October and November Books

October Books

Wormwood (Poppy Z. Brite)

This collection of horror stories was originally titled Swamp Foetus. Brite now identifies as male and goes by Billy Martin. The naming can be a bit confusing. These stories were written by someone who has spent a lot of time in North Carolina but has since fallen in love with New Orleans, and also thoroughly enjoys modern witchcraft. As ever, some selections are better than others, but in general I don’t much care for this collection. It revealed to me why I like some horror stories and not others. Barker’s stories celebrate life because it is fragile and precious; Brite’s stories celebrate death because it is strong and inexorable. While there is a lot of homosexual male love, it’s generally sidelined by the overwhelming fascination with death. Hooray for the representation for gay goths, but maybe there are some guys in the world who like wearing black and listening to heavy metal who don’t want to kill themselves or anyone else. In this book, if there are, they are likely to fall for a murderer or someone with a terminal illness. I had a professor once who told us that you can tell the implicit values of an author by seeing who the murderers and the victims are – they are the ones the author is punishing. If all your gay men kill or are killed, is that really positive representation?

The Longest Journey (E. M. Forster)

Really? A Forster novel that doesn’t go to Italy? Yup. We do still have the critique of mainstream British middle class, but they stay in Britain this time. A young man has a lot of revolutionary friends in college, but then he graduates and gets a job at a boys’ school and his ideas change. It’s about the confrontation of ideals with real life, particularly as it regards the educational system. I have a lot of experience with this conflict myself, which is why I am no longer a teacher. I also wanted Protagonist to admit his love for his former classmate, but Forster’s explicitly gay stories weren’t published during his lifetime. The longest journey of the title is the one that we all take, through life into death. It’s one that we all ultimately take alone because of the difficulties in communicating our ideas and experiences. This is a book of isolation.

The Golem and the Jinni (Helene Wecker)

This was a fantastic story. In the late nineteenth century, there were several communities of immigrants living in New York, and the European Jews and the Syrians didn’t really have much communication between them. The golem was built to be someone’s perfect wife, but he dies on the crossing and she has to figure out what to do with herself now that she’s freed from building her life around this one man. She develops skills, gets a job, and ultimately builds a community of friends. The jinni was trapped in a bottle for twelve centuries until a metalsmith accidentally frees him. He also works on getting a job and developing skills, adapting to the new culture and nourishing his memories so that he can figure out how he got stuck. They both distrust humans and feel confined because they can’t share their true identities with the world at large. Of course, the woman made of earth and the man made of fire meet each other. I was very pleased to see, though, that they don’t fall in love with each other. I’m pretty sure the golem is asexual, though that word is never brought up, and the jinni is very sexual, which gets him into trouble. It is possible to have a book about two people who don’t get all romantic. Despite the setting, the writing is of our own time, the firm, focused prose that we favor in both popular and literary novels. Recommended for most adult audiences of readers.

 

November Books

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima)

There’s a thirteen-year-old boy trying to navigate early adolescence. His friends are sort of terrifying, identifying themselves by numbers instead of names (Chief, One, Two, Three . . .); it’s more of an intellectual, anti-sentimental cult than a group of friends. He learns about sexuality by watching his mother through a knothole in the wall between their bedrooms: first he spies on her masturbating, then continues when she meets a man to bring home. The romance between the sailor and the business owner is sweet and a little Hallmark-ish: they meet when he’s on shore for a few days; they fuck immediately, fall in love, and write each other letters while he’s gone for six months; and then they marry. Moderately wealthy career woman, lower-class hunk with a connection to nature – it’s the stuff American movies are made of. For the first half of the book. After the marriage, the sailor tries to learn business and stepfatherhood and life on land in general, and loses the kid’s respect in the attempt. But as it turns out, the Japanese law at the time determined that no one younger than fourteen could be tried for any crime, so the Chief reminds them that they can do anything they want in these short remaining months before their birthdays. Even murder.

The Mabinogion (Trans. Sioned Davies)

It took me quite a long time to read this book. It’s a group of fragments of Welsh epics, around a thousand years old. There was a specific story that I was looking for, the one about Cerridwen and her cauldron of inspiration, but it’s not here. It’s part of the Tale of Taliesin, because of course they treat a woman as a supporting character in a tale about a man, and the commonly known version of Taliesin has been determined to be mostly spurious, written in the nineteenth century I think. So I missed that one and got instead the authentic, traditional Welsh stories. There are eleven divisions or manuscripts, but don’t let that fool you. There are dozens of stories in this book, and they come so quickly that I could never read very much at a go. I need processing time. I care about understanding what happened, which takes a little digestion, and I also read to share in the emotional experiences of the characters, which just were not explored with the level of detail I (as a twenty-first century reader) prefer. If you’re looking for Arthurian chivalric tales, then this is the right place. Forget Lancelot and Galahad, and read up on the other knights, the ones that get left out of the modern tellings, like Geraint and Culhwch. It’s like we only care about Arthur as a cuckold, because watching Lancelot have sex with Guinevere allows us to vicariously defy authority and we like that. Here, her name is Gwenhwyfar, and women aren’t simply pawns in conflicts between men. The attitude toward sex is remarkably un-Victorian. There aren’t really any deities – maybe a little light Christianity every now and again, but these myths are about people, and sometimes giants and magic-users. My edition is heavily footnoted, maybe a little too much. The writing style is abrupt and forceful, and there’s a little too much Might Makes Right for my tastes. I do like the way that people refer to others as “the man/woman I love best”; it feels beautiful and right. It acknowledges other loves and other types of love while also recognizing the primacy of this individual, and it separates all that from titles and formally recognized relationships. It’s a weird and complex group of stories.

Dead Man’s Quill (Jordan Castillo Price)

The final novella in the series. Dixon and Yuri meet Dixon’s missing uncle who’s been causing havoc and together they resolve all the problems. I don’t think they manage a sex scene, which is a little disappointing, but it wrapped up the series perfectly. The author implied in a postscript that there will be more stories, but I’m satisfied with the closure I got here. I will probably reread all four stories again, as if they were a single book, but I don’t think I need anything more. They’re cute, yes, both the stories and the characters, but I like closure and don’t want any sequels.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)

I liked this book a lot. There are ten first chapters of novels, tied together with a frame about you, the Reader. It is assumed that you, the Reader, are a white European heterosexual man, which I find unfortunate but inevitable in a novel written by an Italian man in the 1970s. The Reader enjoys all of these separate books, but runs into trouble finding the rest of the books, whether through printer errors, sudden interruptions, or the incompletion of manuscripts. He finds a young woman, the Other Reader, and they try to hunt down the books they’re reading, to no avail. Because they are separate human beings with different attitudes and experiences, they can never quite agree on the nature of the books they read, and we only see things through his perspective. The stories start off a little paranoid and Hitchcock-y, then around chapter seven things get very sexual indeed, and finally we drift into death and the dismantling of the story. The last few pages involve a discussion of why and how we read, which explains why we can never quite read the same book – even if the text doesn’t change, we do, so the experience is always different, from one reader to another, from one reading to the next. Great for people interested in exploring the nature of reading as they do it, but the metafictional elements both explain why critics love it and why it seems to have passed mostly out of the United States’ cultural consciousness.

The Body in the Library (Agatha Christie)

This is my first Miss Marple book, and technically it’s a December book because I read the last third on Dec 1. I was surprised at how little she actually does; the story focuses primarily on the police officers investigating the murder. She solves it, of course, but the clue-gathering is seldom in her hands. A body appears in the library of a country estate, and the owner’s wife is friends with Miss Marple, so of course they work the case together. Very little action as clues are revealed mostly through dialogue. Positive representation of the disabled, less positive representation of the working class, no representation of ethnic minorities. But she’s writing for a specific audience in a specific time and place, so these things are to be expected. I appreciate the community-based approach to solving the crimes, even though I am uncomfortable with just how narrow and homogeneous the community is.

August and September Books

August

Hide and Seek (Wilkie Collins)

In this novel Collins starts his interest in writing about the disabled, with Magdalen as his deaf heroine. She’s a real angel in the house, and we conclude with the same brother/sister ending that we had in Basil. I’m kind of hoping that he gets off of this kick, because while I do acknowledge the validity of love between people who aren’t having sex, the fact that Collins keeps replacing the traditional married couple with a pair of siblings makes me wonder about the nature of the relationship, especially in a story like this one where the two kids don’t know about their consanguinity for most of the birth-mystery plot, so they toy with romance a bit before they realize. One of the strongest themes for me is the suspect nature of visibly excessive virtue – the people who are strictest with others have the most to hide, as in all those leaders of conversion therapy camps who later come out as gay. And not the quiet, domestic sort of gay that I am – we’re talking rowdy rent boys in loud techno sex clubs gay.

Sunjata (Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute)

This is a west African epic, in this edition transcribed from a couple of performances by famous bards. It is difficult to capture the magic of a live performance in a written medium, but the editor sure tries his hardest. I think this edition is useful for those of us who are interested in traditional stories but don’t have our own immediate access to traditional African bards.

Zeus is Undead: This One Has Zombies (Michael G. Munz)

The sequel to Zeus is Dead, which I read back in June. The characters who annoyed me in the first book are either absent or only appear in cameos, so I prefer this one. Instead of drifting around to several different characters, Munz keeps a much tighter focus on a single protagonist, Athena trying to win back her divinity by solving the mystery of the zombies’ origin. As with any good sequel, this book is about the consequences of what happened in the previous book, and you can’t just go around killing goddesses and expect nothing bad to happen.

Sugar and Other Stories (A. S. Byatt)

Reading this book, I was actually wondering what I was going to write about it here. I thought about aboutness, a real word/concept we use in cataloging. This book is about the emotional lives of intelligent women. [Find me a Library of Congress Subject Heading for that.] Like many of the women in this book, I was a smart child who grew up and wanted to be known for his heart rather than his brain. So many people treated me like a disembodied intellect, and I went along with it – it’s rather a job to make up for lost time and balance myself out now. I recognize that it’s easier for me to be smart because I’m a man and people either expect me to be intelligent or at least to believe in my own intelligence, which is the opposite of what they expect of women. Byatt’s argument, here and in many of her other early works, seems to be that women have both heads and hearts, and can use both effectively, even simultaneously.

The Lord Won’t Mind (Gordon Merrick)

Okay, so I recognize the groundbreaking nature of having written a gay romance in 1969. I know the cultural issues surrounding coming of age in the United States in 1940. But the protagonist of this book is so racist, so misogynist, so homophobic, so toxic that I had a hard time reading about him. Charlie is a terrible person who, when a girl sets boundaries about what he can do with her body, thinks that he ought to rape her because she ‘deserves’ it. There is a lot of explicit gay sex in the first part of the novel, and it’s really hot and really works for me, but then Charlie gets all stupid and breaks up with Peter and marries the first woman he can find. Then he gets abusive and breaks up with her, after he’s beaten her so hard that she’ll never act again, and go finds Peter again. Peter has been nothing but sweet, honest, and tolerant this whole time, so I really worry that Charlie’s going to beat the shit out of him too, leaving him too disfigured to turn tricks, so I don’t want to read the sequels. Charlie’s not anyone I want to spend my time reading about.

Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

A novel without a real plot. Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan about the cities he’s visited and heard of in his travels, most of which are impossible to really exist. They all have women’s names, so I wonder if he’s speaking metaphorically about people he’s met. As the stories go on, it becomes less easy to know what’s real and what isn’t, who’s speaking and who’s listening, and where the story is being created, if there even is one. It might be a bit destabilizing, but I thought it was very good.

Weight (Jeanette Winterson)

Yes, I’ve read this book before. I enjoyed it thoroughly; I’m allowed to reread. It’s easy to focus on Atlas, the man carrying a heavy burden who learns to let it go. This time I saw the story of Heracles, the bragging, self-centered idiot who is changed by carrying a weight too heavy for him that he dare not lay down. It’s not just the physical weight of the world; it’s the weight of being alone, afraid that the loneliness will never end. When it does end, he’s still changed by it.

The Invention of Heterosexuality (Jonathan Ned Katz)

If you will recall, a little more than a hundred years ago people in the United States created the concept of whiteness as a way to pacify the masses of poor immigrants, I’m thinking of the Irish and southern Europeans. Yes, your lives are shit and no one will hire you or speak to you in a language you can understand, but at least you’re not black. You’re white, and there will always be a place in our slums for you. Katz gives a similar historical survey of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the formation of the heterosexual identity. As gays and lesbians became more vocal about their existence, innate dignity, and basic human rights, heterosexuals began to examine their own sexual orientation identity and to codify what it means to be ‘straight’. In what situations is it acceptable for same-gender heterosexuals to express affection, and how should it be expressed? What habits of dress, mannerism, and behavior characterize the heterosexual American? The book is very interesting in looking at the changing nature of ‘normal’ and the codification of homophobia; I don’t think it should be labeled for gay/lesbian studies (eh-hem, publisher who printed that on the back of the book). I think that in some places Katz’s analysis is a little slap-dash, and his understanding of American history seems a bit incomplete (we didn’t all land at Plymouth Rock), but there’s still a lot of value here. I think this book is a good starting place, but that we need more granular perspectives, a closer reading of specific times and places. The United States is hardly a single monoculture, even today. Katz tends to homogenize the country as he decries the homogenization it performs on itself.

Let’s Talk About Love (Claire Kann)

YA asexual romance. Protagonist is a biromantic asexual college student, starting with the breakup from the girlfriend she loves but doesn’t want to have sex with and working through the friendship that becomes her next relationship. Our culture puts so much emphasis on sexual license for people in their late teens and early twenties that a young woman of color really has to fight for her right not to have sex. She works at a library, which makes me happy, and falls for the guy who volunteers for storytime. He’s straight, so when they do finally have the talk about sex (after having already broken several touch barriers), it’s a struggle for him to deal with the fact that they’re not going to do it. There’s a happy ending, where he says that all the passion and connection he looks for in a sexual relationship are already present with them, but I personally tend to doubt what he says. He loves her, yes, and he’s not a rapist, but I don’t think he’s going to be long-term happy with lifelong celibacy. It’s very much a happily-for-now, not a happily-ever-after.

 

September Books

The Hangman’s Daughter (Oliver Pötzsch)

Historical mystery. The author comes from a long line of executioners, so he did some research into life in small-town Bavaria in the seventeenth century and wrote a murder mystery featuring his however-many-greats-grandfather. Kids are being killed during the week of Walpurgisnacht, and when found they have alchemical symbols drawn on their bodies, so everyone assumes witchcraft. Despite the potential for emphasis on women’s wisdom (and the title referring to a woman), female characters are not really terribly important (the woman of the title is identified by her relationship to a man, not anything inherent in her). This is a book about the hangman and the doctor in love with his daughter, their interest in herbal medicine and modern surgical methods as opposed to the traditional four-humors style of healing by opening veins and forcing laxatives. When women appear, they are fantastic and strong and wise, but we spend most of our time in the heads of the men investigating and perpetrating the crimes. As with the witchcraft itself, women are a distraction or a misdirection, red herrings all. Some of the characters I read in the voice of angry Nazi officers in films, both American and German, which adds a layer of fear that I don’t know was intended. The fact that I can do this seems to point to the quality of the translation – I take it it’s very good.

The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot)

“If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” Maggie Tulliver is a girl who holds tightly to the ties of mutual history that bind her to her family, no matter how miserable they make her. Eliot spends a good bit of time setting up the tug-of-war tragedy of Maggie’s adult life, so it can seem a bit slow at the beginning, when everyone is talking about the future. The foreshadowing is heavy, and then the reflection on the past is heavy as well, and the weight of all that is not present tense crushes her. I really want Maggie to focus on right now for a few minutes, but when she does she breaks convention so strongly that she’s shunned for the rest of the book. I identified very closely with Maggie on this reading; my family vexes, ignores, and intolerates me, but I feel equally unable to cut the ties, no matter how loose they have become, no matter how many Stephen Guests tell me it’s okay to do it. Sometimes I feel so distanced from them that my own last name seems foreign to me. Spending time with them feels like I’m complete, as if I’ve misplaced a part of my identity that only lives with them, even though/even while they constantly reinscribe my role as Lost Child, the tabula rasa who hides his own personality like a palimpsest, wanting to be valued but afraid to be seen.

Where Angels Fear to Tread (E. M. Forster)

This is a story of cultural contact, looking at the way Englishpeople respond to Italy. The fools rushing in, implied by the title, are the English family who seem determined to destroy the life of a handsome young Italian. All the English know that while Italy is beautiful, both by nature and as home of Renaissance art, actual Italian people are dirty and evil, no matter how sexy (probably because they’re so sexy – there’s no way someone that pretty and that dark could be good). It’s easier to stay racist at a distance, so when the English come to Italy they can’t hold onto their resolutions, leading to blunders and foolishness and ruined lives. It’s not always clear when Forster is speaking in his own voice or narrating the inner monologues of his characters, so it’s not always clear where the racism is coming from, but the broad strokes make it clear that the English are idiots and the Italians are better off without their meddling. Misogynistic philanderers, maybe, but also close to nature, closer to the marrow of their own lives. If you can stop thinking of love as monogamous and possessive, then modern Italian culture as Forster portrays it can be really beautiful as well. They just experience chivalry differently than the English do. There’s a strong sense that the English experience goodness as passivity and part of Italian evil is the willingness to act, but I think that good and evil are not easily mapped onto passivity and activity – I don’t think either of these binaries actually exists except on a spectrum from one extreme to another, and that inherent nature (which I perceive to be good, distinct from the dominant culture’s perception of good) always lies somewhere in the middle.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)

Another book about Man’s relationship to Time. I use Man in the gender-specific sense because women are not prominent in this story. They can act as ideals for men to practice their chivalry upon, but if they take up any space in the narrative at all it’s as the fallen woman or the evil witch. It’s a story of men learning to accept the aging process, not trying to speed it up when we’re younger or reverse it when we’re older, not placing sole value on our existence between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. Will and Jim are thirteen-year-old best friends, and in one of the easily-forgotten-yet-foundational early scenes, they watch while a couple has sex with the window open. I guess pornography wasn’t readily available in Bradbury’s Illinois, so Jim is continually drawn back to staring in the window of adulthood while Will keeps pulling him back toward childhood. The dark carnival arrives almost immediately, turning the literal growth of sexuality into surreal metaphor. Will’s father Charles occupies the opposite end of things, older than most first-time parents, so much older than his wife that people mistake him for her father. Realistically, she’s probably only ten or fifteen years younger, but Charles looks old for his age. He’s the janitor at the library, which I find interesting because (a) there’s no stigma attached to his work, and (b) there are no librarians. Librarians were mostly female at this time, and the profession was consciously trying masculinize itself in its rebranding as library SCIENCE. Charles Halloway manages to use the library resources in the absence of the trained library employees, as if to point out that all that education women get in organizing and providing access to resources is unnecessary to a man who is determined to root out evil. The book has a way of erasing women, ethnic minorities, and sexual minorities, leaving us with a world of ‘straight’ white men eradicating evil through the power of their contempt and desperate self-control. I do appreciate the lesson that we see later on in Harry Potter’s boggarts, that the best way to deal with fear is to laugh at it, but Green Town is such a restricted view of the United States that I find it claustrophobic, creepy even without Cooger and Dark’s. Bradbury’s writing is beautiful, but very firmly rooted in the conformist part of the early 1960s.

July Books

That We May Be One: A Gay Mormon’s Perspective on Faith and Family (Tom Christofferson)

I wrote a 3500-word entry on this book alone, but after watching Hannah Gadsby several times I’m not convinced that I want to publish my anger. There’s a fury that I’m not really dealing with – when I came out, this church told me that I’d be better off dead, and my mother wants me to go back to it. The fact that I like having gay sex does not mean that my life does not have value, either for me or for the rest of the world. Christofferson decided that God was more important, so he dropped his partner of twenty years, repented of all his ‘sins’, and seems to be embracing a celibate old age. This is not the life I want for myself. I don’t want to trade abusive human lovers for an abusive divine lover; I want people in my life who show me love in ways I can understand it. This is a book for faithful Mormons who want to love gay people but don’t know how; it should not be read by gay people who have already been hurt by the church and are not interested in rejoining it.

Grave Sight (Charlaine Harris)

Grave Surprise (Charlaine Harris)

An Ice Cold Grave (Charlaine Harris)

Harper Connelly is a nice girl with a traumatic past and an upsetting gift. She was struck by lightning, and ever since she can sense the presence of dead bodies. When standing over or touching the body, she can experience the last few seconds of the person’s life. So, not content with giving her a nightmare of a childhood, the author also has her experience death over and over and over again. Harper travels around the country as a consultant for law enforcement and grief management. Her stepbrother Tolliver Lang manages the business aspect of her career, and she clings to him as the only thing steady and comforting in a world determined to keep retraumatizing her. One of the things I did not like here is the reliance on a negative stereotype about the South: that we all have fucked up families. I’m happy that Harper and Tolliver are happy at the end, but their quasi-incest is just the tip of a murdering iceberg of Faulknerian proportions (there’s no genetic link between them; when the children were teenagers, their parents married). I was also disappointed at the way that characters from Arkansas and Memphis had unmarked speech, but when the narrative came to North Carolina in book three people started saying you-all. I will admit that Doraville is set to the north of Asheville and I’m more familiar with the areas to the south and west, but I’ve lived in North Carolina most of my life and I’ve rarely heard anyone say ‘you-all’. ‘Y’all’, as one syllable, is more common, and in some parts you might hear ‘yuns’, but not a two-syllable ‘you-all.’ There has been a strong influx of people raised in other parts of the country, due to tourists staying and academics coming to work (there are a ton of colleges and universities in the mountains of North Carolina), so a lot of people just use ‘you’ as the second-person plural pronoun. Good fluffy little paranormal murder mysteries, but I may need a little space from the genre. Mysteries tend to find the worst in people, and I don’t want that in my head. The last one, about a serial killer, is especially harsh; it’s like Harris has to punish Harper for being happy.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote)

It’s a bit like Goodbye to Berlin and The Great Gatsby had a literary baby. I don’t understand all the fuss, and I don’t understand why Audrey Hepburn would play the protagonist. Holly Golightly is a social climbing, gold digging woman who gets pregnant from a man who is not her husband. Capote does his best to present her tenderly, but I just don’t see the appeal. Is he fictionalizing someone he knew in real life? Is he trying to show how much harder it is for women to get ahead than men? I mean, Gatsby gets ahead by having money, and Holly Golightly gets ahead by having sex. She’s bisexual, which I guess is progressive for the time, but she calls all homosexual women dykes, and that’s a problematic term these days. I think it’s one of those words that you can use if you belong to the in-group, but that is very offensive if used by someone outside of it. I preferred the short stories included: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, and A Christmas Memory. They felt more original, though Christmas stories generally feel overly sentimental to me, and this is no exception.

