Steve_Bamlett_blog

What book are you reading right now?

Daily prompt on laptop – why does it differ it from mobile?

I have never read only one book at a time, although these days I tend to just read two. One I read at night when I go to bed earlier. At the moment that is Bryan Washington’s Memorial. I am reading this first novel of his because I have just finished his new one, The Family Meal. I want to do a blog on it because it is so much about what basic concepts like ‘home’ and ‘family’, and even ‘making and having a living life’ mean for queer people in that liminal cusp we inhabit between biological and chosen families.

These things matter to me because once I have thought a thought like that, I find my learning deficient till I have worked out some way of understanding them better and growing with them. It’s why the reading ties to the blogs. But it is a tiring process sometimes, because these are the things I am reading for fun originally. These books are even more intriguing because they focus so much on the ritual, and other meanings, of cooking and eating and the relationship, or otherwise, between these activities.

In the day I read the ‘serious’ book – often non-fiction, which develop my interests in art and politics (well the understanding of social power really – sexual politics and the politics of governance and regulation). I am just building a blog on Chris Owen’s Drawing in the Dark: Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission (2022) because I have always been interested in the representation of masculinity in a way that lately specialised in reading about the mining industry and being interested in pitmen painters, and this involves re-reading. The blog may be finished today.

The next goal is Yvette Taylor’s Working Class Queers. Here is another person’s photograph of it from Twitter. My hands are like spades. I wish but could never hold a book as this is held. LOL. xxxx

And in the future. The reading shelf just groans.

With all my love

Steve