Book 10: How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

When I put this book on hold at the library, it was with the optimistic belief that at some point in the future, I would be up for reading a memoir that deals with growing up in the south as a gay black boy being raised by a single mother with a heart condition. I had read Jones's work before, so I knew it would be written well, but also that is a lot to handle! But his light touch in exploring his past and his memories and what he did and what was done to him made it so easy to read, until it suddenly punched you right in the gut. It seemed to float until it landed, and you realized it had been on that trajectory the entire time, and you just didn't know.

So much of his experience discovering who he was as a queer man felt familiar to me, and part of that is in reading about someone coming of age when I did, too - the '90s are now a decade of self-reflection, of origin stories, and that lodged in my chest in a particular way. But of course, so many of his experiences don't reflect my own, and he teases them out and holds up a mirror to them all. I loved it.

Grade: A

Book 9: Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I feel like I have read this book instead of all of the mid-century books written by men about their terrible marriages to women, and I think that is the correct choice. But I'm still not entirely sure what I think about this book.

It is a classic book where the people feel real and yet I don't actually like any of them, or perhaps that's why they're so unlikable, because of how real they are. Toby is a 40 year old doctor separated from his wife Rachel, and it's a shock to the system to be reading books about 40 year olds getting divorced, because I am forty! These people are me, or could be! And yet they are not - they are people I know, though, and they are people who I could have become, and this is the sort of book, the sort of story, that makes me say oh thank god. Thank god I didn't decide to marry a man.

And yet, it's also a book that makes me grapple with how I have deliberately opted out of some things, without actually making a choice to opt in to others. The narrator for most of this book isn't Toby, or Rachel, it's one of Toby's oldest friends Elizabeth, who is also going through her own marriage and life struggles, the struggle of who she once was and who she is now and what she gave up along the way. And so we're getting the tale of Toby and Rachel's marriage from an outsider, but one who fundamentally sides with Toby, except for when she doesn't, when the narrator herself becomes a part of the story in a completely different way.

It's an impressive book, one that navigates these perspectives in ways that I both admire and was affected by, and by the end of the book, when we finally meet Rachel, it is like a shock to the system. And yet, while I recognize everyone in this book, I don't know that this is the story I want to be reading, or that I need to be reading. It is true without necessarily being right. And yet I've been thinking about it for a month. So maybe it was, after after.

Grade: B 

Book 8: Family of Origin by CJ Hauser

I read this book because I had read and loved an essay written by the author called The Crane Wife. This was the book that she had been researching as part of the trip described in the essay, and while I don't know what I was anticipating from the novel, it definitely wasn't what it was? But I still really enjoyed it.

It's hard to know how to describe the book - it's probably closest to magical realism, but it's also a book about family secrets, and about what secrets do to people, and about the taboos that people want desperately to violate, just to see that we can. It's also about a cult on a small island off the Gulf Coast of the U.S., and the sense of a world that has stopped moving forward and is instead falling backwards, and the appeal of an escape to a new world. It's about a woman whose father has died, a scientist who threw his life away after moving to this small island to do research, and who either killed himself or died in an accident, and the research he left behind. She goes there, extremely unwillingly, with her younger half-brother, someone she hadn't seen in ten years.

There's a tension in the writing between what the characters know, and what the reader does, and also what the characters don't know, and the reader suspects but cannot prove. I read the whole book on a train ride from Boston to New York, and I think it's a book that probably benefits from being read in one sitting: I felt contained by it, like the reality of the story was the only reality that was real, and yet completely impossible to understand.

Grade: B

Book 7: Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I didn't know if I was going to be able to read this. It's a memoir written by the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who got six months of jail time by a judge who didn't think he should be punished for a 'mistake.' I hadn't read the buzzfeed publication of her sentencing letter to the court, or looked for much information on the case beyond celebrating when the judge in the case was successfully removed by the voters in his county. But I felt like it was something that I wanted to read, if I was able to, and I'm so glad that I could.

The writing is beautiful, and painful, and shows how wide the gulf is between what you know before you're in the middle of a sexual assault trial, and what you know after: what you know about how the justice system works, and doesn't, and what you know about public opinion, and about having a voice, and living a life that's yours. It's the power of the repetition of how unfair our culture's expectations are for women, and their pasts, and what can be blamed on them, and the hypothetical future of the men, whose ruined futures are always referred to in a passive tense - his future was ruined - rather than an active - he ruined his future. A woman is raped, rather than a man raped someone.