Games People Play (Eric Berne)

This is a popular psychology text from the 1960s, explaining the unhealthy ways that we act in relationships. I’ve taken some pride in thinking of myself as a straightforward person who doesn’t play games, so finding myself in this book was humbling and unpleasant. To roughly quote Elizabeth Bennet, “Until that moment I never knew myself, and I had no one to comfort me.” I recognize that these games are socially conditioned – my mom’s wooden leg is her divorce, mine is my mental illness – but I don’t want my adulthood to be controlled by my fucked-up childhood. I’m trying not to play these games anymore. Changing my conditioning is a challenge, but I think it’s worth it.

Trouble in Taco Town (Jordan Castillo Price)

Something Stinks at the Spa (Jordan Castillo Price)

Second and third installments of a series of novellas I began last month. I think that ‘Quill Me Now’ is the best of the set so far – these two lose their sense of direction. The first one is a gay romance with a bit of mystery, but what do you do with your happy couple when they’re already together? It is good to see Yuri reevaluating his expectations for the world because of his relationship with someone he can’t predict or understand, and it is nice to see Dixon continually finding new things to love about Yuri, but the author has placed them in a world where they don’t have to fight to stay together; they’re seldom even in different rooms for more than an hour. Their relationship has become the type of story that is only interesting to the people involved. The mystery part of the series is also a bit less interesting; there’s less a sense of dramatic irony or potentially unreliable narrators. These are stories about magic gone wrong, words and images becoming misinterpreted and altering reality in inconvenient ways. The problems are caused by Dixon’s Uncle Fonzo, and then Yuri and Dixon fix them. I’m hoping that when they catch up to him (maybe in the as-yet-unpublished fourth?) the stories will regain what I enjoyed about the first one.

The Goblin Reservation (Clifford D. Simak)

A sci-fi/fantasy mystery, from the late 1960s when people weren’t ashamed of their misogyny. Protagonist was duplicated in a transporter accident, diverted to a crystal planet of beings older than the Big Bang, while his other self went on an anthropological expedition in deep space, came back early, and was killed. I quite like the solves-his-own-murder plotline because it forces complacent protagonists to really examine their own lives and figure out the question that privileged people are still asking: Why would anyone want to hurt me? This book took a lot of work for me; even though these are genres I enjoy, this is still a fairly dull book, despite the goblins, trolls, banshees, Neanderthal, Shakespeare’s ghost, and a dragon.

The Damnation Game (Clive Barker)

A retelling of the Faust legend. I’ve been trying not to seek out so many mystery novels lately because I feel like they focus on what is worst in humankind, so it was kind of strange to me that I would dive right into (and devour) a horror instead. In thinking about it, I realized both why Barker’s horror isn’t a problem right now and why I love it generally. For Barker, humanity isn’t the source of evil. Evil comes from trying to become something other than human; the drive for supernatural power (especially the power to escape death) robs people of their compassion, pity, and empathy. When people strive to be more than human, they invariably become less than. Barker’s heroes tend to be the kind of people society ignores, the paroled convict working as a bodyguard for a wealthy eccentric, so even though people die in horrifying ways, there’s a paradoxical affirmation of the value of living an average human life. Barker’s novels help me to become reconciled to living the life that I have.

Upside Down (N. R. Walker)

The usual gay romance story is, boy meets boy, they fuck, something happens to separate them, they overcome their obstacles and live happily ever after. I enjoyed this book a lot because it’s not the usual gay romance. Jordan and Hennessy are asexual, meaning that they don’t use sex as a way of pair-bonding in relationships. I’ve had a few friends talk about this in their own lives: it’s not that they get bored with sex, or that they’re too religious to enjoy it, it’s that they don’t want it. My hetero friends don’t want to have sex with the same gender, my homo friends don’t want to have sex with a different gender, and my asexual friends don’t want to have sex with anyone. So in the book, the two guys meet each other, get to know each other, go out on dates, hug each other, enjoy kissing, but neither of them wants to have sex. This clearly does not describe me – my interest in other men is so explicitly sexual that I stare in public and make others uncomfortable – but it’s a style of relationship that I could learn from. My counselor has said that I should spend more time with the part of romance that isn’t having sex so that I can make better choices about whom to be involved with. I could use a bit more patience, finding out if I have anything in common with someone aside from being lonely.

The Throme of the Erril of Sherill (Patricia A. McKillip)

A very early novel. This is the story of a Cnite who gets sent on a quest to win the hand of his lady-love, but the narrative rejects the toxic masculinity that the fantasy quest story sometimes encourages. The Cnite loses his horse, his armor, and his sword, searching for a book that doesn’t exist. Eventually he has to sit down and write the story that he wants to see in the world. McKillip is acting out the rejection of some of the values typically found in 1970s fantasy, but the clearer sense of what she does believe and want to see in her imaginary world is still developing. I enjoy the later books more.

Hector and the Search for Happiness (Francois Lelord)

An allegorical French psychiatrist travels the world, trying to understand happiness. Hector recognizes his privilege in many areas, but he has an essentialist view of gender that I find a bit outdated. While I do appreciate allegories, the way that Lelord keeps reviewing his main points makes me feel a bit too much like I’m reading a textbook. Ignoring the heavy-handedness of the didacticism, however, this is a nice story about a guy who wants to make people’s lives better and finds out that most people don’t need his help. People around the world have found ways of being happy, no matter what the external circumstances of their lives are. It seems to have a lot to do with positive relationships, though that’s hardly the only point he makes in the book. Happiness is most often found indirectly, as we feel effective in encouraging the happiness of others. Apparently there’s a film version starring Simon Pegg – I’d quite like to see it.

May and June Books

May Books

Hello Down There (Michael Parker)

There’s a strong Faulkner influence here, but applied to the Piedmont of North Carolina in the middle of the twentieth century. I picked this up in the LGBT section of the bookstore, but there is no gay content (except for one homophobic joke). It’s more about drug addiction and (hetero) sexual mores. It’s a sad book, early in his career. I hope he has found happier subjects.

Basil (Wilkie Collins)

The story of a young idiot who gets deceived by a family of gold diggers. There’s some looking at the absurdity of marriage laws that prefigures Miss or Mrs?, and this also has what one of my professors described as the most graphically violent scene in Victorian literature, when Basil grinds his rival’s face into a freshly macadamized road. This is during the period when Collins rejects the marriage plot in favor of sibling relationships, but I hope that he’s not actually encouraging incest. The sister in this one is a real Angel in the House, so it’s frustrating – none of the women characters are believable. Collins will eventually get to where he writes complex, interesting women, but he’s not there yet.

Mr Wray’s Cash Box (Wilkie Collins)

This is a little Christmas novella. It’s not great, but it’s cute and heartwarming, though the ending gets a little capitalist for my taste. An aging actor sneaks into the church at Stratford and makes a mold of the bust of Shakespeare, but he’s too afraid to make more than one cast of it. He thinks the police are going to take him away for breaking copyright, but he doesn’t actually know the law. He’s fine.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne Bronte)

Anne Bronte was the born-again religious one among the Bronte sisters, so while all of them quote the Bible out of context all the time, she does it with a little more piety than her sisters. She also relies on some of Milton’s ideas, the importance of growing and changing one’s mind and the worthlessness of virtue untested. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was seen as a little too sweet and innocent, especially when it was paired with Wuthering Heights, so this was her edgy follow-up. This book takes a hard look at alcoholism and its consequences. Some of her attitudes are surprisingly modern, as when Huntingdon talks about addiction as a disease and a compulsion rather than simply a habit. Also when Hattersley is helped out of it by strengthening relationships instead of being preached at. Some of the women are a little too Angel-in-the-House for me to appreciate them, and I question the wisdom of Helen’s returning to her husband after she left him for very good reasons, but as a whole it’s actually a really good book. Narrators reveal more of themselves than they intend, which is an effect I always enjoy.

Dangerous Personalities (Joe Navarro)

Navarro used to be a profiler for the FBI, so this book focuses on that sort of quick, targeted classification of people. He discusses four basic toxic personalities: Narcissist, Unstable, Paranoid, and Predator. At the end of each chapter there is a quiz to see if someone you know fits this type. The scoring leads to four divisions: safe, annoying, obstructive, and dangerous. I scored my guy as annoying in both narcissism and paranoia and obstructive in instability. It took me another month to get away from him, but I’m good now. I scored myself as annoying in instability, and it seems accurate. I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to have tried to live with me consistently through the last seven years. Navarro’s examples tend to be serial killers, so he can seem a little over the top (as law enforcement officials tend to do), but if you remember to dilute his intensity, it’s an informative book.

If Nuns Ruled the World (Jo Piazza)

I got unexpectedly excited about this book. It’s not so much a story of faith as it is true stories of amazing women who do fantastic things with their lives. Most of them are activists – whether for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, human trafficking victims – and some of them are just doing extraordinary things in their old age, like the one who didn’t start running until she was older than I am now, but worked herself up to compete in marathons, and continues into her eighties. It is true that these are women from a shared, specific faith community, but the good work they do goes beyond that community. In fact, they sometimes end up in conflict with the male leaders of their church because of the work they’re doing to make things better for everyone. Their stories can inspire anyone who wants to make our world better, Catholic or not, particularly those who are interested in women’s political activism.

