• 77 books so far (5 down from this time last year)
• 58 women, 15 POC, 13 queer and 5 trans authors
• Best memoir of an addict recovering on the island of Orkney: Amy Liptrot’s gorgeous The Outrun
• Best lightly fictionalized memoir of an addict living between Oakland and Mexico City: Lucia Berlin’s stunning A Manual for Cleaning Women
• Thirteen more that I truly loved:
  • A Queer and Pleasant Danger
  • Artificial Condition
  • At the Dark End of the Street
  • Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
  • Farewell to the Horse
  • I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
  • Saga
  • The Bear and the Nightingale
  • The Cloud Roads
  • The Flowers of Vashnoi
  • The Henchmen of Zenda
  • Weave A Circle Round
  • When They Call You a Terrorist

…so yeah. Lots of escapism, some memoir, a little unflinching political realism. And Michelle McNamara’s extraordinary book, unbearably unfinished, filled with righteous anger, and an instrument, in the end, of justice.

Janelle Monáe
Angels in America
God’s Own Country
Nanette
Ocean’s 8

(Turns out my sister and I watched Nanette on the same night.)

The world is on fire, and everything seems to be about death right now, but some things have dealt with death in a way that makes me feel less terrible.

Nights are endless because you wake at the softest cough or sob, then lie awake listening to her breathe so softly, like a child. – A Manual for Cleaning Women

This book encouraged me to go back to the stories I’ve already told that still haunt me.

I took the kids to see an all-woman production of Jesus Christ Superstar. It was fabulous, all Resistance and bisexual lighting. Jesus was so good she almost upstaged Judas. Between my parents loving the Sydney production and the Spiral Oasis staging at Burning Man in 99, I have such an odd relationship with this play. It’s puzzling that Lloyd Webber could have written this one decent thing, in a career otherwise so very full of crap. Maybe Judas is his Mary Sue, as Doctor Horrible is Whedon’s.

He rubs his fingers over old scars. – I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Michelle McNamara and death fought one another to a draw.