Uterish Book Club Picks of the Year 2021
Did you tune in every month and read our Uterish Book Club Picks on The Provocateur? Is this the first you are hearing of it? Welcome to our full round-up of each book we selected and wrote about on The Provocateur, our monthly newsletter, in 2021!
JANUARY
Alex’s Pick —
The Memory Police (Yōko Ogawa) tells the story of how we try to hold onto things that threaten to disappear. On an unnamed and eerie island, a police state enforces the disappearance of objects (like music boxes, mirrors, perfume), along with all of their associated memories. A novelist, the book’s unnamed protagonist, has her quiet world permanently shaken when her editor asks her to help hide him from the memory police. The novel she is working on--a story of a young woman who forgets how to speak--becomes an alternate but equally devastating world to the one she lives in. Ogawa’s tragic and beautiful tale follows the narrator coping with the isolation of a world where memories, and thus connections to a world outside herself, fade from reach.
“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls.”
FEBRUARY
Greta’s Pick —
A genre-defying work of nonfiction, Having and Being Had (Eula Biss) is an incisive exploration of living under exploitation, and in a state of consumption. What is most compelling about it is the writing style: rather than leading through narrative, or by theoretical frameworks, the book is composed of a series of vignettes. The reader is left to draw the connections between stories about her husband recognizing strangers based on their gate, buying a piano off Craigslist for her son, and her writing schedule. The throughline, always, is the way money, class, and upbringing influence our lives. There is power in drawing connections through inference in lieu of decisive statements about the nature of capital; early in the book, Biss admits that she doesn’t even really know what class is. Yet, Having and Being Had proves that you don’t need a theoretical background in order to identify the pressure, presence, and influence of capitalism.
MARCH
Alex’s Pick —
Hormones, globalism, ignorance, fertility, beef, and the American family unit.... My Year of Meats (Ruth Ozeki) offers a quirky look at a small town America and the international beef trade. Following two main protagonists located in the U.S. and Japan respectively, Ruth Ozeki’s first novel tells a story about patriarchy and capitalism on the global stage where “meat is the message.” The book challenges you, the reader, to confront your own complicity and willful ignorance in the face of a terrifying reality.
(content warning: sexual assault, intimate partner violence)
“I would like to think of my ‘ignorance’ less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, of psychic numbing, that characterizes the end of the millennium.”
APRIL
Allie’s Pick —
Edited by Marxist feminist scholar Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory challenges and expands on Marx’s model of capitalist production. Traditional Marxist work focuses on commodity production as capitalism’s most essential process; the authors of this book add that the social reproduction of the capitalist worker is also integral to the functioning of capitalism. In the introduction, Bhattacharya captures social reproduction theory’s central questions: “If workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?...What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?” Social reproduction theorists seek to understand how everyday social systems such as education, childcare, transportation, and healthcare function to reproduce the workers necessary for the perpetuation of capitalism. -- Book Club member Allie
Read the rest of Allie’s review here!
MAY
Greta’s Pick —
Real Life (Brandon Taylor) is a tightly written novel that follows Wallace, a third-year biochemistry masters student, over the course of one weekend. Wallace is Black, gay, and functionally stranded in his Midwestern masters program, surrounded by people who don’t understand him and couldn’t care less to try. Real Life looks at personal trauma, shared trauma, and collective experience through the format of a social novel in the vein of Virginia Woolf, masking social critique through the lens of relationships. Elegant, engrossing, and beautifully paced, Real Life is easily one of the best books I have read this year.
JUNE
Justin’s Pick —
It's rare that a book announces its intentions from the beginning, and rarer still for it to deliver on the promises made, but Funny Weather does just that. Through essays, columns, letters, and interviews, cobbled together from years of her work as a cultural critic, Laing unfolds for readers a sprawling landscape of artists making their best work in the worst times. Funny Weather is a report on life, crisis, and the need for art in both. It grabs readers where they are—living, no doubt, in another new emergency—and tells us to proceed.
Read more here.
