Book 47: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Hey so this here book is good!

I read it after having seen the miniseries version of Good Omens over the summer, and I spent the first two episodes attempting and failing to figure out if I had actually read the book back when I was a kid and it was on my brothers' bookshelves, or if it was like the Lord of the Rings: one I had seen so often it felt like I must have read it, but in fact never had. I did determine eventually that I hadn't read it; while a lot of the miniseries felt familiar to me, it was in that cultural osmosis sort of way, and not in the 'oh I read this a long long time ago' way.

It was also familiar in a 'oh, this is like a Douglas Adams book written by a couple of other people' way. There is a sensibility and wackiness in it that is just quintessentially a certain kind of British, where as an American you read about a thing and you can't quite tell if it's a gag in a book or if it's just something that reads that way and is actually thought of as entirely normal in the UK. But anyway! The book reads like the miniseries feels, which makes sense, given Gaiman's involvement in the miniseries. There are a couple of aspects of the book that did not age well at all, and which feel remarkably out of place, since on the whole the book holds up pretty well. But that didn't impact my enjoyment of reading it. Honestly, my main feeling when reading it was thinking over and over again what a successful adaptation it made. But the book itself is still worth reading, even so.

Grade: A 

Book 46: Honestly, We Meant Well by Grant Ginder

So I found out about this book after reading the instant classic twitter thread about a gay dude who, when he was a teenager in the '90s, created a folder of pictures of hot dudes called Beefcake on the family computer and, when asked about it by his dad, blamed his MOM. (His eventual coming out to them was not exactly a surprise.) I went to his bio and when I saw that he was an author I decided to read one of his books, and I enjoyed it!

This is kind of a classic beach read, in some ways - it's light and a bit frothy and there's a whole lot of drama but the stakes of all of the drama is never particularly high. It's about a classics professor and her family, a husband who cheated on her a year ago but has promised he's reformed, and their son, who just graduated from college and is feeling completely unmoored. She gets the chance to go back for the summer to the small island in Greece where she spent a year as a college student herself all those years ago, and when her husband and son join her there, all of them begin to discover their various interwoven secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, even though I found all of the characters to be extremely frustrating at times - this is not a story that allows people's bad behavior to go unchallenged, which is good, but it also at times becomes exhausting that basically no one is without seriously questionable behavior. However, in the end the people you want to succeed the most do, and the people who you most want to see receive their comeuppance do, and all of the characters feel extraordinarily recognizable (which may be why they feel as frustrating as they do - they are exactly as stupid as people are in reality). Sometimes you just want to read a novel where the writer really knows what they're doing, and this is definitely that.

Grade: B

Book 45: Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

I read this book badly. I took too long between sections, and I also ended up having to wait for almost a year for it to come in at the library, and I think that the disjointed way I read it impacted how much I felt the revelations in this third book of the trilogy.

Having said all of that, I really liked this book. It was similar to the first two in that there were things you thought you sort of understood, and then you were given more information or just a different perspective of the same information, and it totally changed how you viewed it. Also, the lighthouse keeper is one of my favorite characters in the entire series, and he made me have a lot of feelings.

I feel like it might be worth it for me to go back and reread the entire trilogy basically in one go at some point, simply because I am certain aspects of the first and second books read completely differently when you have knowledge of where some parts of the plot are going. There are still many things the trilogy doesn't answer in the end, but I don't think that's a flaw of the books; it seems completely intentional and part of the point, really. So yes; my experience of the book was probably a B, but that's because my reading of it was a C.

Grade: A

Book 44: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

This book is basically what you get if you combine a space opera with the bureaucracy of the Byzantium Empire, and use that as a vehicle for examining how we build and tell and internalize the cultural stories of empires. It is full of court intrigue, with missing information in a much more literal sense than we often get from these kinds of stories. Our protagonist is the classic fish out of water, a new ambassador to the City from a small outpost, who is underprepared for this post and also has a secret she's trying to keep while navigating a world she doesn't quite know what to do with. But she's done the homework she's supposed to do; if anything, she's a fan of this empire, and has internalized so much of what it finds valuable. But she still exists outside of it, no matter how well she knows the ancient poetry. I really loved this book and the themes it explores, and how there are no easy answers for any of the questions it poses about culture.

