Field Notes - Books I read for fun in Asia

I love books that are just for fun. I have allowed myself that pleasure recently. When I need to take a break from studying, I read novels.

Field Notes are less polished than essays on Autoimmune Theory And Practice. Their goal is share what’s alive for me right now.

I read White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) on the island of Koh Tao while I was recovering from the fever that laid me out into an autoimmune flare the first week of my trip. DeLillo is a satirist of American culture. White Noise is an acerbic take on the absurdity of the life of an academic whose sole purpose is the study of Hitler, and what befalls his nuclear family, suburban life, and the small town where he lives as natural and man-made chemical disasters. Reading DeLillo reminds me of reading Bret Easton Ellis, whom I loved as a teenager and have outgrown. You should read White Noise if you want to hold a mirror up to the monoculture.

In Chiang Dao and Chiang Mai I read The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune (1935). Dion Fortune is interesting because she was an occultist in the early twentieth century, who was very influential in making magical theory and practice available in the English language outside of closed esoteric orders like the Golden Dawn. She self-published books and started a foundation to disseminate core teachings on magic. The Sea Priestess is a story that has as its actual purpose to teach about working with the land and the ocean. It is a love story between a Victorian suburban real estate agent and the Sea Priestess who is a sorceress of untold power. You should read Dion Fortune if you like camp and you like learning about the European magical tradition through story.

Also in Thailand, I read The Need for Roots by Simone Weil (1949). I did not read it for fun, but I also did not read it to learn about autoimmunity, so I’m including it here. I don’t know why I read it. I did not enjoy it. It is a treatise of moral philosophy. It outlines the obligations of each human being for each other. Simone Weil was a Christian, and her care was for the human labourers of society. Her opinion seems to me to have been that we need to take care of the earth only insofar as the earth is a resource for humanity. Insofar as she holds that position, I disagree with her. The earth is valuable regardless of us. But her description of the obligations of humans to each other is powerful, more so for having been written during the Second World War in exile from France. I agree with her conclusions about how society ought to be organized: decentralized, with spirituality at its center, and all of us doing meaningful work that directly benefits our communities. It was funny in a bleak way to read Simone Weil at the same time as White Noise because while Simone is in exile from occupied France, the protagonist of White Noise is a Hitler scholar. You should read Simone Weil if you’re interested in Christian mysticism and moral philosophy. In french if you can, because her prose is very precise.

When I got to Kerala I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969) for, I don’t know, the fourth or the fifth time. I seem to read it every year or two. People always seem focus on the gender fluidity, the gender-bendy nature of this novel. Yes, it is an account of a world called Winter in which the human population has evolved such that their sexual impulse can drive them to have the sex characteristics of males or females depending on context and environment. It’s a wonderful epic of speculative fiction that is very relevant to the trans experience, and I love that, but that’s not the main reason I love this novel. Ursula Le Guin is a master of world building and The Left Hand of Darkness is the fourth novel in The Hainish Cycle. It is a potent piece of that puzzle, of the wider cosmology in the intergalactic cross-civilizational speculation that is also laid out in The Dispossessed, Rocannon’s World, and City of Illusions, among others. I love this novel in particular for its take on religion and spirituality. Surprise, surprise. The planet Winter is home to the Handdara, and to a form of contemplative practice that they have honed over millennia into an art. The main ritual of this cult is a foretelling, peering into the future in order to answer the question of a querent. The question almost never gets the answer that is desired. It gets a true answer, if it is answerable. As readers, we are shown time and again that knowing the future is not necessarily desirable. You should read The Left Hand of Darkness if you like speculative anthropology.

Then I read Wild Seed (1980) and Mind of My Mind (1978) by Octavia Butler, for the third time. I was astounded, absolutely astounded, again. I read them according to the story’s internal chronology, and I had no idea the whole Patternist series were published in roughly reverse-chronological order. These are the first two of a four-part saga. I decided to stop after the first two, this time.

Wild Seed is the story of two immortal Africans named Doro and Anyanwu. Doro is a spirit who was once human, who wears human bodies as clothes, and extends his life by taking human bodies and inhabiting them. Doro is drawn to power, and difference, among humans. He is a practicing eugenicist over centuries and millennia. He breeds humans together to get very specific potential outcomes. And this saga is set on Earth between the 1600s and the present. Because Doro is so long-lived, and his work spans generations. At the beginning he is drawn inexorably towards Anyanwu, in the deserts of Africa, where she is a powerful shape-shifting sorceress who has developed over her long life the capacity to change the molecular structure of herself. She can heal her body, create medicine in her body, create poison in her body. She can transform into a bird, a panther, a dolphin, any number of beings, and become those others for as long as she desires. Doro recognizes her power and convinces her to leave behind the life and the family that she has known all along. And thus the story begins, and it lasts centuries. This tale of these two hugely powerful people, hating and loving each other for their power and for their cruelty. I am particularly interested in Anyanwu because of her alchemy, because of her healing powers. She only really has control over herself. And she never forces that control on other people. She is beautiful.

