Book 29: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another book club book! And another book that feels like it's in conversation with other stories I've consumed recently - The Raven Tower and Hadestown. This story of mythmaking and gods and the underworld takes place in Jazz Age Mexico, and focuses on the journey a young woman named Casiopea takes with Hun-Kame, a Mayan god of death, in order to free him from his brother's bindings. She is coerced into helping him when she opens the trunk her terrible grandfather kept locked in his bedroom and discovers his bones inside.

It's a story that is incredibly readable and that flows, even while exploring a cultural tradition and foundational myths that I knew very little of going into the story. I kept finding parallels to polytheistic traditions I have more familiarity with, but it also feels incredibly grounded in the specific time and place of the story. It made me want to learn more about both pre- and post-colonial Mexican history, but the book holds up on its own, even without a deeper knowledge. I really enjoyed both the POV of Casiopea and the authorial voice.

Grade: B  

Book 28: Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor

I read this right after finishing Just Kids, and while none of the book takes place in New York City, the entire book is informed by the title character's experience there in the early nineties, just after Robert Mapplethorpe's death and the end of that memoir. It was a clear thruline, although not intended, and Patti Smith is mentioned often, and so are so many other aspects of culture referenced throughout that memoir.

This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.

Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.

Grade: A

Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A

Book 26: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I borrowed this book because the author of it was on a podcast discussing the research she did for it and that was interesting enough to me to want to read the novel. Her research was about how single women in the mid 20th century had sex and held jobs and in general led lives that are not at all what we think of when we imagine American women during and after WWII. The main character isn't a show girl, but Vivian's a Vassar drop out who doesn't want the life her WASP parents want for her, and so when she gets the chance to move to New York with her aunt who runs a not very impressive theatre in Hell's Kitchen, she takes it. Her skills as a seamstress serve her well, as do her good looks and willingness to do just about anything, and even when she pushes that envelope too far and almost has her reputation ruined by the tabloids, she bounces back.

The frame of the story is essentially How I Met Your Father -- Vivian is now in her 80's and is explaining to a woman named Angela "who your father was to me." So there's that mystery leading you through the narrative, the desire to find out who he is, while also wondering how a woman who moves to New York City in the fall of 1940 will make it through such world-shattering times. It took long enough for that reveal to happen that I began to wonder if the book would land for me as anything other than a very readable and light exploration of the theatre world and life in New York in general. But when it does land, it's quite a shift, and it gave the book some emotional weight it hadn't had for much of it. So much of it was deliberately light and insubstantial, and to suddenly have a real foundation made the lightness matter more.

Grade: A

Book 25: Educated by Tara Westover

I read this book because both of my parents read it for their book clubs, and I had seen it mentioned all over as well. It definitely affected me more than I had anticipated; I started reading it thinking it would be a bit of a throwback to the dominant memoir genre of the mid-2000's (compellingly written memoir about the author's abusive/unique/uniquely abusive childhood, and how they recovered), and while it is that, what's lasted for me about the book goes far deeper.

The author grew up in a fundamentalist, survivalist Mormon home in Idaho in the nineties, and was homeschooled until she was accepted at Brigham Young University. She wasn't actually homeschooled, though--there was almost no actual formal teaching, and most of her time was spent either helping her father in his wrecking yard, or her mother as a midwife and naturopath. Her parents were abusive primarily via neglect; she was injured repeatedly because of her father's unwillingness to take any basic precautions with her safety, and any kind of medical treatment from outside the home was viewed as rejecting God's help and therefore evil. But she suffered more deliberate abuse at the hands of one of her older brothers, and I think the biggest shock about this book for me is that everyone in her immediate family actually survived.

The break from her family that she finally achieves via BYU and then eventually Cambridge and Harvard isn't as neat and as clean as I wanted it to be, nor is her anger at them as fully expressed as I desired it to be on her behalf. But her analysis of how her family existed within Mormonism and America is so cutting and much more nuanced than the instinctive blame I have of the structure of her family's faith for her young life--the Mormon church was also what got her out of her family's abuse, via education and a world outside of her mountain. She wrote a dissertation about how Mormonism fit into American culture as a whole in the 19th century, and I genuinely hope that eventually it is released as a popular history book, because this book made me want her perspective on the topic within an academic context. Her story of academic success is extraordinary for its uniqueness, but I think there's so much more that can be learned from her work than merely the ultimate 'overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to achieve something' life lesson.

