What’s to Come // July 2017

Hey again everyone! Look how good I’m being with posting consistently at the moment (although HA lets see how long this lasts for). 

I thought this would be a great time to post up my first outlook on what (I hope) the month of July might bring in terms of reading, playing and blogging. I’ve found it really hard to regularly blog without a schedule, so I’m hoping that doing this will actually give me some structure and something to aim for so that I can post more! So, here are my goals for this month, what are yours?

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Need to finish

I desperately need to finish Radium Girls. It’s an amazing ARC I got from Netgalley on the 22nd April about the women who worked as dial-painters in America during the 1920s, and who fought relentlessly for years for the Radium companies they worked for to take responsibility for the toxic radium poisoning many of the girls got, which lead to a horrendous amount of death and suffering. Whilst I’m really enjoying the book so far, I’m quite a slow reader and this seems to be a little bit on the lengthy side book. Having said that I’m now on 54% so hopefully I can finish it this month. When I first joined Netgalley I didn’t understand how it actually worked, so requested and was approved for loaaaaads of non-fiction books which always take me forever to read D: One day I’ll finish what I have, so I can actually request some fiction (and get approved for them).

I’m also in the middle of reading the amazing ‘The Spectacle’ edition of Skin Deep’s bi-annual publication which I really want to finish and write a glowing review for. For something which I got for a really reasonable £6, it’s packed full of amazing opinion pieces, art and design work, and interviews on issues of race and culture in an enjoyable, more accessible format than online blog posts and academic articles sometimes are.

TBR

In addition to Radium Girls, I’ve set myself 3 other books I would like to read at the very least. I bought I’ll Give You the Sun with my birthday gift card back in April (!!) but haven’t gotten around to reading it. I just got The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet for £1 on Amazon as I’ve wanted to read it for the past year and am jealous of everyone else getting to read the next instalment, A Closed and Common Orbit. I also want to finish one of my other Netgalley ARC’s, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the end of the 20th Century. If I manage to finish all of those, maybe I can even slip The Ocean at the End of the Lane in!

On Gender and mumblings

I haven’t written anything here in a little while on account of fighting my way out of the back end of a degree and then experiencing a kind of anxiety around returning to blogging (writing anxiety strikes again). However, on a day when not many people are around I find myself coming back to my blog in order to spew my gender feelings into the vacant void of the internet in the hopes of coming to some kind of resolution, I guess, while I write these words. I tried washing up, I tried listening to music whilst sitting on my sofa and yet I couldn’t get these thoughts to go away on their own, but I am still at the point in my life in which speaking these words to another person seems terrifying (but yelling them at the internet is apparently fine.. although having said that I have almost deleted this post a number of times at this point).

Reclaiming a Genderqueer identity?

 

For the past month or so, I’ve been debating a lot as to what I envisaged my first post being on this new blog. I imagined it being a lot of different things. A cop-out ‘about me’. An in-depth look at my recent conversion to vegetarianism, situated within the wider context of the mass meat industry. The lamentations of a third-year undergraduate on the cusp of graduating who has many mixed feelings about the ‘university experience’. I pictured it being all of these things over and over again but none of them ever felt quite right. I knew I wanted it to be something about me but couldn’t think what. But finally, at 2.30am on a Sunday night, it has come to me. What could be more personal and more intrinsic to me than my gender identity?