



I don’t remember reading much as a child. The first stories that I remember were made up in my bed at night, with and without my dad. There were secret elevators in peach trees, dragons, and hope.

I recognize that my canon is hella masculine, but I think claiming traditionally masculinize ideas in a feminine space is a way of subverting. I’m interested in an alternative lineage of philosophy–a minor voice–for some of the same reasons. A minor voice doesn’t try to become the major voice, but it uses the major voice—it creates something new from it. This act of creation, for me, is to take my experiences with these texts and translate them in ways that are meaningful to me. These texts altered my view of the world radically and they always seemed to relate to my life; after all, motherhood and the Ethics aren’t unrelated. So instead of taking philosophy and attempting to mold my voice into something that is acceptable—"you’ve read ‘serious’ texts, now do 'serious’ work with them.“ Fuck that. All of it.



The Bible. The first book I ever studied. “Psalms,” “Ecclesiastes,” and “Hosea” were favorites, but I also memorized large portions of the epistles in high school. The Bible produced in me both love and fear.

The Ethics. Baruch Spinoza. The book that broke the fear that the bible produced and I wept. Not maybe what Spinoza intended to happen, not that he intended for me to read it anyway, since I am “not, by nature, the mental equal of a man” and damn right I would seduce you into “irrational behavior” after a comment like that. My weeping probably would further augment his claim. I choose to ignore his comments on gender as it seems incompatible with the argument of human commonality laid out in the Ethics and not relevant to my interest in his philosophy.

100 Years of Solitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Because my dad’s not here anymore, but damn it, there are secret elevators in peach trees. And some of us see them, feel them, know them.

Commonwealth and “The Political Monster,” Antonio Negri. Because resisting oppressive forces must be carnal—dripping with the historicity of human struggle.

The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot. I don’t know how to interpret Eliot, and I don’t care to know. I liked the rhythms his poetry makes, especially “The Hollow Men,” and read them to my babies over and over again while nursing.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Joan Didion. This is at the top of my list because “On Self-Respect,” is the essay of my world right now. What does it mean to accept responsibility for one’s life, “to refuse self deception and misplaced intention,” to throw off the charms of a reputation for a different kind of habit of the mind, one that values my choices and the courage to make my own mistakes.

Lectures on Spinoza. Gilles Deleuze. Every time I read the Ethics, I read these lectures. Deleuze is so clear in his interpretation of Spinoza, and you can feel his affection for Spinoza’s thought; it’s palpable.

“Paul’s Case” Willa Cather. When I first read this in college, I really only remembered the color red. This story—so bold, sad, and powerful—turned me on to short stories.

“What is Enlightment?” Michel Foucault. Foucault’s interrogation of sapere aude—dare to know—and a response to Immanuel Kant’s essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” I like the idea of a minor Kant—a minor philosophy. This seems important to my thinking right now, and Foucault’s interpretation of one of Kant’s minor texts continues to help me consider intellectual courage.