The Path of the Green Man: Gay Men, Wicca, and Living a Magical Life (Michael Thomas Ford)

This was a fantastic book. Ford introduces us to the basic concepts of Wicca and a little of their history, with ideas for meditation exercises. Along with the nonfiction, he also writes an allegory where the green man travels through the wheel of the year, hitting the eight celebrations commonly celebrated by modern pagans, and meeting gods from a variety of (mostly European) traditions. I loved this book and it meant a lot to me.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J. K. Rowling)

The first time I read this book, I had a hard time staying with it because I couldn’t find the mystery that kept the story together. It’s so long and digresses into so many details, and it’s great that Rowling didn’t stop world-building after the first book (so many fantasy authors do), but at almost nine hundred pages I felt my attention wavering. This was the second time, though, and when you know that Harry’s emotional state is the mystery and not just an obnoxious by-product of being fifteen, the book makes more sense. Rowling really hits the connection between Harry and Voldemort hard in this one, and that focus will grow toward book seven. There’s a lot of conflict between Harry and society as a whole, not just with his friends, which we saw less of in previous books. The atmosphere of conflict extends to the Weasleys, as Percy cuts himself off from the rest of the family. There’s a general sense that everything is getting bad, so it’s easy to assume that Harry being a little bitch all the time is just part of the general malaise and not proof that Voldemort is taking over his mind. It’s a much more complex and abstract problem than we had before, and as the dumb jock, Harry isn’t really equipped to handle it. Oh, and while it’s great that Ernie Macmillan has finally developed a personality, I think it’s a shame that that personality is Pompous Ass. Luna Lovegood makes her first appearance here, and she makes me very happy. I’ve heard people complain about the worthlessness of wizards who never use magic unless it’s dramatically appropriate; the Hogwarts kids learn Cheering Charms in year three, get tested on them in year five, but never use them outside of class. They literally know a spell to make each other happy, and they stubbornly refuse to do it. I do not understand.

 

June Books

Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (ed. Devon W Carbado and Donald Weise)

This was a strange anthology. The writings are grouped thematically rather than chronologically, and the divisions didn’t always make sense. Discussions of the United States government’s attitude toward African nations and toward Americans of African descent seem to me to overlap, so why not put them together? It also seems that the majority of Rustin’s work was in action rather than in writing or speaking. While his command of rhetoric is impressive, even he implies that he is most effective at organizing events and movements rather than speaking at them. Rustin’s style is highly educated, which can alienate his less-educated audience. He’s not as popular today, not only because he didn’t go down in a blaze of glory, but because people today aren’t impressed by erudition. People who seem smarter than others are feared and distrusted, not valued. It was probably the case at his time as well. Because my own education in twentieth-century history is not great, I hadn’t realized how much World War II had done for civil rights. The ground was prepared when all those soldiers were forced to mix together; knowing people of color helped whites to understand their value. Rustin started his work shortly afterward, in the late 1940s. The book focuses on the 1960s, as do the superficial discussions of civil rights movements in United States classrooms; it’s misleading because it ignores the gains of the 1950s as well as the fact that drinking out of the same water fountain doesn’t solve everyone’s problems. We’re still struggling with racism all over the world. The two crosses in the title refer to the fact that Rustin was both black and gay, but while he was an activist who was gay, he was not a gay activist. When Stonewall happened, he did not build on the momentum to organize a movement. His focus was on race, and dealing with that identity took up most of his time. He spoke about being gay some, but by the 1980s people only wanted to hear him talk about Martin Luther King. So yes, his sexuality and the prejudices about it (and the imprisonments because of it) were an obstacle to his visible participation in the civil rights movement, but even after twenty years he didn’t have much to say about it. I’ve been talking about those identities that make him similar to me, a gay man working on a second graduate degree, but I don’t want to minimize the importance of what he did for communities of color in the United States. He worked with the bus boycotts made famous by Rosa Parks, and he organized the March on Washington. He was an amazing person at the forefront of cultural change, and the improvements in our laws and culture toward ethnic differences are due to him and his influence. He didn’t do it alone, but what he did changed the course of history.

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (Isak Dinesen)

Confession time: I don’t remember a whole lot about this book. Dinesen’s stories are slow and beautiful, some are realistic and some are fairy tales, but I’ve had so much upheaval in the last two weeks that it seems like I read this book in another life. The most famous one from this collection is Babette’s Feast, due to the slow film that was made of it. It takes a lot of effort to stretch forty pages to fill that much movie. I watched it a few years ago with a friend who said it was her favorite, and we saw different things in it. The story is about a famous French chef who flees from war-torn Paris and finds shelter in an unusually conservative community of Lutherans in Norway. After several years, she wins a lot of money and spends it all preparing a dinner for her friends like the ones she used to make for the wealthy French. If I remember correctly, my friend saw it as a story of artistry and giving one’s best, even when people don’t appreciate it (or know enough to appreciate it). Reading the story, though, I agree that it has to do with the place of the artist in society, but it’s not about love and gratitude. Babette’s feast is a judgment. When she arrives in town, they teach her to make alebread and fish, like she doesn’t know how, and she is forced to kill her creativity for twelve years making these shitty meals for people that she really does come to care about. Someone who can make a turtle soup that people would die for can certainly make bread and fish a sight better than these unoriginal household cooks, but they don’t want her to. The story is about everyone ignoring and undervaluing her gifts, and her feast is a way of saying, “Look at what I can do! Look at what you’ve missed! Look at the talent that your stupid religion has hidden under a bushel!” It’s a story that condemns society for not giving artists free rein to express themselves. It’s a dumb religion that says, God gave you the ability to make the world vibrantly beautiful, but you have to keep making it greyly small because that’s what makes us comfortable.

Quill Me Now: The ABCs of Spellcraft (Jordan Castillo Price)

This is a short little novella, but I thought it was a lot of fun. In this world, magic requires two parts: a picture painted by a left-handed Seer and a saying written by a right-handed Scrivener. Dixon is from a family of Scriveners, though he isn’t really one himself, and he meets a sensitive Russian hunk with a real gift for painting Seens. I’m attracted to the idea that words have power, and that using them carelessly can have unfortunate consequences. Hurrah for paranormal gay romance. First of a series.

Ombria in Shadow (Patricia A. McKillip)

High fantasy. Ombria is a kingdom full of shadows, where people seem to drift through time. I deeply love Patricia McKillip, but I wasn’t as pleased with the ending of this one. The book starts with the death of the prince and the casting off of his mistress – she finds a way to sneak back into the palace to continue raising the prince’s son, whom she loves as if he were hers. Mistress isn’t a title that is often accorded respect, but she’s effectively the new ruler’s stepmother, and they have a close bond. The dead prince also leaves behind a bastard son, whom many people would like to see seize the throne, but he’d rather spend his time drawing the things about Ombria he doesn’t understand. The third candidate for protagonist is the witch’s foundling, a young woman raised on the idea that the witch made her of wax who is now trying to figure out what it means to be human. These three marginal figures work together to protect each other and the young prince, because getting him to the throne is what’s best for the kingdom. Then there are the two witches – the one who lives in shadow realizes suddenly she’s been a mother for twenty years and is confronted with her own love for her waxling, and the one who lives in the palace is caught up in political maneuvers to consolidate her power over the kingdom. While things are vague the book is mysterious and exciting, but when the mysteries are revealed the book just ends. I prefer the revelation to come at the end of Act II, where characters use their new knowledge to guide the community to a resolution (after some thrilling and climactic confrontation befitting Act III), but this isn’t a Victorian sensation novel. Nor is it a romance, or a Bildungsroman, or any other of the labels we use to simplify the discussions about stories. I don’t think it’s fair to define a book (or anything else) by what it isn’t, but that’s where I end up when I try to explain this one. Perhaps that’s the reason for all the shadow – this is a book that just isn’t.

Written on the Body (Jeanette Winterson)

The unnamed narrator tells us about her affairs with married women. This book is deeply and beautifully sensual without being pornographic. She tells these stories in no particular order, as we do when we talk about our past to someone we’ve met only recently. Things can get a bit jumbled up, even though she gives us names for all of these women. There are a couple of men, but they rarely get more than a paragraph. Halfway through, suddenly, this becomes a book about cancer and loss, and while I don’t know if I would make the same choices that these people do, I was really engrossed by their story. This is a fantastic book, where as usual, Winterson probes into the heart of what it means to love.

Zeus is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure (Michael G. Munz)

The Greek gods return to earth in a fun comic novel. Apollo tries to solve the mystery of Zeus’s murder with the help of a television producer, a lovesick anti-hero, and the muse of comedy and sci-fi. In the end they have to defeat the Titans, because apparently that’s the part of Greek mythology that captures the imagination of contemporary writers. Can’t we just leave the Titans in peace? In some ways I found the characters frustrating – Ares is a really unkind Southern stereotype with inconsistent dialect markers, and the anti-hero is harshly sarcastic at inconvenient times. I suppose I just get disappointed when characters don’t use their power for the good of others, and none of the gods do.

The Godmakers (Don Pendleton)

Do not confuse this with the Frank Herbert novel that came out a couple of years later, nor with the anti-Mormon film (and novelization) a decade after that. I will be the first to admit that many of the books I have read over the past few months have been a bit insubstantial, or fluffy. Life has been stressful and I’ve needed relaxation more than intellectual stimulation and growth. However, this is the only one that I would actually call trashy. This is shit science fiction at its shittiest, the type of story that makes Barbarella look like high feminist drama. Characters use heterosexual sex to access higher dimensions of psychic energy, resulting in paranormal abilities. It’s very sex-positive, but racist, homophobic, and misogynistic as well. Adolescent wish fulfillment for incels.

Time Must Have a Stop (Aldous Huxley)

A strange book. It sometimes seems a bit like Dorian Grey, the young man learning about life from older, wealthier friends. But while Huxley makes Sebastian the center of the book, he doesn’t seem to find him very interesting. Sebastian’s uncle dies of a heart attack partway through, but his presence lingers on as we see him suffer in the afterlife and experience seances from the ghost’s point of view. Uncle Eustace keeps trying to hold onto an individual identity even when the painfully shining light tries to absorb him into a universal consciousness. This is the part of the story that attracted me, much more than the privileged teenager whining about finding evening clothes (a symbol of respectability denied him by the father who insists on breaking down class boundaries). Women characters are there to support Sebastian, acting as mothers, lovers, or evil crones. One of the fascinating things about this book is the setting, written in 1944 but about 1929. We’re on the cusp of a crash that author and audience know is coming but the characters don’t. Death gives Eustace some prescience, and the epilogue flashes forward to Huxley’s present, but those fifteen years don’t actually change Sebastian all that much. More experience means that he’s a handsome womanizing poet, not a handsome womanizing poet wannabe. I guess Huxley is right; I mean, as I look over my own life, it seems like there’s a lot of change, but the person I am has actually been pretty consistent. There were things that I thought were important that turned out to be superficial, and I have improved dramatically in self-knowledge and self-esteem, but the self in question is still the same. I enjoyed Huxley’s poetry; putting it in the mind of a teenager in the process of thinking through his art gives him a chance to show the revision process and a bunch of half-finished fragments of thought. It might not be as interesting to people who don’t write or study poetry.

