While in graduate school, I usually had three stacks of books next to me: books required for course work, additional academic books from the library to flesh out my reading, and trash. The trash was generally romance novels (Harlequin, Mills & Boon, historical romances) and pornography (which I got from the school library). In my early years, I was working through psychoanalysis—lots of Freud, quite a bit of Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, Joan Copjec, and whoever I could find in the pages of October. I was also wading through My Secret Life, Venus in Furs, lots and lots of John Patrick anthologies (all from the school library!). Much as I enjoyed the quick hit of grocery store harlequin novels—4 novels for $6 or whatever the deal was—I preferred reading historical romances (Stephanie Laurens, Courtney Milan, Eloisa James, Julia Quinn, Tessa Dare, Amanda Quick). Terry Pratchett deserves his own category.
My reading tastes were shaped by an odd mix of things: the books my father read (Stephen King, Sidney Sheldon), the books available in the house (folk tales, bible stories, Ngugi wa Thiong’o), the romance novels an elder sister loved to read (which I started to read when I was about nine), the books in a neighbour’s library (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Famous Five, all of which taught me how to read a series), the graphic novels that circulated in the neigborhood (Tintin, Asterix), and the odd assortment of books in Nairobi bookstores (Penguin Classics, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde; a lot of Enid Blyton—how is Mr. Pink Whistle not an incredibly inappropriate title for a series of books?; and the very few anthologies of African poetry I could find).
In high school, I encountered a school library full of colonial British classics. For some reason, it had Oscar Wilde—I wonder if the librarians knew Wilde was on the shelves. British colonial classics—the books colonizers read—were a very odd mix of what we’d call high, low, and popular. It wasn’t canonical work in any strict sense. Popular novels from the 1930s and 1940s were on the shelves, stuff that is barely recognizable today. As well as, well, British classics, but nothing fun. Perhaps some military histories? Whatever the British thought was important or interesting.
When I moved to the U.S. for school, I learned how bookstores and libraries organized reading into genre. The Nairobi bookstore I frequented most—the sadly missed Bookpoint—organized books by use: textbooks and non-textbooks. Non-textbooks might be categorized, loosely, by genre, but that seemed more like a happy accident than a deliberate strategy. It was a mostly disorganized bookstore.
In conversations with U.S. friends, they would describe going to the library and reading everything in the children’s section or everything in the science fiction section or everying in the world politics section or everything in the U.S. history section or everything in the biography and memoir section. Their reading had a sense of order. They had cultivated their tastes based, in part, on the way libraries and bookstores—rarely bookstores, most often libraries—organized genre. The casual disorganization that marked my own reading practices was absent from theirs. Or, it seemed that way.
Here, I must also say that Kenyan bookstores—by which I mean Bookpoint—had no real consistency. You might encounter the second and third books of a trilogy and never find the first. You could almost never follow a series in order of publication because books were always missing, so you’d find book five and thirteen. Even today, it’s rare for a bookstore to have all the books of a series available.
Reading, then, was a patchwork adventure. I learned to read promiscuously: to read what was available, to read what others were reading, to read what bookstores carried, to read for pleasure, to read to occupy time, to read when I was tired of socializing (usually after about 30 minutes of socializing), to read on car trips, to read on matatus, to read while waiting, to read in class instead of paying attention to whatever teachers were saying. Reading was cultivated time and stolen time.
I suspect this kind of promiscuous reading muddled what might have become a more disciplined practice of reading. Had I moved through the curation of libraries and well-stocked bookstores, I might have cultivated genre distinctions more rigorously. I might have said that I chose fantasy, or chose mystery, or chose thrillers, or chose literary fiction, or chose eighteenth-century novels, or chose modernist novels, or chose postmodern novels, or chose African fiction (that unwieldy category), or chose Black Mountain poetry, or chose historical romances, or chose European literary fiction, or chose young adult fiction, or chose memoirs (I would NEVER choose memoirs). Or, I might have chosen a few categories and stuck to them. I might have become an expert. Instead, I became a completist, and that’s not the same thing as an expert.