Grade: A

Book 43: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

I liked this book! It's a fairly standard "school for children who are weird in ways that their parents don't understand but that's because it's MAGIC" set-up, but the reason the children are weird is because they've gone through doors to other worlds, lived in those worlds, and then came back to reality. Most of them aren't adjusting well! Most of them desperately want to return to their various fairylands! And meanwhile, people are getting murdered.

I enjoyed the set-up and the characters more than the plot of who the killer is, and finding them. Nancy, who is the new girl at the school and whose point of view we follow as we learn alongside her, is really interesting, and her friendship (and perhaps more) with a trans student named Kade is really lovely. The author doesn't make the fairylands the better versions of reality, either - Kade is rejected by the fairyland for being trans, rather than it being the only place he can be himself.

The book is the first in a series, but it's not one that made me immediately need more, in a good way - I thought this novella stood on its own.

Grade: B

Book 42: Burnout by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle," which gives the reader a pretty good sense of what kind of book it is. But unlike a lot of more classic self-help books, it actually acknowledges and references the systemic oppression and gendered expectations that so often lead to burnout in women (and non-binary people who are viewed by others as women). I read a lot of self-help in my early twenties, and stopped reading it in my late twenties when they didn't seem to make a difference other than to make me feel bad for failing in ways I hadn't even known I was before reading a book. But most self-help starts from the place of Personal Responsibility, the idea that if we just own our own emotions and reactions and so forth, we can overcome anything, no matter what the external obstacles may be. And that's a nice idea, kind of, in a world where we're not in control of the soup of misogyny and racism and homophobia and classism we live in and the way that all of those biases are built into our institutions and expectations of our personal relationships. But it's also gaslighting, and either incredibly naive or extremely manipulative to assert that we shouldn't be impacted by any of that. I found it extraordinarily affirming to have those issues actually addressed as real, and the chapters on the misogyny of burnout and where body image fits into that were both really affecting.

This book kind of splits the difference between being a book that examines the cultural conditions that allow for burnout, and a how-to guide for ways of processing our stress, identifying stressors we can control and ones we can't and formulating an approach to each, and doing the self-care that enables us to heal and live our purpose, not the catchphrase. I found it both really confronting and intuitive, and for once it was written by authors who felt like women I could know (or would want to know). There's a lot that rang true for me in terms of when I've felt the most satisfaction and fulfilled, and what I was doing for myself during those times, and it was also challenging in terms of pointing out that changing certain aspects of my life is long overdue, in both big ways and small. It also made me want to read two of the other books on my current list, Down Girl and Health at Every Size, both of which feel frightening to me for a variety of reasons. This year I've opened myself up to adding additional books to my reading list when I come across books that sound compelling, because I don't view reading as a chore but rather something I chose to do for a variety of reasons. And one of the results is how so many of the books I've read this year have been in communications with each other. This book in some ways is the practical version of How to Do Nothing, but I think it's more that they're approaching the same question of how to live a meaningful life from two very different angles. I recommend them both.

Grade: A 

Book 41: How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Ah, the irony of reading this book while feeling completely overwhelmed and like I wanted to do both nothing and everything (and therefore nothing) at once.

This book is about that phenomenon, and specifically the way the attention economy subsists off of our insatiable need to refresh and the reaction cycle of modern life. But it's a broader rumination on what it means to give our attention to something, and what we find there and how. It's a book that's deeply grounded in Oakland and the East Bay. It's not a prescription, or what I would consider to be a self-help book, but it is something of an invitation: an invitation to bring awareness to where we are, physically, and redirecting attention.