Grade: A   

Book 24: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

I read this book because both my brother and a friend who understands my taste very well both recommended that I read it, and they both also declined to tell me much of anything about it going in. So I'm going to put the rest of this entry under a cut, in case you would like to also remain in the dark.

Book 23: A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale

Fifteen or twenty years ago I read a lot of literary fiction. At some point I stopped, mostly because I was tired of reading books about bad things happening to characters I either liked very much and didn't want to see hurt, or didn't care about and so therefore there was little meaning to it. This book isn't exactly that. But it's closer to gay literary fiction than most of the books about queer relationships that I tend to gravitate toward, but with a strange and at times vaguely out of place villain that didn't always fit the rest of the story. Having said all that, I still enjoyed it quite a lot.

The story focuses on Harry Cane, an Englishman in the late Nineteenth Century, who marries and has a child and comes from wealth and so doesn't need anything as common as employment. His life just seems to meander along until he meets a man who sees something in him that he didn't quite know himself. They begin sleeping together, and Harry is almost charmingly naive about the entire thing, not really recognizing how dangerous his behavior is until it's discovered and someone tries to blackmail him. He decides to leave the country in order to spare his family the shame, with little protest from his wife, and moves to Canada to become a homesteader in the wide prairie.

I found the transformation of a man who never had to work at all, and certainly never had to do manual labor to survive, into a farmer to be fascinating. The book did a really wonderful job of making that transition feel believable while never skating over just how monumental a change it was. He eventually makes a claim that's next to a farm settled by a brother and sister, and the slow build between him and the brother is quite lovely, as is the life they establish together. What happens to the three of them during the 1910's isn't exactly unrealistic or too harsh or anything like that, but it still wasn't what I wanted, and it felt like something the author had decided had to happen, rather than the inevitable outcome. I don't feel like the book was better for the tragedy, even if there is a happy ending of sorts for Harry. I wish it had been a bit more of a romance novel, essentially. There are plenty of aspects of Harry's life in the novel as is that defy expectations; I wouldn't have minded one or two additional ones that spared him (and me) some pain.

Grade: B

Book 22: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

I finished reading this book about 3 or 4 months ago, and have been putting off writing about it, mainly because I don't know how to write about works by GGK at this point. I ran into this same problem three years ago when I wrote about the last book he published, and both times it forced me to look at who I'm writing this blog for, and for what purpose. In general I've kept up with this blog because it both allows me to write about books at greater length than twitter does, and in a place where I can actually find my posts again, and because I like systems and inventories and all that. But am I here to review books? To recommend them, or steer people clear? There are times when I definitely do that--I've read books that I don't think are worth anyone else's time, and I try to make that clear. Or is this more of a reflection of how books make me, and only me, feel? Because the thing about GGK at this point is that he's writing exactly the book he wants to write, and I love them, because the themes that drive his writing are the themes I seek out in almost all of my fiction. But I also feel like if you're going to read this book, it's because you read all of his books, and not in a bad way--it's just impossible for me to think of them as individual works at this point. I think a reader absolutely could enter his novels via this one, but I don't really know why you would (although now that I've thought about that, I would love to hear someone's reactions to this story, if it's your first GGK).

I think my main takeaway from this book is that in many ways it's as explicitly a GGK novel as any I've ever read. He's always explored themes of legacy and how identity and history go together, in the creation and loss of cultures and empires and art, and the moments he chooses to tell us about are always clearly just one perspective out of many possible ones. In this one the framing of the story is from a first person POV, an older man telling the reader about his youth, and it's so self-conscious in its structure that I love it more for it. This is especially true because the story takes place about fifty years prior to the last book he wrote, and while there are those classic callback moments that are really a hallmark of GGK's work at this point, in his quarter turn historical fiction, there are fewer than I expected. It is about actions that are both much more important than any one individual expects they will be, while the actual earth-shattering change is happening hundreds of miles away from the place the story is set. 

