17 for 2017: Chase Joynt recommends The Best Kind of People

17. The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall recommended by Chase Joynt

Throughout my tenure as the December Writer-in-Residence, I have been assembling a list of 17 must-read-books for 2017. To accomplish this numerically satisfying task, I asked 16 people whose work I adore to suggest one title for the list. This post marks the end of the compilation. Thanks so much to the authors, artists, activists, and academics who have offered their time and insights to the collection, and to Open Book for the generous invitation to contribute. 

I met Zoe Whittall 8 years ago in a bathroom full of tiny orange kittens. Within a year of that first meeting, she would start to work on a book that would become The Best Kind of People – a project about people some feared might actually be the worst kind of people. A few years later, I started working on a film that was asking similar questions: How do we continue to love people who have done terrible things? Whittall’s Giller Prize shortlisted The Best Kind of People is a lightning bolt of a read; the text is nuanced, feminist, funny, and leaves the reader forever questioning. Her characters are deeply flawed and deserving of careful attention. In the contemporary moment, wherein violence against women and children remains at the forefront of many political landscapes, Whittall’s book is a timely and necessary intervention. 

17 for 2017:

1. Mariko Tamaki recommends The Land of Forgotten Girls

2. Sheila Heti recommends The Normal Personality: A New Way of Thinking about People

3. Vivek Shraya recommends The Mothers

4. Kate Bornstein recommends Siddhartha

5. Casey Mecija recommends Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America

6. Morgan M. Page recommends Small Beauty

7. Lauren Berlant recommends Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

8. Chase Strangio recommends Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation

9. Jamie Keiles recommends The Group 

10. Sarah Joynt recommends The Hour of the Star

11. John Greyson recommends Citizen: An American Lyric

12. Yasmin Nair recommends Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion

13. Trish Salah recommends AKA Inendagosekwe

14. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore recommends For the Children?: Protecting Innocence In A Carceral State

15. Wanda Nanibush recommends The Winter We Danced

16. Jasbir Puar recommends The Fifth Season

17. Chase Joynt recommends The Best Kind of People

December Writer-In-Residence

Chase Joynt is a filmmaker and writer. His latest two films Genderize and Between You and Me are now streaming live online with CBC Digital Docs. His first book, You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was published by Coach House Books and just named one of the Best Books of 2016 by The Globe and Mail and CBC. His second book The Case of Agnes (co-authored with Kristen Schilt) is forthcoming from Duke University Press.