Image credit: Bequest

Just what does one do when the sun blazes and the humidity churns the air into chunky Campbell soup? Tell that attention-seeking season called summer “Thank you, but no thank you” and camp out by the A/C with your reads and binges. That’s what we did. *winks* Here’s what our staff has been enjoying.

From Marcy Barnes, Production Director 

I just finished Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk. It was an honest, mostly unapologetic (apologetic when necessary), and music/art/emotion-filled homage to a very specific scene. But on a very personal level, it was a true page turner for this GenX reader.

I am currently reading Body Neutral: A Revolutionary Guide to Overcoming Body Image Issues by Jessi Kneeland, body image coach and podcaster (This Is (Not) Your Body). I think of body-neutrality advocates as “close cousins” to the anti-fat-bias scholars and activists like our own Aubrey Gordon. I’m not too far in, but already scribbling on and dog earring many pages! 

From Christian Coleman, Digital Marketing Manager 

Whenever this post comes along, I’m reading horror. Not sure why summer is my season for creepy reads, but I’m sticking to it. Since reading Nadia Bulkin’s anticolonial horror short stories, I’ve been looking for more of the same and found it in Silvia Moreno-García’s novel, Mexican Gothic. When enlisted by her father to check in on her cousin, young Mexican socialite Noemí discovers that she needs to rescue her from the clutches of the insular English family her cousin married into. The family is just as predatory as High Place, the brooding, fungus-infested manor where they live. Come for the gothic vibes and trippy mushrooms; stay for the indictment of eugenics and European settler colonialism. This was slated to be adapted as a Hulu series, but alas, the project was dropped.

Then, to get my queer on, I picked up Craig Laurance Gidney’s novel, A Spectral Hue. Grad student Xavier Wentworth goes to Shimmer, Maryland to investigate and study Black artists whose work features the same mysterious purple-pink hue that glows and pulses with life, no matter the medium. What is the source of this color? Is it a haunting? Is it a muse? The presence luring queer and outsider artists to the saltmarsh frames a story of the terror and ecstasy of art spanning from the days of slavery to the present day. This is a slow burn that loves its characters.

From Beatrice Hruska, Sales Intern

Reading: My current thing is going through the fiction section of my local public library and judging books by their covers (don’t judge me for my judgments!) and I have uncovered some hits. I tore my way through Awayland by Ramona Ausubel, a collection of short stories with one of my favorite covers I have seen yet. It was filled with surreal but deeply sweet mediations on home, family, and relating to an ever-confusing exterior world, as well as the interior one that haunts us all. 

I also picked up The Skunks by Fiona Warnick from my favorite indie bookstore in Providence, RI, Riffraff. I went for literary trivia but needed to console myself after racking up a whopping 4 points (I believe the winning team had 32). So, I browsed. I also noticed Superfreaks by Arielle Greenberg prominently displayed! 

Watching: I am rewatching a classic, The O.C., and would suggest it to anyone looking to escape into a soap opera with endearing characters and early 2000s teen nostalgia. I find it deeply funny, but my partner, who is watching it for the first time, is often baffled by the constant drama. So, if you love reality TV but get a little bit concerned that those are real people’s thoughts and choices, I’d highly recommend The O.C.

From Nicole-Anne Keyton, Assistant Editor 

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

It all started with a footnote in a biography. Citing biographies from those lost to the doomed 1845 Arctic expedition, the author gives life to a character buried in his fellow explorers’ footnotes. There are other fascinating elements, too—an MI5-esque government agency that experiments with time travel; a mixed-race protagonist still grappling with her mother’s haunting experience surviving the Khmer Rouge; a budding romance that transcends centuries. All these elements give the book wings, but from one fellow writer to another, I can’t get over how a complex story germinated from a sentence in tiny print relegated to the margins of someone else’s story.

Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto (trans. Don Knotting)

If, like me, you’re having an existential crisis, why not read this slim memoir about a thirty-five-year-old who gets paid to do nothing? There’s a larger question here about what it means to value someone just for existing. I enjoyed sitting with Morimoto as he regales his new way of life. And no, Morimoto technically didn’t write this book. Someone else did the writing for him.

The Remarkable Rescue at Milkweed Meadow by Elaine Dimopoulos (ill. Doug Salati)

Need a quaint summer read set in someone’s backyard? While this is technically a children’s/middle-grade book, I took great pleasure immersing myself in the pastoral life from the perspective of a bunny. Don’t be swayed by the cute talking animals. Our button-nosed narrator has (justifiably) severe anxiety passed down from the horror stories of her grandmother’s survival and other harrowing incidents that take place at Milkweed Meadow, which she must learn to overcome with each story she tells. Call it exposure therapy for those coming of age. I laughed. I cried. I learned to love blue jays.

From Louis Roe, Associate Art Director 

Currently enjoying Corpses, Fools and Monsters: An Examination of Trans Film Images in Cinema by trans film critics Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, a new release from Repeater. With the recent success of Jane Schoenbrun’s cerebral trans horror drama, I Saw the TV Glow, this is a great time to dig deeper into the images of transness that have both reflected and guided the development of trans identity in visual media.

One of my favorite things about reading about movies is the accompanying watchlist. Of course, Gardner and Maclay’s index includes classics like Boys Don’t Cry, Paris Is Burning, and Funeral Parade of Roses, but their index also encompasses the likes of Frankenstein, Perfect Blue, Tetsuo the Iron Man, and, of course, the timeless transgender classic Bambi. So far, I’ve watched Ernst Lubitsch’s 1918 silent film, I Don’t Want to Be a Man, in which a delightfully rowdy Ossi Oswalda disguises herself as a man to enjoy a night on the town without the trappings of womanhood—and, in the process, accidentally gay-seduces her strict new guardian.

For those just looking for a bite-sized intro to Gardner and Maclay’s work, check out the Film Comment podcast episode where they discuss their research with host Devika Girish.

From Mai-Linh Weller, Digital and Social Media Intern 

As a Chicago native, this is my first summer in Massachusetts, which means bringing Elin Hilderbrand’s coastal reads as company on my lengthy commutes on the T. After devouring The Hotel Nantucket, I’m reading her newest release, Swan Song, a twisting story that transports you straight to Nantucket for the final Chief Ed Kapenash case. I also recently finished Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, a novel of found sisterhood spanning eighteen years, which has further enriched my New England summer reading list. 

As I’ve had the pleasure of being an intern this summer, I’ve been cracking open many of our titles, like Sara Petersen’s Momfluenced and Oiyan Poon’s Asian American is Not a Color. Although interning at Beacon has exponentially increased my never-ending TBR, I’ve relished exploring our social-justice titles, especially during this unpredictable and vital political season.