#helloooo nonny!

i actually don't remember if i've been asked this before. most of the responses to that post have been people who were more interested in giving me their recs tbh, so thank you for asking!

here's a quick list of ten off the top of my head to get you started:

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is a top contender for my favorite novel. when the dev patel green knight movie came out i would not stop telling everyone who said a word to me about it to read this book asap. it's a flawless example of a novel where you feel in your gut what's going to happen even as you can't really be sure what's happening at all. huge chunks of it are told from the point of view of a character who doesn't even share a language with most of the other characters. i recommend Ishiguro in general for a lot of reasons (and many people have rightfully cited him in the notes of my post about loving ambiguity) but The Buried Giant in particular is my darling when it comes to masterful ambiguity.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie is actually the book that prompted the original exchange from that post. a classmate of mine in grad school was having a hard time with it when we read it for a postcolonial lit course, meanwhile i was having the time of my life just hanging on tight watching it all come together.

Beloved by Toni Morrison was an honor and a privilege to both read and get to teach to a college class. I had my students do a compare-contrast activity with one particular chapter of Beloved and a poem from Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, which i also recommend, and looking back on that is one of the biggest things that makes me miss teaching.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin is less "ambiguous" per se than some of the others listed here, but it has exactly the vibe i look for in a book that grabs me by the throat chokehold style and drags me through a story where the pov character frequently doesn't have a clue what's going on.

The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht is a book i just read last year that knocked my socks off. that novel feels absolutely no obligation to tell you which parts of the story are "true" or "real"; that's not the point.

Devil House by John Darnielle pulls a similar trick but almost in reverse. what did or didn't "really" happen is exactly the point (though also hard to pin down); but why does it matter? and what is put at risk in the pursuit of a True Story?

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is also fairly unambiguous about the events of what might be considered the "main" story, but the nonlinear, second person frame narrative is where the book really shines and that part leaves some delicious things unsaid.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. i'm sorry but i am the moby dick friend. i'm the mutual who's gonna tell you to read moby dick. you have to read moby dick.

What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah is a collection of short stories, but a lot of them live in a really gorgeous and unsettling ambiguous space, especially the eponymous one; the short story "What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky" is high on my list of favorite short stories ever.

C60 isotope

Hexagons, pentagons

Make up a sphere

Shortened to "buckyball"

Which is much easier

But still a dactyl

As poets can hear

first and foremost i think we're coming at this from different perspectives. i'm not basing a transfeminine reading on an "inclination towards femininity" in this case; i'm basing it on the fact that a story about a character who exists in a state of fundamental discomfort with their own existence, where the struggle to accept The Self as a whole and complete person who is allowed to live in the world is the climax of the entire narrative arc, lends itself strongly to a closeted trans reading. people in-fiction read mob as a boy. ergo, egg mob is transfem.

i also kind of disagree that the "macho" aspect of the body improvement club is the part that mob really strives to emulate. maybe it is on the surface (a lot of pre-transition trans folks go through a period, especially in adolescence, of trying very hard to fit an assigned gender role to assuage a feeling of not belonging, which is part of mob's efforts to be "popular") but once you get to know the BIC at all past their initial appearance, you find out the ethos of the whole group is mutual support, care, encouragement, and a desire to be one's better self. that's why mob needs them and that's why they're so fundamental to the story (in addition to being very funny). in the epilogue, we even see that some girls have joined the club by the time mob is co-captain! it's not Macho Manly Masculinity that appeals to mob at the end of the day, and that's not what the body improvement club provides.

Anyways it was just a Nutella sandwich btw but it was well before people here know what that was

I also had liverwurst sandwiches but some reason I didn’t get has much hate for that

i wish for peace for you too. obviously i don’t know you—we don’t know each other, presumably. i don’t think what i’m doing is celebrating pain. i’m not celebrating at all, really. i’m acknowledging, as a lot of people are, that there’s something undeniably apt about a man who has said empathy “does a lot of damage,” claimed children should watch public executions, and made a lucrative career out of daring people to “change his mind” about the sanctity of human life being shot to death in the middle of insisting that mass shootings are not a problem in order to peddle transphobia and racism. the man made light of others’ pain and made a lot of money doing it.

i don’t think gun violence is worth celebrating. it’s rampant in the united states, where i live. i think about the possibility of a mass shooting every time i’m in a crowded place. i think about how easy it would be for someone full of unproductive anger to do something unforgivable, as has happened in the US almost 50 times already this year. charlie kirk’s death was as preventable as every death and injury in a school shooting (such as, for example, the one that happened yesterday in colorado at almost the same time). we live in a country where this is normalized, and charlie kirk did a lot of work—knowingly, on purpose, and it made him rich—to make that society what it is right now.

my heart should be softer than it is. i think about that often; i think about my child self who cried for 2 hours after hearing on the news that a family of four with two small children had died in a house fire. i think about my teenage self who felt such limitless love and care for every life on earth that it was a source of exquisite pain. i think that version of me should have more room to breathe again. this is work i’m doing in my own life that you don’t see in random tumblr posts. but if you think a soft heart—a sensitivity to others’ suffering—is the opposite of anger, i hope you soften your own heart a little bit someday too. who should i give my grace? the dead fascist who wanted a more violent country and got one? or the people he and his ilk hurt? you can say “everyone,” and you’re not wrong, but you’re not necessarily right.

i’ve been rereading les mis this year, and i have been doing a lot of thinking about the first section, with the bishop.

this story is both sillier and more of an accident than i made it sound, i promise!

two pieces of context:

our unit and the upper unit share a landing. there are more stairs past the door for the upper unit, but from the outside they look like they're on the same level.

my spouse and i were, at the time, very freshly moved in to our current apartment. unbeknownst to us, when the previous tenants locked up on their way out, they left the last key on the windowsill of the aforementioned landing.

so, late on a weekend night, our upstairs neighbor had a birthday party. two of her friends, slightly-drunk early 20-somethings, showed up to this birthday party at 2:30 am. being as they were slightly drunk and in their early 20s, when faced with the conundrum of which of the two doors in front of them belonged to their friend, they tried one door. it was locked. rather than proceeding to try the second door, they said, surely this must be a mistake. let's look around for clues! point-and-click game style, they said, aha!

use [key] on [door]

now, by this point, meg and i had been woken up by the sounds of two drunk guys debating what to do while rattling our doorknob in the wee hours of the morning. i got up to see what was going on, just in time to hear the deadbolt turn and see the door open.

please recall, i had just been woken up at 2:30am. i'm a notorious night owl, but working a 9-5 for the past 2 years has thrown me off my game. toss in the insomnia medication i've been acclimating to for a couple of months, and i was in a state of such delirious confusion that all i could think as i saw a 6-foot-tall smiling stranger open the door to my home was "it would be super weird for the maintenance guy to show up at this time of night, right?"

so all i could say, as a second young man appeared behind the shoulder of the first, was. "what?" and then, as if in explanation, one of them said "we're with them," pointing to the invisible party around the corner. and then i said, using the skills of elocution i'm so lauded for, "what?"

one second after that, the penny visibly dropped. they both backed out, apologizing profusely and looking more mortified than i'd ever seen anyone look (and i used to teach literature to undergrads, so i know from embarrassed 20-year-olds). i gently closed the door on a harmonizing chorus of "we're SO stupid," propped a chair in front of it in case there were any more confused partygoers, and went back to bed.