The story is a slow burn, in part because it's about looking at the small, petty, all-consuming local issues societies obsess over until or unless something greater than all of that refocuses everything. Sometimes that great event is truly massive and wide-reaching, and sometimes it's something so intensely personal that nonetheless changes how a person behaves in their public life such that it becomes part of a city or country's history. I want to read all of his novels set in this universe again, leading up to here, because I want to see how his scope and scale and ambiguity or lack thereof shifts depending on the smaller narratives within each novel he's telling.

Also, this is by far the most bisexual book he's ever written, and his examination of sexuality in this era is, to me, pleasingly casual, where some people sleep with women and some people sleep with men and some sleep with both and whether or not they do is affected by so many cultural constraints and expectations in addition to desire and love. So that, for me, is fantastic, but I live in hope that I will finally get the FULLY GAY GGK book of my dreams in the future, or that I will eventually figure out how to write my own version of one.

Grade: A  

Book 21: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

This is a charming and beautifully drawn graphic novel about a prince who actually would rather wear dresses, and the dressmaker who designs them. It's very much 'it is what it says on the tin,' but that's not a complaint or a criticism -- the story hits all of the beats you might expect it to, but so satisfyingly, and the characters really land exactly how you want them to. There's secrecy and budding romantic feelings and a split caused by secrecy not being acceptable, followed by the grand revelation of just about everything all at once. The story floats through a fairy tale Paris that appears to be whatever era it needs to be to support the desired fashion from scene to scene, but the fact that the story doesn't attempt to exist in a real past, but rather the idea of what royalty and the aristocracy used to be, makes the story even easier to drop inside of. A really enjoyable read right before bed.

Grade: B

Book 20: Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

The subtitle of this book is "Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," which gives a pretty good sense of the thrust of the argument made in this book. It purports to be a book intent on explaining why Millennials are the way they are, using facts and macroeconomic analysis, but it is also very much a philosophical point of view desperately seeking factual support, rather than a conclusion being discovered via research. The entire thing feels reverse engineered, which may be satisfying to read if you agree with the arguments being made, but doesn't exactly make it well supported or especially illuminating.

Harris's essential argument boils down to the theory that millennials were born into a world in which there was ever greater competition for even fewer spots, that the middle class had ceased to have opportunities that the Boomers had enjoyed, and that millennials have become so accustomed to needing to go the extra mile in order to achieve anything that they've fundamentally and permanently undervalued their own labor. He gets some credit for actually understanding that, at the time of writing his book, millennials were anywhere from 20 to 35 years old, but he still fell prey to the impulse to equate millennial with young whenever convenient. He spends a short amount of the book acknowledging that our view of who a millennial is makes a bunch of assumptions about whose lives we mean when we reference generations: American, largely white, largely "middle class," largely suburban. He also acknowledges that many of the shifts from Gen X to millennial have causes beyond the economic hollowing out of the American middle class, but is fairly uninterested in exploring any of them. It is a book that is almost instantaneously dated; it was written mostly during 2016 but came out in 2017, and he makes no bones about the fact that in his view the entire world is now permanently fucked and that there's no way out for anyone, and in fact there hasn't been any way out since these beaten down millennials refused to collectively rise up and overthrow capitalism during the Occupy movement or at the very least by electing Bernie Sanders as president. It is a fundamentally short-sighted view of history that feels so entirely male and white even while it attempts to demonstrate that it recognizes women and people of color I cannot take it seriously. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism in this world, and millennials have in fact been dealt a shitty hand compared with their Boomer parents--but that shitty hand is only especially remarkable if you are one of the white male college educated millennials who thought things would be better for you, specifically. His afterward, in which he describes what he predicts the future will be, only made me shake my head at how limited and limiting his imagination truly is. Things are bad, and finding a path forward is and will be hard. But there is something too close to a celebratory tone of how fucked we all are in his analysis, and a condescending sympathy for those who don't acknowledge this permanent condition, and I stopped talking to dicks like that back when I was in college. I wish this book had actually been what I think a book on this topic really could be.

Grade: C