Lime Gelatin and Other Monsters (Angel Martinez)

Another short paranormal gay romance novella. I get on a kick sometimes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Kyle Monroe is a police officer in Philadelphia’s paranormal division, and while everyone there has magical abilities, they’re all bad at them, like the guy who accidentally lights things on fire when he’s angry, but only achieves little smolders rather than large conflagrations. They’re kind of like X-Men who haven’t had any training, so they just flail about with their unusual abilities and try not to hurt each other. Kyle absorbs the powers of those around him and controls them even more poorly, kind of like what I do with picking up on other people’s emotions subconsciously and then inventing reasons for me to feel this way. He gets a new partner, a giant beautiful man of southern Asian derivation, so it’s all police procedures and Indian food, with some gay sex thrown in. It was a fun little story.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)

The kids are sixteen, and romantic relationships are starting to take over the plot. They’re also swearing more often. Draco Malfoy and Professors Snape and Dumbledore play larger roles than they have heretofore, with Dumbledore taking a more active role in Harry’s education and the antagonists finally actually plotting to do evil things. We also meet Narcissa Malfoy, who is one of my favorites. There’s a big political storm brewing around her, but all she cares about is keeping her family safe and she will do anything to accomplish that, which makes her a lot more like Molly Weasley than people ever acknowledge. Mrs Weasley, poor dear, spends a lot of time worrying about everyone. Fred and George have become successful businessmen without having finished high school or attempted college, which is great to see, and people start to acknowledge that Ginny might be the most powerful witch of the series. The death at the end of this book always makes me sad, though I have plenty of other reasons for that just now. I’m glad I read it, but I’m also glad it’s over. One of the things that gets me about this series is that while Rowling is fantastic about retconning the Horcruxes and other plot elements, she does not do so well with retconning the school system. We seldom see students doing things that Harry and his friends can’t do yet, like trips to Hogsmeade or Apparating in the earlier books. We see adults doing serious magic, but there’s very little of the intermediate steps between where Harry is as an eleven-year-old and where his teachers are adults. Fred and George seem to represent the zone of proximal development for Harry, but even they are consistently more advanced than he is. It’s like, being raised by Muggles and not that good at academics, Harry isn’t really interested in doing magic, or he thinks that all magic is so far above him that he can’t even try. Finding the old Potions book in this story is the first time that Harry experiences magic as power he can access and not just a symbol of the social acceptance he was denied at his uncle’s house. Looking at Snape’s notes and revisions and experiments, he finally shows some actual interest and passion for something other than sports, so I’m disappointed in Hermione for trying to squash that. But she’s got enough of her own problems in this book, so I don’t judge her too harshly. A lot of people talk about the Slytherin House as being evil, but that’s not their defining trait. Think about Professor Slughorn as Head of that House. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just hyper alert to power and the way it moves. He likes it, he likes its benefits, and he likes being seen as close to people who have it. But he’s not willing to put others in harm’s way to get it, nor does he enjoy the suffering of the powerless. Slytherin isn’t about being evil or serpentine; it’s about understanding relationships of power and staying aware of how social structures affect people. Which is why I identify as Slytherin even a little more strongly than I do as Ravenclaw, the House of learning for its own sake where books are more important than people. This book is definitely building to the series finale/climax of book seven, much more strongly and intentionally than we’ve seen before.

Late April Books

Stop Thinking, Start Living (Richard A. Carlson)

This is the recent rebranding of Carlson’s first book, You Can Be Happy Again! The premise is that all you need to do to be healed of your clinical depression and anxiety is to stop remembering that you have them. Well, actually, he starts by saying that all you really need to do is have an epiphany, but you can’t force yourself to epiphanize, so everything after the first few pages is an effort to guide you into a purposefully serendipitous experience.

For ages now I’ve been going back and forth as to whether depression is something that is inborn and I just have to put up with, like coeliac disease, or whether it’s something that is done to me, like a respiratory virus. Carlson introduces a third option – it’s something I’m doing to myself. Of course I don’t like this option because it means that I have to change, and I don’t like change.

Fortunately, Carlson gives me a lot of reasons not to listen to him. First, he attacks his entire profession. If all you have to do to cure depression is quit thinking about it, then nearly all psychotherapists are selfish gold-digging charlatans. Second, he attacks his readers as well. He keeps calling us who are depressed and seeking help for it silly and ridiculous, and he blames us for all our mental problems. Third, and clearly the most important, there are no double-blind tests or any other efforts to do quality scholarly research. Nor is there any secondary research. His points are seldom backed up by any evidence, and what evidence he presents is purely anecdotal. There is no reason for anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills to believe anything he says. Fourth, it’s so repetitive that eventually you start to believe him just because he keeps saying the same thing over and over again.

When you stick with it and get close to the end, things get better and he starts to acknowledge that there are some traumas that really do need professional attention, and maybe some people have problems that need more than purposeful ignorance. Because, you know, it’s not always the best thing to just ignore problems and hope they go away on their own while you’re waiting for your epiphany.

This came out way bitchier than I intended. Sorry about that. This is what happens when people blame me for my problems, however justified they might be.

In the Ring (James Lear)

This author usually writes his gay porn as James Lear, and he has a real name that he uses for more reputable work. And normally I don’t write here about the erotica, but the Dan Stagg series starts to drift away from the strictly porn. Lear is focusing a lot more on story in this book, and First-Person Narrator even desists from describing a couple of sex scenes because he thinks we must be bored of reading about him fucking (we’re not). This is the third in the series – in The Hardest Thing, he was hired as a bodyguard, and in Straight Up he was solving a mystery for some of his military friends. This is much more James Bond-ish, with Stagg hired by the CIA to go undercover in a boxing/organized crime thing. Yes, there’s still some graphic sex with super-muscle-y athletes and spies, but it’s seriously de-emphasized. So, more of an action novel than a gay sex romp, but still a good quick read with some scenes that make me happy.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Marlon James)

This book is amazing. It’s a graphically violent horror-fantasy, so a bit Tolkien and a bit Clive Barker, but instead of being based in British mythology, it’s all Africa. So there are spirits that do all sorts of mystical stuff, sometimes called demons, and there’s some vampire content, and people turning into animals. Quest narrative with a nonstandard ending, doors that appear in midair, government corruption, evil creatures who walk on the ceiling, a girl made of blue smoke, a man who becomes a leopard, and a tracker with a powerful nose and an eye that’s borrowed from a wolf (he’s the first-person narrator).

Someone has already purchased the film rights, but I wonder. One of the main thrusts of the book is to normalize QBTIPOC, and it’s hard for me to trust people. Is he planning to make a film of this, with all the gay sex between Africans who haven’t been corrupted by nonexistent Europeans, or did he buy the rights to stop anyone else from making the movie? Just to be clear, most of the main characters are gay men, but there’s a lot of homophobia too. I mean, it’s not like American homophobia, where they call us a bundle of kindling which means that the best thing to do with a gay man is light him on fire. They just call them boy-fuckers, which is at least descriptive of what they actually do. There’s also some of that internalized homophobia where tops get more respect than bottoms, but if you look at their abilities and nonsexual actions, there’s really no difference in masculinity. As he says close to the beginning, blaming a man for which way his dick points is kind of like blaming a compass for pointing north.

People who are religious are advised to turn away, because there’s a lot of profanity, and Tracker’s favorite way of swearing is to say Fuck the gods. There’s all sorts of wishing for the gods to go get fucked, which I enjoy but you might not.

Seriously. I loved this book. It’s gripping and adventurous and paranormal and awesome. It’s supposed to be first in an upcoming trilogy, so that’s going to be great. I recognize that it’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.

Sacred Paths for Modern Men (Dagonet Dewr)

This is sort of like a pagan man’s Wild At Heart, the Christian book about how we should all be Braveheart. Instead of the one archetype, Dewr gives us twelve, pulling examples in a Golden Bough fashion from the classic mythologies, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Norse, Hindu, Tolkien, and a splash of Judeo-Christian. The result is an examination of the nontoxic bits of masculinity that have always been a part of our culture but that we’ve ignored. It’s good to know that the pagan world has inspirational nonfiction, and I enjoyed this bit of it. I’m looking forward to reading more, as a sort of gearing up for the deeper study of what this community believes, searching for what I believe.

Each archetype has a couple of rituals, one for private study (often with arts and crafts projects) and one for groups. I haven’t practiced any of them yet, but it’s good to know that they’re there when I’m ready. I’m very interested in symbols, so rituals are very meaningful for me.

It’s a good book, about possibilities. The author spent a lot of time at the ManKind project, so he plugs it rather frequently. One of the things that interests me the most is that he refers to his flavor of faith as Storytelling Wicca, and that is definitely a concept I want to learn more about.

Early April Books

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J. K. Rowling)

Harry Potter undergoes a transformation here, and I’m not sure if people talk about it. In Book Three, having become fed up with his nonmagical family, he grabs his school things and wanders into the night. He takes a bus to London and puts himself up in a public house for a week or two, at the age of thirteen. Harry is no longer a poor boy who suddenly finds himself with money; he’s a rich kid who didn’t have access to his accounts over the summer. The Dursleys are no longer the permanent reality; they’ve become a temporary inconvenience while he waits to get back to his ‘real’ life. Harry has begun to act privileged. And while I love this book a lot, it might be my favorite of the four I’ve reread this year, I don’t really have a whole bunch to say about it.

In the fourth book Hermione responds to the privilege being enacted around her by trying to unionize the house-elves. There’s some discomfort here in Rowling’s portrayal – it’s a common thread in British literature that some people are born to be servants and they’re only happy if they have a firm master who knows how to keep them in their place. We often call it colonialism, though it seems to apply to Dickens’s servants as well. There’s less of a sense of personal obligation and affection with the house-elves, but it’s just as alarming. They are almost all happier as slaves because their sense of identity comes from their service. Without a master, a house-elf sees herself as nothing, a failure. Winky is so programmed this way that of course she ends up an embarrassing drunk.

I also wanted to complain about the message of gender roles that the film teaches that isn’t supported in the book. In the book, there’s a mix of genders from both of the foreign schools, but in the film Durmstrang has boys and Beauxbatons has girls. Why? Is it so inconceivable that Fleur Delacour could be chosen as a champion when she’s competing against boys? Are Frenchmen unfilmable? Their movie industry would lead me to believe that isn’t true, nor does being French make a man effete. I also don’t think there’s anything especially masculinizing about Eastern Europe – their women are strong and beautiful, quite the equal of women from any other part of the world. Okay, so now I can’t remember any moments with Durmstrang girls in the book, but if there is sexism in the selection process we can blame it on the fact that Karkaroff is a bad guy.

Just a quick review – in Book Two the government responds ineffectually to a crisis; in Book Three two innocents are condemned to death and the main characters help them escape; and now in Book Four the highest government officials refuse to accept what is happening in front of them and begin the policy of denial that leads to so much trouble later on. It’s not often a series of children’s books represents this type of authority figure as being neither good nor evil, just stupid in a realistic, non-cartoonish way. It reminds me of the importance of choosing the right people to lead the community, as if living in the United States for the last three years hasn’t been enough of a lesson in that.

