It\u2019s a great life we lead, the kind of life where we get to read books. Damn<\/em> I read a couple of good ones this week. You ever feel so lucky to be alive at the same time as these people who see the world in this incredible way and then translate what\u2019s in their heads to literature? <\/p> No matter how lucky we are to read books, this\u2019ll be the last week I read more than one book for a while<\/em>. Summer is here, and the pace was getting to me anyway. Gonna make like Kawhi and slow the pace, read deeper. <\/p> What I\u2019ve Been Reading Lately: <\/strong><\/p> Mrs. Dalloway might\u2019ve said she was going to get the flowers herself, but Mrs. Dalloway\u2019s gender matched the sex she was assigned at birth. At least one <\/em>thing came easily to her. I gotta say, dudes\u2014these two books are flat-out incredible<\/em>. Breathtakingly good. Impressive achievements and yet readable<\/em>, that elusive balance. I\u2019m talking, of course, about What Pecan Light<\/em> by Han VanderHart and Didn\u2019t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened to Carlotta<\/em> by James Hannaham. <\/p> What Pecan Light<\/strong><\/em> by Han VanderHart: <\/strong>this is the book of white southern poetry I have been waiting for. It probes the atrocities and failures of our forebears further, and for my money a touch more effectively, than Kory Wells\u2019s <\/a>Sugar Fix<\/a><\/em> (but these two would make an excellent pairing). Yet this book is not rooted in anger and retribution. The poems situate themselves in crop-yielding and battlefield-fence-dotted nature, taking the capital-L Landscape<\/em> for what it is, what it used to be, and what it used to be before that. <\/p> How gross is chicken farming? Pretty gross. Asking for a Confederate pardon is grosser. How beautiful are the pecan trees? Very beautiful. Eating biscuits with honey with your family is beautiful, too. \u201cI said warm not war. \/ I said surrender.\u201d the poet says, mere pages before ending the book with barbecue\u2014serving collards and ribs, aka the best barbecue food (Han I\u2019ll bring baked mac and cheese). All books, like the best Fast and Furious<\/em> movies, should end with a barbecue.<\/p> Didn\u2019t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta <\/strong><\/em>by James Hannaham: <\/strong>Lord in heaven, where to start with this amazing book? Let\u2019s do a text example, so you can get an idea what reading\u2019s like. The book is third-person limited which is often interrupted by first-person narration written in dialect. The sense is, you have a narrator (which kind of functions as the camera, if this were a film) and then the main character\u2019s internal commentary (kind of a fourth wall-breaking aside, if you\u2019re a smarmy TV producer, you pitch this as \u201cAfro-Latina Fleabag<\/em>,\u201d maybe). <\/p> \u201cIn 1993, Carlotta\u2019s cousin Kafele had shot some old lady whole sold little bottles of Thunderbird to the skels of Bed-Stuy and put her to sleep for a month. Carlotta was in attendance, showing off her talent for bad timing.\u201d <\/p> \u201cBut she hadn\u2019t finished her face\u2014she only had the blue pool-cue chalk (smuggled in from the juvie wing) on her left eyelid This gon look bad. It do <\/em>look bad!\u2026no way would they spring a freakazoid with just one<\/em> blue eyelid. The minute she saw her chance, she leaned over and smudged her blinker with the one chalky finger she still had\u2026\u201d<\/p> \u201cCarlotta nodded Not countin the year in jail fore the sentencing, but I ain\u2019t gonna split no hairs, and said, \u2018That is correct\u2019 How I coulda did the whole twenty-one an then some is I\u2019m a fuckin bruja.\u201d<\/p> \u201cI done my damn time an then some. Paid my debt or whatever. Society sure want a whole lotta cash back from folks that ain\u2019t got no money\u2014the fuck\u2019s that about?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote> From here, we get 10 episodes of Carlotta adjusting to her freedom, struggling with parole stips (it does not help that she can\u2019t be around alcohol and this Fourth of July weekend happens to include three different parties being thrown at her family home), and reflecting on her torturous time in prison. <\/p> By the way, you should know all the CWs that come with someone reflecting on their time in a US \u201ccorrectional facility,\u201d and if you don\u2019t? Maybe read this book, then this one<\/a>. <\/p> I will say this book is more \u201cmemories of violence\u201d than \u201cscenes of violence.\u201d It is, after all, stream of consciousness.<\/p> That\u2019s a term I think sometimes gets a bum rap. Partially because it\u2019s hard to fully inhabit the consciousness of someone multiple generations ago, partially because it\u2019s real easy to type-puke a bunch of half-formed nonsense that doesn\u2019t connect and call it \u201cstream of consciousness.\u201d Here, the narrative is more effective than Charizard\u2019s Blast Burn<\/a>\u2014we are on Carlotta\u2019s side simply by being readers, and we can see exactly how she reaches the conclusions she does and why she acts the way she does. Zooming out, of course, we see a person making bad decision after bad decision thanks to a brain broken by a life of torture (being trans in New York in the 70s and 80s, having a child for a few months before going to prison\/solitary for 22 years has the exact opposite effect on your brain as playing Wordle every morning). I say bad decision after bad decision, but I<\/em> do not think this novel is a tragedy. There are maybe some ambiguities with the last chapter, but I choose to read that Carlotta is going to be alright, in fact, she\u2019s going to be more than alright. She\u2019s shed her old identity and her deadname, call her Diana Ross because she\u2019s coming out. <\/p> Carlotta joins Kris<\/a> and Harry Stables<\/a> in my personal pantheon of \u201cpurely cool narrators I\u2019ll always cheer for even when they\u2019re being stupid.\u201d This book RULES.<\/p> LINKS!<\/strong><\/p> A little different this week, as it\u2019s less links<\/em> per se and more recommendations. You want something to listen to though? I\u2019m trying to get my kid into Queen, they play \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Me Now\u201d in one of the Sonic movies.<\/p>![\"What](\"https:\/\/substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com\/public\/images\/70f4ae85-5674-41ed-8b21-23f072f09cb5_4032x3024.heic\")
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