By the time I started undergrad and was introduced to thinking canonically, it was too late. I could never cultivate the snobbery that said Alexander Pope was better than Agatha Christie. I could never imagine that reading George Eliot was better than reading Johanna Lindsey. It made no sense to rank Shakespeare above Angelina Weld Grimké. I failed to develop taste. I enjoyed reading some things more than others, but the promiscuous reading habits I’d developed taught me to be interested in many things, to learn how to stay with what felt difficult. Lacking the idea that certain periods or genres were not for me, I tried many things, some more successfully than others.
I fell in love with certain authors and periods—the Harlem Renaissance was my first love, poetry remains my most enduring companion. But I stayed promiscuous.
Tricking with strangers is how I tend to frame promiscuity. Encounters that often do not repeat and, in the moment, satisfy something. The analogy doesn’t translate exactly to reading—tricking has more fluids, for instance.
Reading when you need to feel a certain way. Or reading when you don’t want to feel a certain way. The comfort of rereading—I tend to reread most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld during December. The habit of rereading—I have probably read novels by my favorite historical romance authors 3 or 4 times. Reading for a change. At one moment, I wanted to read fiction featuring women serial killers, as most of the books I had found featured men. When possible, I love to complete a series, or as much of it as I can find. Most recently, I have enjoyed Louise Penny, Donna Leon, and JD Robb. I mostly read books by women.
If I attend to the shape of my hunger, I will know if I need to read Dionne Brand or Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde or Georgia Douglas Johnson. I might crave John Keene or Edmond Jabès or Tahar Ben Jelloun. When I need to remember what a sentence can do, I turn to the authors who sit by my desk: Christina Sharpe, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Mariame Kaba, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
Promiscuity still appeals.
I spent a few months obsessed with cozy mysteries featuring witch detectives. I have read a lot of Nalini Singh. Even knowing what I know, I still return to Enid Blyton’s school stories—I have no desire to reread the Famous Five or Secret Seven. I reread a whole bunch of Sweet Valley High. I was delighted to reread lots of Jackie Collins. I have not yet worked my way back to Sidney Sheldon.
I read Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh and Queen of the Night. They asked for a lot. I gave what I could. And then read harlequin romances for a few months after, so I could recover.
I love Samuel Delany’s genius. It burns hot. I can only stay near it for so long.
When I need to feel grounded, I turn to Ngwatilo Mawiyoo, Carey Baraka, Ndinda Kioko, and Lutivini Majanja. Friends, yes. And writers.
When I need to learn how to think sideways, I turn to Neo Musangi, Grace Musila, and Joyce Nyairo.
I generally dislike memoir and biography, but Alexis De Veaux’s Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Survival is a Promise keep me enthralled. Alive to the possibilities of how to write a life.
Perhaps what I mean to say is that I follow my appetites and needs while staying open to surprise. For now, that’s a reading life that sustains me.1
One version of this writing mapped two trajectories of the so-called canon wars. For some, the point of the canon wars was to expand the canon by including formerly excluded groups. This tendency remains very strong among creative writers. No shade. For the small minority I belong to, the point of the canon wars was to undo canonicity as a frame and practice for thinking with all work, not simply the literary. The blog post would sit alongside the university press book. The tweet by a stranger alongside Fred Moten. I think the hierarchy introduced by algorithms—introduced is not right, as social media practices are drawn from social practices—has privileged canon-making practices, where engagement has the same weight as taste did for the canon wars. Both arbitrary. That post is not this one.
Yes yes yes! I love this way of reading - perhaps it's a product of our generation in our post colonial locations.
Another path for me was the accidental finds in a Sunday book bazaar - my city, but also bombay and delhi.
My way of reading is similar to this. What a delight to read this article!