Honestly, I'm having a hard time writing about this book. So much of it is actually an examination of art, and public spaces, and the idea that people and societies need both public time and space to be able to live and think and breathe, and that when everything is optimized and each interaction can be viewed as a networking opportunity or a side hustle rather than simply a conversation they lose their actual inherent value of connection. It made me think a lot about why I value fandom and fanfic so much, both because it's a community that is built out of love and not capitalism, but also because when I engage with fandom online, on twitter and elsewhere, I know the context for my interactions. I'm not trying to project a constant all-encompassing expression of myself, the way Facebook wants my public facing posts to do; I'm not trying to tailor my comments for my family and my co-workers and my college friends and my childhood friends and my fandom friends all at once. There's that tweet that goes around asking "is your online self the same as your real life self," and the answer is always, always "well that depends on the context in which we meet in real life." If you saw me at work, probably not. If you saw me at a concert or a hockey game or a con, then almost certainly, because that's the context we know each other in online, too.

I think that's why, to the extent a social media fast or permanent flounce is appealing (and it can be), I've never seriously considered it, and not just because becoming Thoreau and leaving society behind (while still having my laundry delivered) isn't actually a morally just decision, in my opinion. I like the context of my social media, and while I do wish that it was completely non-commercialized, I also feel like my community has colonized the existing space and taken it over, in a way that a site like twitter deserved to have colonized.

What does any of this have to do with doing nothing? Well, it's less of a call to simplify, or retreat, or detox, and more of a call to do nothing by noticing more, by deepening the attention we do give. She describes how that has occurred for her, and what that looks like in her interactions with the world, but it isn't a to do list, which I both value and find frustrating, because of course it would be so much easier if there was just one single solution to any of this. But I found the actual reading of the book itself to be an example of it; I have read many of the books I've read this year while half paying attention to them, and for some of them that's an indication of how engaging I found the book itself, and for some it's me not reading them well. But I had to sit with this book, and grapple with it, and that focus I think, for me, was the point.

Grade: A  

Book 40: Damsel by Elana K. Arnold

This is a fairy tale about the damsel that is rescued in all of the stories, the one who's being held captive by a dragon and needs to be saved by a prince. The first chapter is told from the point of view of the prince, but as soon as he has defeated the dragon, the rest of the story is the damsel's perspective.

The damsel has no name at first. She is given a name (Ama) and clothes and most of all a purpose by her prince. She journeys back to his castle with him, the prerequisite he needed to be crowned king after his father's death. Ama remembers nothing before the moment she woke up in the prince's care, and learns what she needs to know in the castle from the queen mother, who was also a damsel, and her maidservants.

This book is good and interrogates the damsel story really well, and I liked Ama, but man. I just also didn't necessarily need to read another story about what the underlying reality of these sorts of tales are. The sexual violence that occurs in this book isn't gratuitous or without purpose, but I also spent most of the book just desperately reading on, hoping and hoping for Ama's escape and, preferably, vengeance. It satisfied me on that note, but left me feeling like I hadn't really needed to go through that in order to get there. 

Grade: B

Book 39: This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Boy I loved this book. I read it for my sci-fi/fantasy book club, and the title alone should give you a sense of what the story is. But honestly it was completely unlike anything I've read before, and yet deeply reflective, and man. I just loved it.

The story has a consistent structure throughout the book: Each chapter focuses on either Red or Blue, two agents on opposite sides of the time war. We start with Red, who has just triumphed and won her latest mission, but there's a letter she finds in the middle of her battlefield, incongruous among all the death. We watch her read the letter, and react, and then the end of the chapter is the text of the letter she's just received from Blue. The next chapter begins this pattern again, only from Blue's point of view. The two of them circle and chase each other throughout time, following each other's paths on the threads they weave and braid together, each of them attempting to accomplish some unnamed ultimate victory for their side of the time war, and delighting in their competition with one another.

All of this alone would be enough to make for an entertaining novella. But the language in this book is so beautiful, and so captivating, that it shouldn't be so surprising when you realize how much you care about Red and Blue, and how little you care about the ultimate victor in the time war itself. I finished reading it and wanted to start over again immediately, just to see how it had been done. A really wonderful read.

Grade: A

Book 38: I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum

This is a collection of essays and profiles written by a television critic, who came to her life as a critic via an abandoned English PhD and being a fan in the early days of internet fandom. She approaches television from the point of view of someone who had absorbed early on that television storytelling wasn't considered to be worthy of analysis and critique, and then pushed back against that. But she also rejects the idea that there is only some television worth analyzing and loving, television that is almost always male-focused and often bleak and cynical and mechanical in its violence: the antihero "not like the other guys" stories that didn't start with The Sopranos but certainly gained a cultural respectability via that show.

