TOP 5 THINGS TO READ WHILE NAKED AND ISOLATED
written by NAKED BOYS READING and reprinted with their permission and that of Dr Sharon Husbands.
An Aggregated Reading List
Here in London, where Naked Boys Reading began, we’re ALREADY bored of washing our hands 10000x a day, and our premium PornHub subscription feels LACKING in textuality. The Covid-19 Emergency has meant that we have to rethink modes of sociality and offer other means of connection (we aren’t up for this “social distancing” rhetoric!).
We have decided to aggregate a list of Top 5 Things to Read While Naked and Isolated.
We’ve asked our friends, lovers, and enemies to offer a top 5 that might ease you through your self-isolation.
The engagement requirements are simple:
Pick a text (order it and support literary economy),
Get naked (you’re alone, go on!),
Read (that’s an order, Nerd).
Brian Lobel
NBR Curator, Lover
Esquires Handbook for Hosts (1949)
Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealey
Surge, Jay Bernard
Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazanstzakis
Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde
Brian | @bamullinspeaks
NBR Curator and Reader, Lover
“How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” Douglas Crimp (from Melancholia & Moralism)
Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz
Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, Danez Smith
The (New) Joy of Gay Sex, Dr. Charles Silverstein & Felice Picano
Alex | @acf_paints
NBR Reader, Lover
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
South and West, Joan Didion
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
Dr Sharon Husbands | @drsharonhusbands
Founding Host of Naked Boys Reading, Enemy
Rabbit, Sophie Robinson
Cygnet, Season Butler
26, Jonathan Kemp
Notes Made While Falling, Jenn Ashworth
Jane, A Murder, Maggie Nelson
NBR Reader, Lover
Homosexuality, Power and Politics, ed. by The Gay Left Collective
Sexual Outlaw, John Rechy
The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White
How to Survive a Plague, David France
Upstream, Mary Oliver
MJ Lyons | @queer_mikey
Producer of Naked Boys Reading Toronto,
author of “Murder at the World’s Fair”, Lover
The Last Sun, K.D. Edwards
Our Dreams At Dusk (series), Yuhki Kamatani
This Wound Is A World, Billy-Ray Belcourt
Big Kids, Michael DeForge
The Complete Poems, Walt Whitman
Ghosting, cookery, and Dettol | @hijodeyma
NBR Reader, Lover
One hundred years of solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The house of spirits, Isabel Allende
Like water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Home Cooking a writer in the kitchen, Laurie Colwin
My sister the serial killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
La John Joseph | @agenerouslover
NBR Curator, Lover
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
The Lonely City, Olivia Laing
The Twyburn Affair, Patrick White
Dragon at the End of a Flat World, Joseph Keckler
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Adam Zmith |@AdamZmith
NBR Reader, Lover
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
When Brooklyn Was Queer, Hugh Ryan
What Belongs To You, Garth Greenwell
Go The Way Your Blood Beats, Michael Amherst
Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy because it’s thick
Adam | @adamgcarver
Queer Pioneer, Friend & Lover
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
Cunto , Joelle Taylor
The Fabulous Sublimity of Gay Diva Worship, Brett Farmer.
Cock, Mike Bartlett
Disco Bloodbath (Party Monster), James St James
Liz Rosenfeld | @liz.rosenfeld
NBR Curator, Lover
“Time is A Thing The Body Moves Through,” T.Fleischmann
Histories of The Transgendered Child, Julian Gill-Peterson
Confessions of the Fox, Jordy Rosenburg
Survival of the Sickest, The Art of Martin O’Brien
The Motion of Light in Water, Samuel R. Delany
Sebastian | @historical.homos
NBR Curator, Lover
The Persian Boy, Mary Renault
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, Priya Parker
Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed, Will Storr
Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World, Gregory Woods
Chris | @cmccrudden
NBR reader, author, Lover
Support your local bookshop in these times of isolation. You can find all these titles and more on www.hive.co.uk
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Good Behaviour, Mollie Keane
The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark
Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho
Battlestar Suburbia, Chris McCrudden (a cheeky plug)
Luke Pell | @lukepellmakes
NBR Reader, Lover
Ecodeviance (Soma)tics For The Future Wilderness, CA Conrad
Essayism, Bryan Dillon
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
Late In the Day, Ursula K Le Guin
We Were Always Here, A Queer Words Anthology edited by Ryan Vance and Michael Lee Richardson
Theo | @_twgordon
NBR Reader, Lover
Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront, Fiona Anderson
Modern Nature, Derek Jarman
Linderism , Amy Tobin (ed.)
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton
The Symposium (for group reading online), Plato
Season | @season_butler
NBR Curator, Lover
Nudibranch, Irenosen Okojie
Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P Newton
Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
Black Macho, Michelle Wallace
Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Marie Brown
NBR Reader, Lover
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner
Leave Land, Brendan Joyce
Unmastered, Katherine Angel
Accidental Splendour of the Splash, Gerry Potter
Louis | @LouisMcBlewis
NBR Reader, Lover
2666, Roberto Bolano
Living At The End Of The World, Marina Benjamin
How Can I Help?, Ram Dass and Paul Gorman–
The Book Of Human Emotions, Tiffany Watt Smith
Guided Meditations, Explorations And Healings, Stephen Levine
Josh Cheon | @darkentriesrecords
Owner of Dark Entries Records & NBR Curator, Lover
No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, Darnell L Moore
I Remember, Joe Brainard
Mechanical Fantasy Box: The Homoerotic Journals of Patrick Cowley, Patrick Cowley
The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, Samuel Steward
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, Cookie Mueller
Joseph Morgan Schofield | @jmschofield
NBR Reader, Lover
The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee
A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit
Paul Takes the form of a mortal girl, Andrea Lawlor
Float, Anne Carson
Queer Communion: Ron Athey, Ed. Amelia Jones and Andy Campbell
Jonathan Kemp | @JonathanMKemp
NBR Curator, Lover
The Sexuality of Christ , Leo Steinberg
Selah, Keith Jarrett
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure , C. D. Rose
Cygnet , Season Butler
Staying With The Trouble , Donna Haraway
Patrick Cash
NBR Curator & Reader, Lover
At Swim, Two Boys, Jamie O’Neill
Educated, Tara Westover
Future Popes of Ireland, Darragh Martin
Normal People, Sally Rooney
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo
Ben | @BenCampkin
NBR VIP, Lover
Naked Boys Reading Anthology 1
Architecture and Fire, Stamatis Zografos
Queer Constellations, Dianne Chisholm
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delaney
An Apartment on Uranus, Paul B. Preciado
Dan | @Dandelamotte
NBR Reader, Lover
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D Salinger
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Adventures of Tintin, Herge
Seán | @VonGov
NBR Reader & Curator, Lover
Sirk on Sirk, conversations with John Halliday
Second-hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich
Prison, A Survival Guide, Carl Cattermole
Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, Neil Bartlett
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Chris | @parkesland
NBR Reader, Lover
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson
Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
Museum Without Walls, Jonathan Meades
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