Welcome to Read This Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that should absolutely be put at the top of your TBR pile. Recommended books will vary across genre and age category and include shiny new books, older books you may have missed, and some classics I suggest finally getting around to. Make space for another pile of books on your floor because here we go!
Today’s pick is another book I not only enjoy and appreciate, but one that has also changed me after reading it.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong
This is an essay collection from a wide range of disabled folks. About one in five people in the United States is disabled which is a massive amount of people. It makes the already horrific disregard, lack of representation, lack of access, and more all the more egregious. The essays in this book are a wide range of experiences, which makes sense, because the disabled community is a wide range of people. There are essays that are heartbreaking, uplifting, anger-inducing, and joyful, sometimes all in a single essay.
So many of the essays lay bare the layers of oppression at the intersections of identities and they can be very, very heavy. I had to take several breaks while reading this book because some of the essays filled me with massive amounts of rage. The essay titled “The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness” by Jen Deerinwater and the essay titled, “The Isolation of Being Deaf in Prison” by Jeremy Woody as told to Christie Thompson come to mind.
One of the essays that blew my mind was by Sky Cubacub, the non-binary, queer, and disabled Filipinx creator of Rebirth Garments which, from the website, are “fully customizable gender non-conforming wearables and accessories centering Non-binary, Trans, Disabled and Mad Queers of all sizes and ages.” The bit that just absolutely floored me was when they wrote about accessibility during a fashion show. Fashion shows often have loud music and are very fast-paced and it can be difficult for a person to offer live descriptions of what is going on on stage. So, they collaborated with a musician to integrate the descriptions of the fashion into the lyrics of music that they were writing for the show. I thought that was incredibly rad!
I read this book quite a while ago and it is one that stays with me. If you are a person that is reading all kinds of social justice books, all kinds of books on anti-Blackness and books on homophobia and books on intersectional feminism etc., you absolutely must read this book as well. Even if you’re not reading all those books, if you are an adult human, or even a young adult, this is a must-read.
There are content warnings at the beginning of each essay that warrants them and there is a range too large to fully list here but it includes infanticide, genocide, institutionalization, abuse, and more.
That’s it for now, book-lovers!
Patricia
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