 

The Coming of the Quantum Cats (Friederik Pohl)

I was really disappointed by the lack of interstellar feline companions in this book. The title comes from Schroedinger’s cat, the thought experiment about how observation influences reality. By now, most of western culture is familiar with the idea of multiple dimensions of reality, or the multiverse: every time you make a choice, reality splits to create two parallel worlds, one where you turned right and one where you turned left. In this book Pohl explores the idea of travelling between these alternate realities. When we first meet Dominic Desota, he’s a mortgage officer in a world where North America has been taken over by Arabs. He gets arrested for taking his shirt off at a public swimming pool. There’s another world where he’s a senator, and a third where he’s a quantum physicist, and a fourth where he’s a mid-ranking soldier. Major Desota’s America has decided to invade and colonize the other realities, which makes the boundaries between thinner and thinner, so that people, objects, and weather events start slipping into the wrong reality. It’s really interesting to see the same group of characters cast in different roles, but when things get going Pohl pulls a deus ex machina out of thin air, so the plot ended up being disappointing. The bad thing about Cold War-era environmental novels is the idea that there’s always somewhere else we can go. If we screw up this planet, we can just blast off in a rocket to another. If we damage this reality, there’s always an unspoiled Eden dimension we can shift to. In the 1980s we never had to learn from our mistakes, no matter how destructive they were.

 

The City and the City (China Miéville)

Now, remember all that alternate reality stuff and imagine applying it to just one city. At some point in the past, we’re not sure how or why, the city bifurcated into two realities – Beszel is eastern European and Ul Qoma is southwest Asian, but they overlap. Some areas of the city are completely one or the other, and some are crosshatched. There are strict laws about crossing from one to the other, so people have developed a set of visual cues to establish their reality – colors and mannerisms are defined by which city you’re in. The people train themselves to see only their reality, and they ignore (unsee) the people and buildings in the other. Protagonist lives in Beszel, but an Ul Qoma commuter train goes right by his front windows, which he is partially aware of some of the time, as the commuters are only ever partially aware of him. There is a border crossing with customs agents and everything, but you can shift between cities if you start noticing what you’re not supposed to see. It’s illegal and the mysterious secret police will come, but you can do it.

All that being said, this isn’t a sci-fi book like the Pohl was. This is a Raymond Chandler-style noir murder mystery. The critics invite Kafka comparisons, but I think that’s out of place. Orwell is a little nearer the mark, but this isn’t a representation of where we could be going, and I guess you could make arguments about immigration and open borders, but it doesn’t seem closely related to our world at all. Miéville does follow the dialectic structure – Thesis/Beszel, Antithesis/Ul Qoma, Synthesis/Breach – but the government isn’t the primary antagonist like it is in 1984. It’s much more of an old-school mystery than it is anything else, so as ever, just ignore the quotes from critics that are chosen to convince you to buy the book. Besides, comparing any author to our cultural monoliths does him a disservice. If you spend your time thinking about how similar (or not) he is to Kafka, you don’t notice how great he is in himself. This is a fantastic, compelling book in its own right, a fascinating mashup of two of my favorite genres, so let’s celebrate that.

March Books

Somewhere in Time (Richard Matheson)

I read somewhere that Matheson considers this one of his two best books – this is the one where love transcends time, and What Dreams May Come is the one where love transcends death. If that’s true, I can’t say I’m very interested in reading the rest of his work. Somewhere in Time is a time-traveling romance, where a man reads J. B. Priestley and realizes that time travel is a function of the mind (not a machine), and all you really have to do is hypnotize yourself. If you really believe it’s 1896, it will be. Our subject is a screenwriter in his mid-30s. He’s dying from a brain tumor, so he wanders away from his family and lands in a hotel on the coast of southern California. There, he sees a photograph of an actress from the previous century and he becomes completely obsessed. He goes through all the historical research and theories of relativity and time, and then he goes backward seventy-five years to see her.

She’s an actress who’s just okay, and has had two experiences with fortune-tellers who predict the love of her life. Suddenly a man shows up who fits their descriptions, and he’s odd but ardent. She’s guarded by her manager and her mother, but she still finds a way to meet up with this guy. Because we read the research, we know what’s going to happen. The actress is going to disappear from the stage for about nine months, then she’s going to be amazing. She’s technically flawless before, but it’s only after meeting her time-traveling man that she can really put some emotion into her roles.

Neither had ever loved anyone before, even though they’re certainly at an age to have done. The whole love story feeds into this misconception that there is only one love of a person’s life. I think it’s ridiculous – in a group of eight billion people, you think only one of them will love you? Rubbish! Love is everywhere, if we’re willing to look for it. These two people try to cram a lifetime of loving into a span of three days, and it’s a dismal failure. Not that they don’t love each other, but that waiting your whole life for one intense weekend and then never having another is a frightful waste. They have sex three times in one night, and it’s great, but why would she never try it again with anyone else? She has a long life ahead of her. He doesn’t, but in 1971 people with brain tumors are capable of casual sex.

What I’m saying is that the attitude toward love and sex is about as realistically believable as the idea that you can think yourself into a past you’ve never experienced.

This book is not as long as it feels. After a while, it seemed like the obstacles preventing the lovers’ union are simply there to stretch the story out as long as possible. It may have been more enjoyable as a short story. There’s a film that wasn’t well received, but it might be interesting to watch. Any excuse to stare at Christopher Reeve, right? Besides, the original title of the book was Bid Time Return, but it’s now printed under the film title, so maybe the movie is better? I don’t know. But the talent seems good, and the music is apparently popular, so it’ll be worth the experiment.

 

Men Under Water (Ralph Lombreglia)

It’s a risky business, giving young writers awards. You never know how the rest of their career is going to play out. This guy, for example, wrote two short story collections twenty-five years ago and has apparently spent the rest of his life teaching and doing media consulting. The stories are decent – all about men in pain acting out in one form or another, so it’s sort of like The Man of Feeling, reclaiming the primacy of (heterosexual white American) men’s emotional lives and the art they produce. I get the feeling in another month or two I will have completely forgotten this book. There’s one about transforming one’s house into a museum of love that caught my attention, museums and libraries being so closely related, but it’s another example of an unhappy man making everything about him, reducing a woman’s existence to a series of objects that he has a sentimental attachment to, and imprisoning himself in a literal basement.

 

What Remains (Garrett Leigh)

I seldom go for gay romances written by women, but this one was good. I wouldn’t recommend it to people who are squeamish about reading explicit gay sex scenes, because there are a ton of them, but if that’s no obstacle, this is a good story. Jodi is a web designer in London who gets hit by a car. There’s a coma, and some amnesia – he forgets about coming out of the closet and his five-year relationship with Rupert, a handsome Irish firefighter.  Personally, I’ve been having amnesia fantasies since I was a teenager, so the book touched on some ideas that I’ve thought out myself. I’d love to start over without all of the social conditioning. This is probably uncomfortably close to suicidal ideation, but it doesn’t feel the same. I don’t want to stop being; I want a shortcut to getting past the mental corset that hampers my ability to express myself freely in daily life. They fall in love again and there’s a happy ending, but it’s not super-sappy and the male characters are not unnaturally expressive or clearsighted as to the nuances of their emotional lives. They deal with things realistically, in a manner that is consistent with my experience of gay men of their ages.

 

The Nine Wrong Answers (John Dickson Carr)

The classic mystery of the 1960s. It’s such a perfect exemplar of its genre that nothing stands out too prominently, except for the gimmick expressed in the title. Every so often, there’s a footnote where the author discusses one of the genre conventions as a potential right answer, but as the title indicates, they’re all wrong. It’s a way of pointing out how well he’s meeting audience expectations while subverting them at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not super memorable either.

 

The Library at Mount Char (Scott Hawkins)

This book is engaging and well written, but terrible. A godlike figure kidnaps twelve kids and forces them to study in a mystic library, which is divided into catalogs. The protagonist studies languages, but other kids learn about animals, or war, or healing, or death. Their study involves a lot of practical application as well as book learning, so the girl learning about death dies and Father brings her back, over and over and over again. This is just one example of the way that something that sounds pleasant, like a magical library, turns into the locus of trauma and abuse. There is so much needless suffering, and the library is the source of it. For me, libraries were a refuge from the horrible things in my life – Hawkins makes the library the opposite. There is no safe place, and the library is the source of the terror. Knowledge is power, and you can’t trust anyone to use power altruistically. Carolyn does eventually learn that joy is better than pain, but it takes her a long time to figure that out. Most of the characters in the book die at least once, but my favorite does come back at the end, so there’s a little tiny bit of hope. But it’s not like in Catch-22, where the ending makes you realize there was always hope and the last four or five pages make the whole book of suffering worth it. There’s so little joy that it doesn’t compensate for the difficulty of the rest of the book. Maybe if a reader isn’t full of traumas like me, they won’t find it as triggering as I did. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks telling people to stay away from this book. It is too upsetting for me.

 

A Wish Upon the Stars (TJ Klune)

The finale to the series about Sam of Wilds and his friends. The only thing that can compensate me for the loss of more books is the fact that I can reread these four again. Happy endings all around, marriage, recovery of lost unicorn horns, defeating the evil one, reclaiming the land for love, secrets revealed, relationships repaired, gay sex. It’s great. The author includes an endnote about how he started writing these books when he was in a dark place and needed some laughs, and these characters and their ‘overt immaturity’ really helped him a lot. They’ve helped add to my life’s store of happiness, too. It does make me question whether his other books will be as delightful as this series was. I’ll have to try one sometime and find out.

 

The Riddle-Master of Hed (Patricia A. McKillip)

Heir of Sea and Fire (Patricia A. McKillip)

Harpist in the Wind (Patricia A. McKillip)

Truth be told, I read this trilogy in a single volume, which has been published under more than one title. The one I borrowed is Riddle-Master: The Complete Trilogy, but I’ve also seen it as Riddle of Stars.

Morgon is a lot like Ged, the wizard of Earthsea in Ursula le Guin’s books. He’s just learning how to do magic, so he goes on a quest that spans the length of his known world to find an authority who will reveal to him who he is and what his life’s calling is. He thinks that he’s meant to rule over a peaceful island of farmers, but his life moves in a different direction. All the journeying is really typical of your Tolkien-based fantasy novels (McKillip admits the influence in her introduction), and Morgon even has to face the fact that the end of his journey is quite different to what he had imagined it would be.

But that’s only the first book. Part of Morgon’s journey was to complete a task that a local king had decreed would be rewarded with his daughter’s hand in marriage – Morgon had met her previously, having gone to college with her brother, so he was really okay with marrying Raederle if she would agree to it. The second book is about Raederle’s journey to find Morgon after he goes off to Erlenstar Mountain and never comes back. The series is full of women who are powerful rulers, fierce warriors, and even determined little sisters. While Raederle doesn’t set off with self-discovery in mind, it’s a strong element of her story as well.

In the third book, they’re finally together, but we see things mostly from Morgon’s perspective again. The conflict between multiple antagonists is finally coming to a head, with a giant war that spreads to all the lands. It’s sad, but McKillip does a good job of focusing on individual characters instead of faceless masses of humanity. The end is a new era, which we hope will be better.

I really like the way that McKillip doesn’t shy away from portraying abstractions, magic that can be perceived with the mind only and has no equivalent in our world. She takes up the challenge and does it well. I also appreciate her female characters for their strength, and the examples of nontoxic masculinity she provides as well. Some of the men are toxic, but not all, and Morgon’s journey has a lot to do with learning how to express his emotions. I like the fact that in the end, Raederle is still free to do as she likes, and that she and Morgon can love each other without living together. For the 1970s, the idea that a woman needs to grow in ways that don’t involve a man is sort of radically feminist. And true.