I enjoyed her pieces about shows that I watched and often loved (in particular her piece on Hannibal), but I also loved reading her thoughts on shows I haven't seen, because so much of her focus is on what television means to us, and how we can see what stories we're telling ourselves about reality through this particular medium. It wasn't always an easy read, both because there are essays that were written and published before and after the 2016 election, and also before and after Me Too in the fall of 2017, and obviously both of those events are still reverberating in our art and in our daily lives. She also takes a look at what it was to be a young girl who grew up being taught to focus on men, and men's lives, and valuing that perspective, and how it really did take something earth-shattering to fully examine the price that extracts. But at its heart, this is a book that deeply engages both with narrative and also why narratives matter to people, and there is nothing that matters as much to me as that. I really enjoyed this book, end to end.

Grade: A

Book 37: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Cordova

This is one of those YA urban fantasy books that I think I would have been really happy to read when I was a teenager, but that didn't do much for me beyond being an easy and enjoyable read as an adult. I don't think my opinion of it matters that much, though, simply because of that.

It's a classic YA urban fantasy set up: 16 year old girl is different from everyone else, doesn't want to be because of a secret she's kept since she was young, and in attempting to deny who she really is causes a huge mess and has to figure out how to fix it. The particulars aren't nearly as standard, though: Alex, the protagonist, is Latina, and her entire family has magic, so it's got a very different cultural grounding than most stories. And while there is a love triangle of sorts, Alex is in the middle, and a boy is on one side and a girl is on the other. All of these elements definitely engaged me more than a similar story without them would have, but I've read enough versions of this story before that those aspects of the novel didn't make it fresh enough for me to truly love. It's definitely a book that I'm going to buy a copy or two for my friend's GSA library though.

Grade: B

Book 36: Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Man, this book should be exactly my thing: a romance novel about Alex, the American First Son, falling in love with Henry, the youngest Prince of England, and navigating a new relationship while also trying to make sure his mother wins re-election. It should be a beautiful alternate universe version of current times that makes me wish we lived in that world. And instead, I spent the entire book simultaneously grumpy at how naive and dumb everyone in this version of Washington D.C. is and also outraged on Henry's behalf, since everyone in his life is monstrous and also he seems to have literally no agency whatsoever.

Obviously I am in the minority on all of this! It is extremely popular, and so clearly lots of people got something from this story that didn't work for me. But the whole book feels like it exists in too many alternate universes for it to really land anywhere for me at all. The England felt so completely fake to me, and I couldn't understand what this America even is: one where a divorced white woman whose children are half-Mexican American could be the President, and yet her son experiences his personal revelation about his sexuality in a way that felt much closer to 2008 than 2020. Obviously not everyone knows their sexual identity by the time they're 22, no matter how liberal their family or community is. But I didn't believe in the character of Alex at all. He's smart and charismatic and wants to change the world, but he also seems to have exactly one friend in his life and thinks of a guy from Harvard as being hopelessly privileged while attending Georgetown and being the son of a Senator and the fucking President. He's a classic romance novel character, but he's not grounded for me at all. I fundamentally did not believe his isolation or how little he considered how his behavior would impact his mother and himself. I ALSO didn't believe the specific kind of meltdown people had about the relationship once it was revealed. I am fine with secret romance, and obviously the relationship being gay would be more complicated and all that, but everyone treated it as being both far more serious and far less serious than a relationship between two non-elected officials would necessarily be.

(Also, the political machinations going on in the background were fucking nonsense and the sort of pretend version of politics that I might have had more time for four years ago but can tolerate even less now, sorry. Also also, the plot point involving the independent gay senator's past felt extremely bad to me!)

