Getting This Thing Started

An Introduction to Reading Indie

Thank you to everyone who signed up for this newsletter, and thank you to everyone reading this from Twitter or wherever else you found it — I’m glad you’re here! Here are my goals for this project:

1. To write about my reading in a way that readers might find useful and enjoyable while at the same time giving me an outlet for sharing thoughts and ideas. This will be very much like the blog I kept for years. I’ve struggled to feel motivated to post there, however, and it feels like time to try something new, so here I am.

2. To highlight books from independent presses. By “independent press" I mean any press that isn’t one of the “big five” (Penguin Random House Simon and Schuster, etc.), soon to be “big four.” There are SO MANY great small and independent presses publishing wonderful books right now, and they deserve attention and readership. In 2020 about 2/3 of the books I read were from indie presses, and I hope 2021 will be similar. I don’t promise to write ONLY about indie press books, but that will be my focus.

3. To highlight books in translation. I’ve made a point of reading translated books over the last few years, and I’ve discovered many authors I love. These books, too, need more attention than they get. Often they are published by independent presses.

4. To highlight any book I fall in love with, whether from an independent press or not, whether a translation or not. This is why I included “weird nonfiction” in the newsletter description, because I read a lot of it. And I read and love books by the major corporate publishers as well. I just want to rave about great books.

I have some more specific ideas for how this newsletter will run, but this is a work in progress and everything is subject to change. With that said, I’m thinking I’ll start with thoughts on recent reading and/or some other bookish topic, and then I’ll end with some regular features, maybe not the exact same thing every time, but regularly-recurring sections, like these:

Currently Reading

• Exposition by Nathalie Léger, Translated by Amanda de Marco (Dorothy Project): this is part of a triptych (the books are related by theme but can be read in any order). This is the second in the series I’m reading and the third will be up next. You will hear more about these from me in the future.

  

• White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, and Writing by Jennifer De Leon (University of Massachusetts Press, Publication date 3/26/2021): I’m reading this essay collection to write a review for Foreword Reviews.

• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon): I usually have an audiobook in progress, and this is my current one. It won the National Book Award for fiction this year.

Publishing Soon

This particular week is not a good one for brand-new releases, but when there are new books I’m excited about, I’ll discuss them here. They will most likely not be ones I’ve read yet, but ones I hope to read at some point.

Don’t Forget About

Here I hope to feature books published in previous years (not necessary OLD books, but ones that came out at least a year ago) that I read and liked. For today:

Mean by Myriam Gurba (Coffee House Press): I read this back in 2017. It’s a coming-of-age memoir about growing up a queer, mixed-race Chicana. It’s dark and funny and, yes, mean, in a thoroughly satisfying way. It covers a lot of difficult things — racism, sexual assault, misogyny — and it does this with energy and inventiveness.

Newly Acquired

Books that recently made their way into my house, one way or another:

Everything Like Before by Kjell Askildensen, Translated by Sean Kinsella (Archipelago Books, Publication date 4/27/2021): I’ll be reviewing this for Foreword Reviews. It’s a collection of short stories by a Norwegian author.

The Cormac Report

For those of you who don’t know, Cormac is my 7-year-old, soon to be 8-year-old. He loves books too. Currently he is reading books about dinosaurs (we own many) and telling me about which ones get their facts wrong. Today over breakfast he pointed out errors in this book and told me how terrible the cover picture is:

That’s it for now! I hope to be back soon with some thoughts on reading in 2020.