It is a hard book to recommend, except that it's not, because it is beautiful and real and fairly devastating, and I hope very much to be able to read works by this author in the future. If there are other stories she wishes to tell, I want to hear them.

Grade: A

Book 6: Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner

This book is just me flinging my hands up in the air a la the "Well I GUESS" meme.

First, the good stuff: it's really readable! I remembered why I enjoyed Good in Bed and In Her Shoes back in the early-2000s! But man. Those books were denigrated as being 'chick lit,' which is unfair and sexist and all that, but I also spent most of this book feeling like it was written by someone who was out of her depth, honestly. It's a multi-decade story about two sisters, Jo and Bethie, and if those sound like familiar names for sisters, wait until you find out that Jo wanted to be a writer but then gave it up and got married to a man who didn't deserve her.

The story reads like a version of Forrest Gump that follows two Jewish sisters from Detroit who aren't right next to history the way Forrest was, but who experience every single cultural shift as if they are. It also felt a lot like The Heidi Chronicles, if the protagonists had literally no self-awareness and the dramatic irony was thick and never-ending. The sisters simultaneously experience everything terrible and have insanely good luck, which could just be the mark of it being fiction rather than history, but what it really felt like was that nothing had any real weight or true consequence. And that's before we get to the current modern day generation, where Jo's three daughters all fill these cardboard cutout roles as representatives of Millennials, and man. Everything is shoe-horned in here, and it did not come together for me at all. The more I think about it, the grumpier I get, honestly.

Grade: C

Book 5: The Deep by Rivers Solomon

A book club book! Well, novella really. This is a pretty fascinating transformative work - it's based on a rap piece by clippings., which in turn was inspired by the explanation behind a techno song by Drexciya. It is a mythology built around the idea of pregnant women who were enslaved and then thrown overboard when they died during the transatlantic crossing - what if those women's babies were born underwater, and created a new people? How would that culture cope with the trauma built into their origin, their history?

The story centers on a young wajinru named Yetu, who has the responsibility of remembering this trauma for all of the days of the year except for three, when during a ceremony she shares the history of her people with all of them. It is an enormous burden, and one that she suddenly decides she can no longer bear it. She leaves her people and goes to the surface, to an island, where she means a human woman who is also dealing with the memories of her people, the loss of a homeland, the struggle to find meaning in it all.

There were a lot of elements of this story that I liked, and I found the writing to be really compelling. It was a hard read, without easy answers, and I don't know exactly how I wanted the story to end, but I wanted it to be either more difficult or easier, somehow - I can't articulate what a better (for me) resolution would be, but I wanted it to land in a different way than it did. Still, I'm very glad I read it.

Grade: B

Book 4: The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

In most ways, this final book of the trilogy ticks all the boxes: it ties up the loose ends that were introduced in the first book and complicated in the second one, it gives the reader the reveals they were hoping for/expecting, and the romance that was the clear endgame since the beginning gets its happy ending in a way that feels earned.

I just wish that it had been somewhat more surprising. Part of me feels like that reaction is unfair; I'm an adult reading a YA fantasy trilogy, which means that there are a lot of tropes I'm much more familiar with than the target audience will be. But part of why I loved the first book of the trilogy so much was because it did surprise me at times, and I didn't always know how what I was anticipating would actually happen. Jude felt too unsuspecting at times in this book; the 'twist' felt like something that she could have at least considered at some point, even if she refused to believe it because of trust issues or whatever, and it meant that there was a weaker payoff for me when it was confirmed that the narrative was in fact going where I thought it would. Still enjoyable! A really good read for a winter day! But not quite what the first book of the trilogy had promised, at least for me.

Grade: B

Book 3: The Charioteer by Mary Renault

Before I started reading this book, I got confirmation that it wasn't a Tragic Gay book, that while it took place during WWII and therefore contains a lot of the hardships typical of a war story, it's not a book that ends poorly for our protagonist and others simply Because They're Gay. And I'm glad I did, both because I didn't actually want to read a tragic ending, but also because even with that assurance, the tension in the final couple of chapters was so much to deal with.