Octavia Butler’s prose is entrancing and the books are impossible to put down. All of Octavia Butler’s books are impossible to put down for me. So you should read Wild Seed if you want to immerse yourself in historical speculative fiction that runs parallel to the horror of the last few centuries while emphasizing the brilliance of human ingenuity and the resilience of the soul in the face of cruelty.

Then I read The Dreamblood Duology by N.K. Jemisin. I had never read any N.K. Jemisin yet. I had meant to, for years, and it hadn’t happened before. And I cried. Over and over and over reading these two novels, I just sobbed constantly. These are high fantasy novels, inspired by the ancient Middle East. The feeling tone is the Thousand and One Nights meets Dune. This is a tale of dreams. It is a tale of nightmares. It is a tale of high desert political drama. It’s a tale of blood magic and tribal sorcery. It’s a lot of fun, it’s a wild ride. It is the best pair of atmospheric world building I’ve picked up in ages. It’s the most enjoyable reading experience I’ve had in years. I read the first one in one sitting. And I’m gonna read it again. It fascinates me, and I am going to have a lot more to say about it eventually, because blood is a central component. Dreamblood. The life force that keeps people alive. You should read the Dreamblood Duology if you like political intrigue and you don’t mind reading violence.

Then I read The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand (2023). In parallel, I also read The Body Is a Doorway (2025), but The Body Is a Doorway is not fun. In her memoir, Strand wrote the illness memoir I needed five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. She put words to experiences I have repeatedly struggled to translate into a form I can share. She lapses into a lecturing tutorial voice only ever long enough for the reader to get the gist of the facts, and otherwise maintains the thread of story throughout sublime and harrowing life. She refuses to lie and deliver a neat package to the reader. In this she is strong. She wrote the book we needed about illness and ecology today. The text does not resolve, does not promise absolution. It dissolves, melts and, in her words, composts experience into soil. Where I am obsessing over distillation, the industrial alchemy of blood, she shows us blood is always dirt.

Strand’s novel, The Madonna Secret, is loads of fun to read, if no less harrowing and heartbreaking. It is exquisitely researched and textured historical fiction set during the life and times of the historical Jesus. It is told from the point of view of Mary Magdalene, who in this story was Jesus’ wife. It feels like reading a true story about Jesus, and it is a balm to the soul. As a lover of Christ as a teacher of the heart, and a hater of empire, this novel really soothed me. Strand’s prose is beautiful. She sets the stage through the smells and textures of the earth and the soil. Alongside her romantic tendencies, the sensorial nature, the sounds, it’s a very engrossing reading experience. You should read The Madonna Secret if you like historical fiction, and you want to think differently about the life of Jesus, to put him back in the context of the first century in which he was a naturalist magician.

Then I read Boudica: Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott (2003). Boudica is a historical fiction saga that reimagines the life of the Celtic warrior queen Boudica and her people. The story takes place in the British Isles and Gaul, at the edges of the Roman Empire. It is a story of dreaming. It is a fiction, largely because there is no written record of Boudica’s life and her people’s life. And, as both a fiction and a historical look at the horrors of Rome, it is striking. After reading this novel, I started dreaming again and taking my dreams seriously and writing them down, which I had not done systematically in years. Having read some of the context from Manda Scott’s writing this novel, I understand that dream initiation was in part her intention. In that, it is a complete success. As a page-turning adventure novel, it is totally engrossing. You should read Boudica if you love the earth, you love animals, and you want to read fiction that helps you feel closer to the land instead of further away from it. There’s a lot of horses in it. Manda Scott was a veterinary surgeon, and she’s really good at talking about animals.

I love books that are just for fun. When I need to take a break from studying all of the things that I study, I read novels. I read epic fantasy and speculative fiction and stories of dreams and magic and high drama. Stories of magicians and assassins and seduction and sorcerers vying for geopolitical power in fantastical lands. At no given moment is there anything I would rather be reading, and this has been the case for decades. For my whole life. For as long as I’ve been able to read.

Reading for fun is really important. It’s really important to feed the creative inner child with stories that are long form, complex, and emotional. I find myself crying during novels a lot. I do not weep and sob when I read political theory, ancient traditional medical texts, immunology papers, or substacks. Very rarely. So it is important to me that I foster my love of reading.

I occasionally get very romantic and whimsical about living in a pre-literate culture and wondering what it would be like if, oh damn, if I just had never learned to read, if we didn’t need books, if we didn’t need text, if I could just live in an oral culture, have amazing place-based ancestral memory, be so connected to the earth because I don’t have this medium between me and the world that is the written word. Wouldn’t everything be so much better? But that’s not necessarily true, you know. It’s a very romantic vision of things, to think things would be better if we didn’t have texts.

And, anyway, I can read. So I might as well do it. It is something that brings me a lot of joy. I feel enriched by using my time reading. I find that when I read novels specifically, I feel fulfilled and I feel a sense of purpose. And I feel a sense of escape, also, from the harder parts of the current reality, which are too many to list here. You know what I’m escaping from. While the point of this blog is primarily to talk about autoimmunity in a more framed way, more specifically about the health and the illness and the politics and the philosophy of it, I give myself space to read for fun. And I think you should too.

Okay that’s it! Now I’m reading The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. I’m heading back to Montreal this week.