February-ish Books

Once on a Time (A. A. Milne)

This is a fantasy book written for adults (now probably considered YA). Of course, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything inappropriate for children here, merely that they are not the primary audience. There are people who are bad and unhappy because they are miscast, and Milne makes sure we understand that – a good leader can be an underhanded, manipulative follower, and a good swineherd can make a careless, aggressive king. The difficulty in life is to figure out what people’s strengths are, what they are truly well-suited to, and then putting them in those roles. I’m seeing a lot of that in my management class, but it’s true here as well. Magic kingdoms that are somehow excessively small, transformations, foolish men, women who don’t actually need help – it’s a great book.

The Biology of Luck (Jacob M. Appel)

I read this book in unhappy circumstances, sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck, but I don’t think I’d care much for it in the best of contexts. Protagonist writes a book for the woman he loves, recounting the day that he finally gets the courage to ask her to marry him but from her perspective, and then he waits for the day he has the letter from the publisher either accepting or rejecting it to ask the big question. So, we see the day from his side, as he gets his letter and tries to hang onto it during the course of his day as a tour guide. We also read the book he wrote, telling the day from her side, but the two stories keep intertwining, so Protagonist predicted the day accurately, with its deaths and disasters and everything. A better writer would take a little time to speculate on the nature of reality, whether Protagonist is trapped in his own story or whether he is influencing future events in which he is not involved, whether free will exists or we are all pawns in some cosmological plan that he got an accidental glimpse of, but Appel ignores it all. There is no meditation on the fabric of events because Protagonist is completely obsessed with this girl Starshine. She doesn’t think of him at all. He fills the same role in her life as the gay best friend, only without being gay. I’m really confused as to why he would portray the woman he loves as a manipulative bitch, but he does. The common folk would call her a cocktease – she holds the possibility of sex in front of men in order to get them to do what she wants, but she prefers not to actually let them touch her. The boyfriend she meets for lunch is fabulously wealthy and wants to take her away to Europe; the boyfriend she meets after lunch is fabulously sexy and wants to take her away to Europe as well. The first one is young and entitled, the second is older, muscular, and revolutionary. Sleeping with two men is enough; she doesn’t need more sex in her life, but she still presents herself as available to other men so they will donate to the nonprofit she works for or do whatever else she wants. Why does protagonist love her? He digs all into her psyche, but I can’t find anything there to justify his feelings for her.

This book is another example of how New Yorkers think that a book is good, interesting, and important simply because it is set in New York. There’s nothing else to recommend it.

The Witching Hour (Anne Rice)

I first picked this book up in the staff room at my workplace ten years ago. I read through the first chapter, and I knew that this book could completely take me over, so I put it down and decided to leave it alone. Until now. There’s something about Anne Rice’s writing that feels real; it didn’t feel like reading fiction at all. It was a complete experience for me. Which is good, because at over a thousand pages, it took me nearly three weeks to get through it.

This is really two books. Nestled in the center is an epistolary multigenerational Gothic novel, along the order of Daphne du Maurier, about a family of witches. In seventeenth-century Scotland, a girl named Suzanne was a local healer. She slept with a witch hunter who told her all sorts of stories about witches are supposed to be able to do, so she went outside and called forth a spirit who whipped up a storm. She named him Lasher. He guides, protects, and supports her descendants for the next three hundred years. Lasher picks up various tricks from them over the years. The witch gene doesn’t stick with only female children, though, so he gets the idea to breed them for magical talent the way a puppy mill inbreeds for floppy ears and gentle dispositions. There’s some gay content here, but since the gay men in the family also tend to fuck their sisters/aunts/daughters/mothers/nieces, it’s not as gay-positive as I’d prefer. The Talamasca is a group of scholars who try to learn about the paranormal and protect the Mayfairs from their own witchcraft. They provide some genetic material for the line as well.

The frame story, the second longer book, is about the newest witch, Rowan Mayfair. She’s a neurosurgeon sworn never to see the family in New Orleans, who rescues a hot drowning guy and falls for him. He’s a poor Irish from New Orleans as well, so just her type. He gets some psychic powers after his near-death experience, as well as a driving mission to help the Mayfair witches. Not the ones living now, all the dead ones. Lasher’s in on it too, glad to have finally found a Mayfair who understands enough about anatomy to give him corporeal form. I’ll admit that my attention started to flag sometime around page 850, but I pushed through and things got intense there at the end. It’s a good book, just very long. The other two books in the trilogy are of a reasonable length.

The Consumption of Magic (T. J. Klune)

This is the third in the series about the magically bitchy twinks who gather dragons to put down the Rising of the Darks. When we finished A Destiny of Dragons, Sam hadn’t quite forgiven his mentors for concealing some details from him, but he gets over it here. Things are getting too dangerous for him to pass up allies, and this is a book about reconciliation. Even Gary and Kevin get back together, and we’re all glad we don’t really have to imagine what unicorn-dragon sex looks like. Knight Delicious Face is still dashing and immaculate, though once Sam starts telling his own secrets things change a little. Prince Justin is a bit less of an asshole than he has been, so maybe Sam’s charisma is winning him over at last. As ever, Klune’s writing is a joy and a delight, and if I knew him I would be begging for a beef injection. I love this series so much. This isn’t the end, and this installment finishes on an Empire Strikes Back sort of a note.

 

I know that I usually discuss books in the month that I read them, but it’s the afternoon of March 2 and I’ve already finished two more, so I’m going to go ahead and discuss these as well.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J. K. Rowling)

I’ve heard people say that this series takes a dark turn in the fourth book, that the death of Cedric Diggory changes the series in less pleasant ways. I’d disagree – things get really dark here in Book Two. I know the movie makes him look like a Pixar chihuahua, but Dobby the Self-Harming House-Elf is really disturbing. Far from being the friendly sidekick, he’s one of the primary antagonists, despite the way he gives himself severe burns and bludgeoning trauma. It’s a miracle he hasn’t had any amputations. Then two fourteen-year-olds steal a car, only to have two twelve-year-olds steal the same car a few chapters on. Fortunately for it, the car goes feral and hides in the Forbidden Forest. Then there’s the giant spider, and the even gianter snake who kills on sight. Hagrid continues to be incredibly irresponsible with the children, even though it’s strongly implied that he’s sixty-three, so I feel like he should be more mature than he is. How long do half-giants live? How long does it take them to grow up? There’s also a great deal of cynicism in relation to celebrity culture and government authority, which will persist throughout the series. Bring on the darkness.

Prater Violet (Christopher Isherwood)

I read this book in about twelve hours, and most of those I was asleep. It’s the fictionalized account of Isherwood’s involvement on a motion picture in 1933 and 1934. The book focuses on his relationship with the Austrian director. There’s a lot of talk about politics, Hitler, and preparing for war – writing in 1945, Isherwood knew where things were going so he makes a big deal out of it, but the character Isherwood doesn’t know that World War II is just around the corner and just tries to keep the peace. The real meat of the book, for me, is in the last ten pages, where Isherwood starts thinking about what the experience means. What are we living for? In the midst of a worldwide economic and psychological depression, why do we bother to keep ourselves alive? It’s an expensive business, stuffing food and water in your mouth so that the cells keep replicating. It’s an interesting and intense burst at the end of the book. It got me thinking – he talks about how he takes lovers to hide from his fear and depression and hopes that eventually he will reach a point where he doesn’t need a man’s body to distract him from his terror and despair. I wonder if that’s what I’m doing. Why am I still with this guy? And if I do shake him off, how long will I stay single? Am I into relationships for the sex, or am I using men to avoid facing who I am and how I feel? Am I so in love with being alive that I really think it’s better than the alternative? Haven’t I always wanted the sort of adventure you never come back from? How aware am I of what’s going on in Venezuela, and to what degree does that make me complicit? Maybe I am just a stupid American, using more resources than an entire village, taking up more space than anyone has a right to, foolishly optimistic about the future and so not working to stop war or climate change. I’m hearing the girl from The Last Five Years, singing “I suck! I suck I suck I suck!”

Late January Books

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender)

A little girl starts to taste people’s emotions in the food they make. She is exposed to a lot of adult emotion at a young age, particularly her mother’s depression. I was really interested in reading a kid trying to describe what anxiety tastes like. It’s a hard childhood, particularly with her brother melting into the furniture, but she seems to become a functioning adult with a strong sense of self-care. I liked this one a lot – a model for growing up to be healthy even with a childhood full of trauma.

The Long Walk (Stephen King)

This one was hard to read. At one point, a character feels like he’s in a Shirley Jackson story, and there are some parallels to make with “The Lottery.” Teenage dystopias have become quite popular, though, so I’d be more likely to connect it with The Hunger Games. Every year, one hundred teenage boys are selected to walk through Maine. If they stop moving, they get killed. There is, of course, one winner. I wonder if any of the winners survive; it is not good for the health to walk continuously for four or five days, especially not with Maine weather. It works as a sort-of allegory for the human condition and our walk through life, with the relentless grind of daily activity and a not-really-benevolent Major watching over you, ready to reward you if you win. The outlook is intensely bleak, as Ray Garraty makes friends and watches them all die. The only way this makes sense is as a form of population control, but really, there are more efficient and private ways of getting rid of ninety-nine teenagers. That’s not quite two per state per year; I’m sure more die from influenza or leukemia. A sad, sad book that grinds you down.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (J. K. Rowling)

Note the title – this is the original text, before it was Americanized as The Sorcerer’s Stone. The publishers thought that American kids wouldn’t know what the philosopher’s stone was, or maybe that they wouldn’t be able to pronounce philosopher. I think that changing it was insulting to the kids and dumb of the publishers, because it’s not like sorcerer is any clearer.

I think the plot is fairly familiar by now – Act I, emotionally abused child discovers he’s a wizard and prepares to go to a magical school; Act II, he makes friends with this year’s Weasley and gets through Christmas; Act III, he makes friends with Hermione and the three of them stop the most evil wizard ever from granting himself eternal life, just in time for summer break.

People talk about how revolutionary this story was, for a lot of different reasons, but I find revolutionary the treatment of Harry. He is essentially a dumb jock (excuse me, an athlete of moderate academic ability), which usually means he’d be the villain of the piece. Instead, Rowling puts him at the center – the protagonist of a book aimed at children is a child who doesn’t read for fun, which was really rare when I was a kid.

There are details that I didn’t notice when this was the only book I had read in the series – Bathilda Bagshot has been writing Harry’s textbooks since Year One, and he goes to visit her in Godric’s Hollow in Book Seven. Sirius Black is an important character in books three through five, but here he’s just that guy who lent Hagrid a flying motorcycle to bring Harry Potter to the Dursleys. I’m impressed with the way Rowling plants seeds for herself, in this book that was written before the others were conceived, and then she waters those seeds and they become fully realized characters and change the course of the series. I know that I’m going to forget the centaurs again – so many of the minor characters blur into the background for me – but maybe I’ll remember better this time. Even if I don’t, I know that I’ll enjoy continuing to read this story.