This book focuses on Laurie, a young man who was injured and now convalescing in the early days of WWII just post-Dunkirk at a military hospital in England. While at the hospital he meets Andrew, a Quaker and conscientious objector who is supporting the war effort by working at a hospital, and who many of the soldiers judge harshly for his choices. They have a relationship that is deeper and more romantic than a friendship, but which never crosses a line, a line that Andrew seems unwilling to ever acknowledge even exists.

Laurie is also reunited with Ralph, his Head Boy from his public school days, who had been expelled for a relationship he had with another boy at school. Ralph was also injured in the war while a captain on a ship, and they each struggle to cope with the permanence of their injuries. But unlike Laurie, who is isolated by his sexuality, he has a large community of mostly gay men for friends, which Laurie both desires and fears.

The book is in many ways a classic love triangle, but the choice Laurie has to make goes deeper than which man he wants to be with: it's which life he can imagine for himself, one that is contained and safer and emotionally satisfying, as long as it's kept within limits, or another that involves much greater risk and expression. It's a story that has stayed with me, one that I keep thinking about.

Grade: A 

Book 2: Find Me by Andre Aciman

First, a couple of disclaimers: I did not in fact read this entire book. I skipped the whole first section, because I had less than no interest in reading about Elio's dad finding love with a younger woman and having a child with her and any of that nonsense. I also read this book with an extreme level of detachment from it; while it is an actual official sequel to Call Me By Your Name written by the same author, I went into it determined to essentially treat it like I would any bit of fanfic, and certainly not necessarily my canon.

That second disclaimer was really important, because woo boy! This certainly is a book about characters who share the same names as the two main characters in CMBYN, and the breathless narrative voice matches or at least approximates the point of view in the original novel. But the question I kept asking myself over and over again was what the point of this sequel was. We encounter Elio again ten or fifteen years after the summer he spent with Oliver, and he is still lost amidst a romance with a much, much older man (the significance of the age difference is commented upon so many times it lost all meaning). And then the story loses the plot completely when it turns into a mystery about a Jewish musician lost to WWII and a song that was a confession of love hidden within a Jewish melody, and apparently this is a universe in which every single character's father had a great gay love, and now Elio's second significant lover also has a gay Jewish lover of his own, and Elio is still just pining for Oliver, and it is a mess.

The next section involves Oliver's life in academia, and specifically at Columbia in the mid-2000s when it was still just barely possible to have the sort of celebrated and financially rewarded life as a professor that post-war novels of the twentieth century were all obsessed with. He is also, of course, in a bizarre and typically loveless marriage, while also attempting to seduce a gay male friend and a straight female friend, but he too cannot manage to leave Elio behind.

These two vignettes about their lives aren't what I wish to imagine for these two characters post-CMBYN, but there is something at least recognizable about the depictions: you can see the progression of their lives, how they each could have gotten there from that summer, and you could even see how their memory of that summer could not possibly match the actual experience of it. If this was a novel about the formative relationships of our teens and early twenties never truly resembling our memories of them, that would be one thing. It wouldn't necessarily be the narrative thread I am most interested in following in my fiction, but I could at least understand it.

Instead, the final section of this (quite short) book reunites them in Italy, at Elio's parents' home (that now belongs only to his mother, following his father's death), showing that they in fact can go home again, apparently. It is the least earned and most perplexing end to this book and this overall narrative that I can imagine; nothing is rooted in any kind of reality, which is even more disappointing given that one of the true joys of CMBYN is how it reads like both a dream, completely ephemeral, all atmosphere and the memory of how a place and time smelled and tasted and felt, while also being utterly grounded in the physical realities of life, sometimes painfully so. It was only ever Elio's experience of events, which made them that much more concrete; there were no other perspectives to hide in, ever. The sequel gives us the worst kind of wish fulfillment, a fantasy of their life together in Italy, forever on vacation, adults playing at the memories of their youth while ignoring their real life children, among other responsibilities. And if that wasn't ghastly enough, the specter of Elio's half-brother, the inevitable result of his father's affair with a woman Elio's own age, a little boy named Oliver, truly puts the story over the top. The prose is still fluid and breathless, but the story leads you down a path of genuine nonsense.

