Lispector - The Apple in the Dark
- Thomas Mann - Lotte in Weimar
- Robert Chapman - Empire of Normality (*)
- Georges Perec - Things/A Man Asleep (*)
- Dorothea Tanning - Chasm (*)
- JG Ballard - Crash
- Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters (*)
(*) denotes particular standouts to me
Year Trends
The Good: I read a lot of fiction I really enjoyed in the latter half of the year; Satin Island probably being my favorite. It was what I needed at the time, having a crisis of confidence over writing with my own ranty, pedantic weirdo voice, but also a rangy and hilarious book in itself. Chasm is the one that also stands out as a potential favorite. It unpacks the dream imagery of surrealist art so well without ever becoming overcooked or flowery, and maintaining a bizarre yet edge-of-the-seat plot on top of it. I was also really happy to revisit Izumi Suzuki's short fiction, as well as getting to read Alasdair Gray's interconnected short story collection Something Leather in its originally designed form.
In nonfiction, Melinda Cooper's Family Values was a great critique of how the nuclear family (as opposed to "individualism") is the actual social form reinforced by capitalism, and the role this plays in gender role enforcement, heteronormativity, and even expanding consumer debt. It's fantastic and a great response to growing trad impulses stoked by how communitarianism can offer a conditional, limited response to precarity. Aliens in America was also a fabulous, wide ranging study of the variety of narratives and ideologies underlying the millennial alien media boom, and Empire of Normality was a great combination history of mental health and disability activism as well as a thorough rebuttal of shallow anti-psych and naturopathic perspectives on the topic.
The Bad: This year had less standout stinkers than the last one; I don't think I genuinely hated any of the books I read. The Right to be Lazy was an interesting historical text but too short, combined with other less relevant texts to pad out the length, and full of niche inter-european racisms I hadn't previously encountered for it to have much worth alongside existing anti-work books. The Silver Eggheads was also basically one of those sf novels that were obviously spun out of the 30 page short story that makes up the first chapter or two and so feels kind of pointless past the concept setup, even if finding a book about procgen writing putting authors out of work from the 70s was pretty funny. I finally read I Love Dick, which was fine, but kind of hampered by being Chris Kraus' first novel in the sense that a lot of the ideas that are more idiosyncratically and deeply explored in her later work kind of stop short in the land of borderline cliche here. Similarly, I thought the overwhelming focus on gender norms in The Apprenticeship made it some of Clarice Lispector's limper and less-inspiring work, especially alongside reading the I *heart* SUBMISSIVE MEN fest The Apple in the Dark was later on.
The Forthcoming: I have a further stack of novels to get into in the new year, including some Gore Vidal, John Wyndham and Pier Paolo Pasolini... all authors I've been meaning to get around to for a while. In terms of nonfiction, I'm also excited to crack a natural history of slime molds that I picked up, and Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train, at the recommendation of my partner and also the strength of some of her old essays on the LRB website (I have to do SOMETHING at work, after all!) even though I am usually a bit of a memoir hater.
Well, that's all for now! Happy New Year!