Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill
Voting ended onMay 30
Book summaries below:
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas, tales of her parents' native Grenada. She trudges to public school along snowy sidewalks, and finds she is tongue-tied, legally blind, left behind by her older sisters. On she stumbles through teenage hardships—suicide, abortion, hunger, a Christmas spent alone—until she emerges into happiness: an oasis of friendship in Washington Heights, an affair in a dirty factory in Connecticut, and, finally, a journey down to the heat of Mexico, discovering sex, tenderness, and suppers of hot tamales and cold milk. This is Audre Lorde's story. It is a rapturous, life-affirming tale of independence, love, work, strength, sexuality and change, rich with poetry and fierce emotional power.
Nonfiction, memoir, biomythography, 1950s
Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill
Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources – including personal diaries and letters – the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals had on British culture, in its arts, politics, music, theatre and self-understanding. During difficult decades when homosexuality was unlawful, gay academics – who included celebrated literary and scientific figures like E. M. Forster, M. R. James, Rupert Brooke and Alan Turing – lived, loved, and grew old together, bringing new generations into their midst. Their remarkable stories add up not just to an alternative history of male homosexuality in Britain, but to an alternative history of Cambridge itself.
Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill
Voting ended onMay 16
Book summaries below:
Understory: a life with trees by Inga Simpson
This is a journey of staying in once place, told through trees.
For ten years, Inga Simpson lived inside a forest.
Each chapter of this nature writing-memoir explores a particular species of tree, layering description, anecdote, and natural history to tell the story of a scrap of forest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland - how the author came to be there and the ways it has shaped her life.
In many ways, it's the story of a treechange, of escaping suburban Brisbane for a cottage on ten acres in search of a quiet life. Of establishing a writers retreat shortly before the Global Financial Crisis, and losing just about everything.
It is also the story of what the author found: the literature of nature.
"I see the world through trees. Every window and doorway frames trunks, limbs, and leaves. My light is their light, filtered green. My air is their exhalation."
Nonfiction, memoir, nature
Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History by Simon Goldhill
Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources – including personal diaries and letters – the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals had on British culture, in its arts, politics, music, theatre and self-understanding. During difficult decades when homosexuality was unlawful, gay academics – who included celebrated literary and scientific figures like E. M. Forster, M. R. James, Rupert Brooke and Alan Turing – lived, loved, and grew old together, bringing new generations into their midst. Their remarkable stories add up not just to an alternative history of male homosexuality in Britain, but to an alternative history of Cambridge itself.