Grade: C (but only because of approximately three passages from the Elio POV that still managed to take my breath away)

Book 1: The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre

A friend of mine mentioned reading this last year, and I put it on hold at the library without really wondering too much about what it would end up revealing. He said that it was an interesting look at how the Myers-Briggs test was created, and it certainly was that, but it's also a completely bonkers history of how personality as a concept was thought of from the early twentieth century all the way up until the 21st.

One of the major revelations of the book is that there is practically no scientific basis for any aspects of the test, or of the four major choices that determine whether you're an E or an I, a T or a P, and so on. The questionnaire was created and then revised repeatedly by a mother and then her daughter; the mother, Katherine Briggs, was initially interested in codifying a route to salvation, and then became completely obsessed with the theories of Carl Jung, whose teachings she adapted liberally for her personality indicator. She wrote stories about a Jungian character falling in love with another man, and their tragic fate, and practiced psychoanalysis without any formal training or knowledge beyond what she read in Jung's books on people she knew in her town. She also typed her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who brought the test to the government during WWII as a part of a training program for spies. It might have easily been lost forever after the war, but it managed to stay alive in various university testing settings for long enough to be resurrected in the 1970s, just in time for the cult of self-actualization courses, and from there it was a perfect fit for the kind of corporate culture matching and sorting.

Myers-Briggs now functions as a sort of scientific-feeling kind of horoscope, one that purports to illuminate aspects of yourself based on static personality traits that don't vary from test to test, or change with age or circumstance. It hold the same kind of appeal of a horoscope, though: an easy to obtain explanation for why you are the way you are, and who else is like you, and what sort of role your fundamental essence makes you ideal for. I found myself both completely appalled by the lack of substance this entire methodology was founded on, and bizarrely proud of these two women, who were upper middle class housewives married to professionals, who managed to create an entirely new belief system simply out of the strength of their own belief in it. And yet the test itself can be used to categorize and limit people in extremely crude and damaging ways, and was built upon fairly regressive beliefs about gender and race and class. I came away from the book feeling like I needed to reject it completely, and also extremely tempted to take the indicator one more time, just to be told who I actually am, by someone with no authority to do so.

Grade: A

2020 Master List

Well! As is an annual tradition at this point, I am here to announce that I did not read all of the books on my list last year. I did in fact read 49 books, which is more than the 41 I had read in 2018, and in general my reading habits reflect good things about how I'm doing: I'm able to focus well enough to read almost a book a week, on average, and I'm interested enough in narratives and histories and people to want to read in the first place. And since I started 2019 with 77 books on my To Read list, that must mean I'm starting 2020 with a goal of reading 28 books, right?

...there are slightly more books on my list than that. Almost a hundred. And the list by the end of the year will be closer to 160, since I add three books a month to my list without trying as a result of various book clubs. So yeah, I'm starting out at 125 /o\ But that's actually \o/ because I love reading, and I love that there are so many books out there I want to read, and I also love having a goal, even if it's one I have repeatedly failed to meet. There are about 35 books on this list that have been on my To Read list since at least 2016, the year I started this whole book blog, and I would really really love to actually get those read!!! It's been hard for me to actually tackle the backlog, though, in large part because this past year I also started really using the library hold system, which is an incredible enabler. I constantly have too many books checked out at any given time, as well as too many books on hold, but I also don't seem to be STOPPING, so oh well. I'm not really looking at changing this plan anytime soon, especially since this year I will need distractions badly for unknown reasons that I'm not going to dwell on here. 

I am also, for the first time in about five years, full swing in the throes of a major fandom passion, and I'm also playing a game on my Switch that demands a lot of time and attention, and I'm doing some traveling and will also be volunteering quite a bit as the year goes on, so like! Will I achieve my reading goal this year??? Probably not! But I am gonna give it my best shot, because what the fuck else am I gonna do.  

END OF YEAR UPDATE:

Well, I did not end up reading 125 books in 2020! But I DID read 84, which, given everything that 2020 was, I think is pretty impressive! I have carried over just about a hundred books to start off 2021 with, and we'll see how that goes. The list below is all of the books I did in fact read this year.