JULY
Rose’s Pick —
In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, protagonist Janie Crawford offers a glimpse into how the expectations of others influenced her life and more importantly, her relationship with herself. Utilizing Janie’s perspective as a Black woman in the early 20th century, Hurston offers a critique of the treatment of women in society and the suppression of their freedom to live authentically. Often in Janie’s community, women were only valued by their marital status and rarely by their own achievements, but Hurston provides a holistic representation of Janie’s identity by delving into Janie’s complex and evolving relationship with herself. Janie becomes empowered to reject abusive relationships and oppressive societal norms, allowing herself the space to embrace a more dynamic version of her womanhood. I read Hurston’s novel in my American Studies class, and Janie’s character has become a role model for me and the person I want to become.
AUGUST
Alex’s Pick —
Dawn (Octavia Butler) is a transcendent work of speculative fiction by the visionary writer and Black feminist Octavia Butler. The story follows Lilith Iyapo, survivor of a catastrophic event on Earth, who wakes up centuries later in an alien spaceship. The book troubles the gender binary, monogamy and the family unit, extractive capitalism, and the sanctity of humanity. Further, Dawn asks complex questions about belonging, survival, and kinship. It is both thought-provoking and a page-turner.
SEPTEMBER
Greta’s Pick —
Detransition, Baby, author Torrey Peters’ debut novel, is a funny, fun read that follows three people trying to decide whether or not they should have a baby together. Reese, the protagonist, is a hot, impulsive, polarizing woman sleeping with cruel older men as a form of self-destruction (or perhaps validation?) after the dissolution of her relationship with her ex-girlfriend Amy. Amy, who has detransitioned since the breakup, is now Ames. In the midst of a secret and forbidden liaison, Ames has accidentally impregnated his boss, Katrina, who is cis, well-intentioned, and sheltered. Reese has always wanted to be a mother. Ames misses Reese. And Katrina doesn’t know that Ames used to be a woman...
OCTOBER
Alex’s Pick —
David Henry Hwang’s 1988 play M. Butterfly takes place across time and space, jumping between a complex present and a revealing past. The play, referencing the famous show Madam Butterfly, is set in the context of masculinized espionage and global state craft where the stability of gender and sexuality are more instrumental than ever to shape the nation’s identity and influence international politics. Yet, in M. Butterfly, these social formations are thrown into crisis.
The reader meets protagonist René Gallimard for the first time when he is imprisoned in France for treason. A former civil servant with the French embassy in China, Gallimard’s retrospective narrative reveals the power of denial, performance, and nation-state to shape our own sense of identity. Our first play in the Uterish Book Club is a short, paradigm-shifting read!
NOVEMBER
Greta’s Pick —
In Sexographies, Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener attempts to understand (and rupture) our social norms. Wiener inserts herself directly into the middle of every taboo––whether by spending a weekend in a sex cult, tripping on ayahuasca, or spending a working night with a trans sex worker in Paris. I think Sexographies is a great title for this collection; while not every essay deals with sex or gender directly in its subject, each attends to Wiener’s gendered experience of the world. A collection which begins by looking at gender difference through lighthearted explorations of nonnormative sex concludes with “Impossible Interview with My Abuser,” a serious examination of sexual violence. In short, Sexographies delivers on its title: by placing Wiener as the protagonist of each essay, it becomes a geography of gender, even in the cases where she ends up writing about something purportedly unrelated.
DECEMBER
Mary’s Pick —
It is a common myth that the best way to survive quicksand is to resist struggling. How curious then, that Nella Larsen titled her first novel Quicksand, because its protagonist, Helga Crane (loosely created after Larsen herself) struggles to find her identity from the opening pages of her young life in 1920’s America. Helga’s father, a Black West Indian man, and her mother, a white Danish-American woman, abandon Helga straddling two races and two cultures, neither owning her. Almost a century since its publication, reading Quicksand today feels remarkably current. Resolving a plot takes a back seat to inquiry, pushing the reader to ask, “How does a person find their identity?” Is it in gender, race, culture, class, or some amalgamation of all refusing to melt into each other? Helga Crane’s life is a conglomerate a geologist couldn’t assess. Do we find happiness, then, by defining ourselves through the eyes of others?