Reparative Recommendations; or, You’re So Reparative You Probably Know This Booklist is About You

One of our booksellers, Teddy, sadly (for us) recently returned to Australia. You'll have seen Teddy's name under MANY recommendations in our monthly round-up as he's by far the most prolific reader among us. Before leaving us to our diminished round-ups, he pulled together this truly delightful book list:

If you’re anything like me, Eva Sedgwick’s essay, Paranoid and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay’s About Youchanged your life. Sedgwick outlines how literary and cultural studies, and modes of reading and writing in general, tend to operate under paranoia – that the text is out to trick you, that you must figure it all out. We see this mode of thinking dominate radical spaces, the need to purify our thinking, never get it wrong, never read anything not radical enough or miss the implications of our own words.

However, Sedgwick argues that this paranoia is destructive; it doesn’t allow us to be creative, imaginative, to repair. If, as leftists, we are going to be paranoid, we must also be reparative.

For Sedgwick, reparative practices are localised, affective, pleasure-seeking, open to being surprised, additive, and, I would add, utopic. But this process has allowed me to be more compassionate, more radical. Reparative thinking allows us to step off our back foot, and actually step forward into the future we want. I think radical bookshops are incredibly reparative, and in honour of that (and the work that Lighthouse does), I want to suggest some reads, fiction and non-fiction, that I think do this reparative work towards a more hopeful future.

- Teddy

Fiction:

Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox

Shola von Reinhold’s Lote

Isabel Waidner’s Sterling Karat Gold

Henry Hoke’s Open Throat

Non-Fiction:

Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia

Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

So Mayer’s A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing