Shelf Reflection is a monthly series where we explore the bookshelves and reading habits of our featured First Book Club authors.
This month’s reflection is from visual and performance artist SJ Norman, whose debut short fiction collection Permafrost (UQP) won the inaugural KYD Unpublished Manuscript Award. Read Ellen Cregan’s review, and stay tuned for a podcast interview with SJ later in the month!
SJ’s book collection. Image: Supplied
What are you currently reading?
I’m slowly making my way through Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir Dear Senthuran, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, Jeffrey Kripal’s Secret Body, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, Lou Sullivan’s collected diaries, and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body.
What kind of reader are you?
I read widely in terms of form and genre, and I usually have multiple books on the go. I will often spend a long time reading a single work, often in focused bursts, sometimes over the course of months or even years. I am by no means a voracious reader. I am a careful, deliberating and discriminating reader. It baffles me as to why anyone would want to rush the experience of reading a book. Most books take years to write, so my tendency is to pay the work and the author the respect of my full and enduring attention, even if that attention is sporadic and cyclical. Similarly, if something is simply not for me, I’ll usually know that by page 50. In that case I will pay that work and myself the respect of putting it down, and passing it on. I don’t understand the bloody-minded urge some readers seem to have to complete books they don’t enjoy—seems like a punishing thing to put yourself and the book through. There are very rare cases when a book consumes me ecstatically and leaves me wrecked—these are few and far between though. I treasure those experiences.
The only book I have re-read more than twice is Wuthering Heights. I’ve re-read Sarah Schulman’s After Delores, and I will probably re-read The Argonauts and Freshwater at some point, but I don’t make a habit of it.
Most books take years to write, so my tendency is to pay the work and the author the respect of my full and enduring attention.
I read first thing in the morning, and late at night. I also love to read on the beach—something about the sound of the surf gives me a deeper capacity to focus. Reading on long bus journeys also does it for me—I have raging ADHD and can find it very hard to sit still, so being in motion or being somewhere where there is some kind of repetitive sonic input (like the sound of waves, or an engine) can help be fall deeper into a text. I often stand and pace while reading, for the same reason.
I also love, love love reading aloud to people and being read to. It’s one of the most exquisite intimacies I know. The other night, a loved one came over when I was really in a pit of grief, picked up a book and started reading to me. I was able to sleep that night, and able to get up feeling loved and purposeful. The same person had been in my home a few days beforehand pulled a collection of Sylvia Plath poems (the same copy I’ve had since I was 14) and started reading to me spontaneously. When they did, a pressed flower fell out of the pages, which I realised had been put there more than 20 years ago by the last person to read aloud to me from that book (another close friend). Reading to lovers is hot—I read the whole of Jonathan Kemp’s twenty-six aloud to a lover over the course of two rainy summer days, and most of Johnny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead to the same person when they were in the ICU after a near fatal accident. Those are the moments when I’ve really, truly recognised the power of writing as a craft—I often need to share the experience with another body.
I fucking love audiobooks. People can be snobby and weirdly egoic about their reading habits, as though reading from the page is the only way to read like a grown-up and preferring the audio version makes you somehow a lesser reader. What a nauseatingly pompous (and ableist) assumption. It’s also often such a joy to hear an author read their own work—Zadie Smith’s reading voice is a special treat, so is Akwaeke Emezi’s, and I think all of Tommy Pico’s work is best enjoyed this way, and the audio version of Andrea Long Chu’s Females was also great.
I love, love love reading aloud to people and being read to. It’s one of the most exquisite intimacies I know.
What does your book collection look like?
They’re colour coded at the moment, which was fun to do and looks nice in my house. That’s not counting the reservoirs of books left behind in various other homes in other countries, and various storage units. Honestly, the bulk of my collection is electronic, because I move so much. My hard copy collection is a mix of second hand and new books. I do like to buy new books when I can because I like to support living authors. I own (and read) more reference texts and non-fiction than fiction.
The books I’ve owned for the longest time are the aforementioned collection of Sylvia Plath poems, as well as a book of Lorca poems both purchased around the same, age 14–15 approximately. I was young and queer and sad. I have had a copy of Banana Yoshimoto’s short story collection Lizard follow me around the world for the better part of two decades, she is a treasured companion. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was one of the books that made me a writer—I read it for the first time when I was 16, and I still own that copy.
What’s one book you found critical to the writing of your own book?
The aforementioned Banana Yoshimoto. I probably owe more of a debt to her than any other author. Yoshimoto is such a bold writer in her embrace of ambiguity and the numinous. She mostly writes short, polished, weird, sexy, magical books where not much ostensibly happens, where the story arc and endings are completely unclear, and I love her for that. She is uncompromising in her quiet, strange world-building, her prose is understated, unpretentious but enormously rich.
Banana Yoshimoto’s short story collection Lizard has followed me around the world…she is a treasured companion.
What book/s are you constantly recommending other people read?
I have found myself recommending Tyson Yunkaporta’s work to any non-Indigenous Australian who will listen. I also love Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot and find myself recommending that one a lot. Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a work which I urgently want everyone to read.
If you had to pick one book to live in for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Ooft, none of them. My tastes are fairly dark, and besides my tattoos I am not in the habit of making permanent earthly contracts with anything or anyone. I can’t think of any books I would want to be inside of, but I can certainly think of plenty I want inside of me, books that I would eat if I could. Right now that book for me is Dear Senthuran.
What’s next for you?
Knowledge of Wounds, the curatorial project I run with my collaborator and loved one Joseph Pierce, is ongoing—visit knowledgeofwounds.com or @knowledgeofwounds on Instagram. We are running online events featuring queer and trans Indigenous writers, artists and activists year round.
My next big show is the National Indigenous Triennial, at the National Gallery of Australia in March 2022. My Instagram is the place to keep up with me: @vitreous_lustre.
Permafrost is available now at your local independent bookseller.
