Lit Girl 2024 and Exposure City
What I read this year + what I'm calling this thing now.
I read this essay by Michelle Santiago Cortés today and I’m increasingly coming around to the “write your reading down in a book” method of existing in the world. Megan also recommends this. I will probably continue with StoryGraph because at heart, I am a person who loves documenting unnecessary things to unnecessary degrees, but I may also try this out. It feels more human, somehow, to hold something physically in your hands.
Here is a list of the books I finished this year:
Rifqa - Mohammed El-Kurd
Topographia Hibernica - Blindboy Boatclub
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century - Olga Ravn trans. Martin Aitken
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck trans. Michael Hofmann
Garden Physic - Sylvia Legris
Mammoth - Eva Baltasar
The Happy Couple - Naoise Dolan
Our Wives Under The Sea - Julia Armfield
Plat - Lindsey Webb
Penance - Eliza Clark
The Utopia of Rules - David Graeber
Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh - Amber Husain
Satori in Paris - Jack Kerouac
Glimpses: My Life as a Journalist - Brij Bhardwaj
Lost on Me - Veronica Raimo trans. Leah Janeczko
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Just going through this list has made me feel a bit irritated at the online interface of demonstrating and logging what I’m reading. I’m also really inspired by Santiago Cortés’s writing on discrete, selected lists for what to read, watch, consume:
My inclination is to read deeply, slowly, closely. So organizing tightly-curated reading and watchlists works really well for me. It enables my instinct to read with and against, to identify overlap, and make the most of any extracurricular research I assign myself.
I have been trying to find a vocabulary for this structure for some time now, and I feel eager and weirdly earnest about finding a space to try it out. I know this is the oldest promise ever, but in 2025, I am aiming to spend a lot more time on Substack and on Exposure City (which is what this place is called now, welcome). I hope that my third post in a handful of days is encouraging.
In this vein, here’s what I’m reading with the hope of building some research work around it, which I’m currently pointing away from the direction of a PhD proposal (for now, momentarily, subject to change). Specifically, I’m in the middle of reading three books of theory/empirical nonfiction, which I’m hoping to concentrate on making my way through over the next while.
Firstly, Fredric Jameson’s A Singular Modernity, a section of which was assigned as part of the Jameson Reading Group’s inaugral meeting. I read the assigned part, but I got very curious about reading the whole book, which I’m now trying to do. It’s deeply clarifying but requires intense concentration; I made my peace a while ago with the fact that I won’t take in everything, especially in a first read, but his deeply joyous and fascinating writing is genuinely too good to not try.
I’m also towards the end of David Lloyd’s Under Representation, a book that has been slowly, systematically altering my brain and my ways of thinking since I first picked it up. Again, it’s the kind that is difficult to absorb and appreciate in its entirety, but it’s already completely reconfigured my approach to thinking about power and its realisations, similar to what Graeber’s Utopia of Rules did by making me unable to look at anything outside of its bureaucratic contexts for quite some time.
Finally, I’ve been (very) slowly reading Erving Goffman’s Asylums — this isn’t theoretically dense, but it’s heavy in terms of subject matter, and I easily get distracted by the suspense of fiction from the certainty of difficult reading. This is fine, and I think I’ll make my way through it eventually. It’s hugely informative, if even as a historical document of academic inquiry.
So, next year. I will be in your inbox more frequently. There will be an occasional paid post, but the main thrill of a paid subscription is unlimited access to the archive — public posts retreat there after some time, with some exceptions. I will also endeavor to answer your questions at how to be normal — these answers will (most likely) be behind a paywall. Welcome to Exposure City. I’m listening to In A Dream I’m A Painting by Porridge Radio, who Nat told me to listen to for days and then I finally did. We should do this all the time.