Henry is great! Henry and Alex is great! I believe the chemistry between the two of them! But I did not believe the version of England at all, and the fact that Alex's life just matters more, even though he is at this point only the 22 year old son of a politician and not a public figure in his own right, in the same way Henry is. You can either have a monarchy not really matter at all, in which case there's just no real conflict, or you have to actually examine how it does, and examine the stakes. Also, I'm not suggesting that the current day real life British monarch would be thrilled to have a gay prince. But he's not in line for the throne!!! There is no succession issue here. The only real issue Henry has is that everyone in his family is a fucking monster except for his sister, but not for any real REASON.

And finally, if you're going to write a romance novel about two dudes, can we have some actual sex scenes. This book attempts to fade to black without actually fading to black, so it's quite clear that they're fucking or exchanging blowjobs, but the sex is always talked around rather than shown, and it drove me crazy. Obviously different romance novels have different levels of explicitness, and that's fine, but it felt pretty out of character with how the sex scenes tended to begin. 

So yeah! Great set up, easy enough to read, some really decent side characters, but on the whole, a book that I like the idea of much much more than I enjoyed the actual book itself, sorry to say.

Grade: C

Book 35: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I read this book for my book club, but it had already been on my list because necromancer lesbians in space just sounded like something that I should read. And I enjoyed it, for the most part, but it didn't click for me the way it seems to have clicked for a lot of people, and I've been trying to figure out why that is since I finished it.

The basic set up is that there are these nine houses, and the leaders of each of them get called to solve a task in order to be chosen to ascend and serve the big high god, and if that sounds a bit vague it's because that's how a lot of the worldbuilding actually felt to me, like there was this huge system that I was supposed to be able to figure out but that felt extremely opaque. I may have needed to be a better reader, genuinely, but so much of it ended up being handwaved for me, because the only real point is our protagonist, Gideon, who is the champion for the leader from the Ninth House, Harrow. Gideon isn't supposed to be her champion; she's an indentured servant for the House who is in the middle of attempting to escape once again when Harrow essentially strong-arms her into being her champion and fighting for her while Harrow does the necromancy work.

I did really enjoy the dynamic between Gideon and Harrow, and the ending was satisfying and caught me by surprise and made a bunch of the build up worth it to me. But everyone from all of the other houses blended together for me, and the result was that the entire race/puzzle/challenge/mystery they were trying to solve just felt like a horror film where I knew that everyone except for the people who truly mattered would die, and none of those deaths really landed for me. I've seen some fan theories about where the series will go, and I think that I probably will end up reading the next book, because the character it focuses on is pretty interesting to me, but it didn't hook me the way I had hoped it would.

Also, I did find that Gideon's persona was more enjoyable as a lesbian than it would have been as a male character, where her chauvinism would have simply been standard and fairly boring. But I had been hoping for more, both in terms of more queerness (and what that even meant in this universe) and more originality as a character.

Grade: B 

Book 34: Fen by Daisy Johnson

I felt similarly about this book of short stories as I did about this one: well written, with a lot of interesting ideas, but nothing I ever felt like I could fully hook into. I like magical realism a lot, and the themes of many of the stories are compelling and ones I'm really interested in reading about, but I kept waiting and waiting to experience an emotional response, but it never really came. I wish very much that I liked this book more than I did.

Grade: C

Book 33: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

I went into this book expecting to like it, but man, it really left me reeling emotionally. I had read one of the essays in the book before I started it, a piece about growing up in Houston and attending a megachurch and the connection between the divine and the euphoria of club drug use, and it was extremely good and well written, but it also didn't feel all that relatable to my personal experience. It was a window into someone else's life, which I enjoyed, but was also able to maintain an emotional distance from. And boy was that not the case of every essay in this book!

The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.

The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.

There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.

Grade: A

Book 32: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

When I first read about this book, I knew that it sounded extremely familiar, and in fact it had originally been posted as an original work on Ao3 sometime in the last couple of years. It's a really lovely story incorporating the Green Man myth, someone who has survived in a Wood for centuries and is part of the forest himself. This particular telling also involves two gay love stories, one old and one new, and a fetching stranger who may know more than he initially lets on, and wood sprites and a secret and a reveal and final confrontation that I'm not entirely sure I completely understood, but I enjoyed it regardless. It is a quick read, something nice for a fall weekend afternoon in a cozy chair.

Grade: B