Raving Fans (Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles)

I hated this book so much. This is an essay on customer relations that could fit into fifteen pages at the most, but Blanchard dresses it up in the guise of poorly written fiction with an angelic fairy godmother (male) obsessed with golf and an unnamed protagonist called simply the Area Manager who seems most competent at avoiding work so he can spend time shopping and hanging out with his imaginary friend. There are some good points to be made, but if the TLDR version can be put on a one-page handout, I’d rather have the handout. Instead, my professor made me read a 130-page narrative that tries to be an allegory but doesn’t understand how.

Night Shift (Charlaine Harris)

I love Charlaine Harris. I really appreciate her portrayal of life in the South – her books seem natural, as if the characters live just down the street. This is the last of the Midnight, Texas books, and its storyline is covered in Season One of the television series. Fiji is back to her central role, and she’s great. She spends the book with her body image issues in the front of her mind, as a demon bent on taking her spreads death throughout the town. She’s a virgin, which supposedly makes her an incredibly powerful witch, and I have a hard time with the idea of sex weakening a woman’s power, but the townies hold a ritual where she loses her virginity with someone who isn’t a demon and drives the evil back to hell. When they decide on this, just about every guy in town offers himself. Several of them are genuinely excited about her, and even the two gay guys would consider it an honor. The only ones who don’t volunteer are the town priest and that one guy who’s married. In the end, it’s the guy she’s always loved who gets to fuck her in the town square while everyone else watches. The town secrets are all out, at least to the reader, and there are no plot hooks for a sequel. It’s a book with closure, which is another thing I admire. I had a writing instructor in undergrad who said that it takes talent to know where to begin, but I think it takes just as much talent for a writer of popular genre fiction to know where to end. These series tend to go on forever.

The World and Other Places (Jeanette Winterson)

This would be a fantastic introduction to Winterson for someone who isn’t familiar with her work. It hits all the right themes without taking the time for much other than theme, except maybe character. The writing is beautiful, as ever, but there isn’t time for a lot of world-building in a short story collection. I think that I’d read “The Three Friends” in one of the earlier novels, but I can’t say for sure. Love. Loss. Imagination. Dogs. Gender. Lesbians and other women. Winterson’s writing always makes me feel full, nourished, alive (while insisting that nothing alive is simple). Her books are always worth reading.

Holiday Reading

 

Inspector Hobbes and the Blood (Wilkie Martin)

Inspector Hobbes and the Curse (Wilkie Martin)

Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers (Wilkie Martin)

Full disclosure – Kobo offered me the three in a bundle, so that’s why I read them all in a row. There’s a fourth, and now you can get the four of them in a bundle. Or I can pay full price for the one that’s left.

These books are low-key paranormal mysteries. Inspector Hobbes, the resident Sherlock Holmes, is a large, hairy man with a keen interest in old-fashioned manners and a complete obliviousness to anything modern, like fashion or technology. Watson is played by Andy Caplet, who calls himself a journalist but he’s better at causing news than at reporting on it. He’s clumsy and awkward, and in the first book that leads to a tendency to incite riots. People react less violently in the later books, and the novels are the poorer for it. In the portrayal of trolls and vampires and other supernatural characters, Martin displays unflatteringly people’s tendency to racism and classism, and the gratitude that minorities have toward someone who just treats them like a regular person (maybe a little too grateful). That being said, there’s nothing in these cozy little mysteries to offend anyone, or even to make the heart beat faster. Read these books to laugh, not to be enthralled or horrified. The comedy is the most successful aspect.

 

A Ghost in the Closet (Mabel Maney)

I loved this book so much. It’s a lesbian parody of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, with a bit of Nurse Cherry Ames thrown in. It’s the third in the series, with two previous Nancy Clue/Cherry Aimless books. By the time this one opens, the squad has something like five lesbians traveling together – Midge and Velma are the stable couple, while Nancy and Jackie are fighting over Cherry. There are also several bits of the Hardly boys dealing with their own homosexual feelings (not for each other). The mystery itself is a cross between utter triviality and overblown world destruction, and the writing style is so alliterative I was giggling constantly. There are a couple of graphic scenes with the ladies, but not so graphic. There’s an emphasis on fashion and interior decorating that leads me to question the community’s interest in conspicuous consumption – are we really that materialistic?

“Let’s have breakfast,” Willy announced, shepherding the gang into his pleasant kitchen. Nancy relaxed for the first time in days as she watched Willy bustle about the cozy room, painted in soothing peach tones and decorated with starched white tie-back flounced curtains. Above the sink was a saucy shelf edged with ruffled gingham and holding a collection of dainty porcelain egg cups. She sipped her coffee as Willy tied an apron over his slacks outfit, took a bowl of farm fresh eggs from the Frigidaire and expertly cracked a dozen into a cast-iron skillet, next to a pan cradling a sizzling side of bacon.

A few minutes later he plopped a plate of just-right eggs, yummy-smelling bacon and crunchy toast in front of her. “You’ll feel better once you’ve had a bite to eat,” he smiled. Nancy blinked back tears. He had seen right through her brave charade!

 

Alien Quest (Mark Zubro)

Another gay book, this one not so much a parody as a clunky genre piece. Joe is a detective from outer space, and Mike is a Chicago waiter. There is nothing hot or steamy about the romance, and Mike routinely ignores the global consequences of events for petulant moments of self-absorption. Then, there are so many other things that get shoved in, because apparently no book about gay men is complete without (a) someone dying of AIDS and (b) the gay community adopting a homophobic teenager and converting him to tolerance. Seriously. I get so sick of the myth of the saintly minority. I know what it is to suffer, so I’m required to relieve the suffering of those who hate me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Minor Character is out of the physically abusive situation he was in, but having to save the teenage jerk while trying to save the world was an unnecessary distraction. It’s like Zubro didn’t have enough plot with an alien detective, so he had to keep shoving more elements in until it reached critical mass. There are a couple more in this series, but I may end up having too many issues to read them.

Another thing that bothers me is how seldom the narrator uses Joe’s name. He’s always referred to as ‘the alien’, perhaps because he’s so normal that we might forget that’s what he is. It makes Mike (and Zubro) seem a bit racist against non-humans. If someone looks and acts like a human being, even down to having the same genitals and manner of employing them, why would you keep insisting on his difference?

 

David Starr, Space Ranger (Isaac Asimov)

Asimov includes a short note of apology at the beginning of this book, because science moved on and the story as he imagined it could not possibly happen. Interstellar radiation, or something like that. David Starr is the type of hero that the audience of the time would have really loved – young, rebellious, smart, asexual, and violent. Asimov was writing for boys in the 1950s; what do you expect? Female characters? Despite the complete absence of women, he avoids any hints of homosexuality, which is actually sort of amazing. The last page features two men swearing eternal friendship and companionship, but it’s not until the last page. It seems strange to me that there’s so much hand-to-hand combat, because I don’t think science requires the frequent application of fists to noses, but I’m from another time.

 

Old School (Tobias Wolff)

This is a book about books. First-Person Narrator is remembering his school days, at this uncomfortably elite school where they invite famous authors to meet the students. The first part, about Robert Frost, is sort of straightforward and introduces you to the world and characters. The second part disrupts the first – some fool invites Ayn Rand. She’s horrible, travels with an entourage of superfans, and treats everyone like shit. FPN is enamoured of her work until he meets her and realizes what a terrible person she is. I was going to say bitch, but that’s an insult to dogs. Things get really intense for the third author, Ernest Hemingway. Of course FPN has to submit a story, but he can’t force anything out until he reads a story in a girls’ school literary magazine, and her story hits so hard and seems so much like his own that he plagiarizes the entire thing. He’s chosen, and caught, because this is what Story requires, but Hemingway dies before the visit anyway.

This is a book about authenticity, told by a boy who is so ashamed of his Jewish heritage that he can’t admit it to anyone, not even other part-Jewish boys, not even when he plagiarizes a story about being Jewish on the edges of high WASP society. It’s sad and weird, but worth reading.

 

Alphabet of Thorn (Patricia A. McKillip)

This book was so fantastic. Protagonist is a foundling raised by librarians to be a translator, and one day she finds an untranslatable book written in a completely unique alphabet that only she can read. It tells the legend of ancient heroes, and with the increasing level of detail it becomes clear that it was written by the greatest magician of all time. Because history is as it is, a number of legendary historical figures are misgendered, so the books feels strongly feminist, literally taking a time-traveling fantasy out of the hands of men and making the real heroes women. Men are realistically portrayed, but they do tend to be either violent, dense, or both. My favorite male character accidentally turns himself invisible.

I like the way that McKillip is sex-positive without being erotic or graphic. In this book, sex is as normal, unquestioned, and not worth describing as eating. She normalizes it successfully instead of fetishizing it or making it a significant plot point. I’m now looking for all the books of hers I can lay my hands on.

 

The Lost World (Arthur Conan Doyle)

I had a hard time making it through this one. I started it back before Nancy Clue, but it took this long to finish, even though it’s a short little thing. The problem is that I hate Professor Challenger. Like David Starr, he uses his fists as much as his scientific intellect, but he looses his violence on reporters and colleagues, not anyone who is actually trying to pick a fight. His wife disagrees with him on something, and she’s in the right, so he punishes her by literally setting her on a pedestal that is too high for her to climb down from. It’s everything that’s wrong with Victorian masculinity condensed into one vain, belligerent asshole. He leads a small expedition – another professor, a reporter, and a big-game hunter – with its attendant racist portrayals of Brazilians to find an isolated plateau populated by dinosaurs. It’s hard to escape from, but apparently genocide helps. The reporter is the first-person narrator, and he’s Irish, but uses unmarked speech while his Scottish editor is portrayed as a dialect-employing idiot. So racist. So sexist. Also ends with two men agreeing to stick together because “Bitches be cray”; she told him before he left that he wasn’t good enough for her, so I don’t know why he expected her to stay single while he got himself lost in the Amazon. It’s been a very long time since I’ve read any of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but if they’re as bad as this, I may never come back to Doyle.

 

Faerie Tale (Raymond E. Feist)

Horror novel based on the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Phil and Gloria, a successful screenwriter and an unsuccessful actress, buy a house in upstate New York and move their family there. The twin boys are pretty standard American fare, obsessed with baseball and too young for girls, and the older daughter falls for a grad student working with Phil’s old mentor. He’s a good kid. There are also Mark and Gary, two folklore scholars who are studying the fairy stories and strange occurrences. They sound and act like a gay couple, even though Gary has a girlfriend. Her name is Ellen and she’s a very competitive, athletic tennis player who is almost never onscreen – the perfect lesbian beard. There’s a lot of secret society stuff, and sex is positive when it’s offscreen, as if rape is the only sex worth describing. Feist isn’t a bad writer, and I’ll probably read some more of his work, but there’s something dissonant about this book that I can’t quite articulate. Maybe it’s just me.