Book 16: Dearly Departed by Chip Pons

This book was mentioned on a newsletter as being a great m/m romance, and that was enough for me to request it on Libby! And there's so much in it that I like, and even more that I WANT to like, but. 

It's a classic grumpy-sunshine romance, where the grumpy is a funeral home director who always wears black and the sunshine is a florist, oh and also the funeral home director is literally Hades made mortal and the sunshine one is essentially Persephone only without the dubcon and so forth (but still with the grief!). Things I liked: great gay best friends for Levi (our Persephone), frank inclusions of bottoming prep including douching, and discussions of PrEP, and poppers appearing at a club, and in general these aren't queer men who exist as solo beacons in a straight world, they exist in a queer community in this decade. Now, would there be a gay club full of grinding men hooking up on the dancefloor in suburban New Jersey? Not in my experience, but they live in a Hallmark small town that's like every '90s show that has an inexplicable club in town. Call it Twin Peaks, call it Buffy, that's all fine. 

Things I liked less, or more to the point needed more of: this is one of those books where the concept is great, and a lot of the details are fun, but the actual feeling of the romance and them getting together just doesn't land for me. Part of it is that even with everything I liked above, they keep almost getting together physically and then waiting, waiting, waiting. And I love a slow burn, but there's a certain level of 'yes yes, one of you is literally a god who's been cast out, but what's the actual conflict' to the book. By the time they did finally kiss and then fuck for the first time, I felt like the story was done, and in fact we were only halfway through. 

This book also suffered from the thing where not only is it abundantly clear to the reader what the major issue each of the main characters is dealing with, they're also too aware of it. Bring back characters who have no self-awareness!!! It makes it all so pat and boring. 

Anyway! I don't regret reading it, even if I spent more time analyzing what did and didn't work and less time being swept away. 

Grade: B  

Book 14: Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

A book a friend mentioned in a group chat and I decided to see if the library had it, and indeed it did! A short novel about a woman in New Orleans and the absolute disaster of a man who she loves, that takes place in a hazy idea of then-contemporary day (the book was published in 1985). It depicts an idea of the white South that floats between eras; the first scene is at a wedding, and I thought it was in the 1920s, but then a passing reference made it clear it was post-WWII, so I thought maybe the early 1960s, and then there are enough other identifying objects that mean it can only be in the mid-1980s. But the lost in time, the gentile South, the Lost Cause of it all is such a key element of the novel that it might as well have been in 1927 in the days right before things came crashing down, just like 1985 was part of the yuppie days right before the post-Reagan recession. 

This is also the kind of book that introduces a small boy in a way where you can feel his incoming death and how that will unmoor everyone, but what will stick with me is how out of time the whole story feels. It longs for a time past and considers the South to be a completely different world from the rest of the country (and certainly the East), and maybe that's right. 

Grade: B

Book 13: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin

I started reading this book at the beginning of the year, before the first season of the show based on these novellas came out, but waited to read the second and third novellas until after. And that may have been a mistake, only because I enjoyed the versions of the characters on the show much more than I did the ones in the novellas. I was excited to read these because after reading GRRM's "history" of Fire and Blood I thought that I would probably enjoy his actual stories better than half-told wikipedia entries of a made-up history. And I was right, I did, but unfortunately I think I may have lost a bit of my taste for his style of writing at this point - I remember loving the ASOIAF books that I read, but I'm not sure if I still would if I went back to reread them now. I look forward to more stories of Dunk and Egg on my screen, but I hope that the creators of that show continue to adapt rather than transcribe his work for the series. 

Grade: B 

Book 12: Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce

A book club book that I didn't manage to read in time to participate, but wanted to read anyway. This is a novella that felt like it didn't get to the meat of the story until about 2/3rds of the way through it, and then I wanted more at that point. It's a story set in Reconstruction, in a magical realism world, about a young Black woman who accepts the responsibility of planning her aunt's funeral service. She longs to have freedom from her mother and from who her mother would have her marry, and there's a secret at the heart of why her mother and her aunt were estranged, and there's so much of interest here, but the pace of the story just didn't quite work for me - too slow to begin with, and then much too fast, when I would have loved more time. The world was really compelling, though, and the concept of easing a person's passing within the magical systems of this place was beautiful. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang

A bookclub book! Specifically a novella, and it's the sort of space scifi mystery type story that I'm so glad is the length that it is. This is both because it involves lots of different species and translation and beings moving through space in ways that my brain simply will not picture while I'm reading, and so there was a lot of me just letting certain descriptive elements wash over me rather than stressing about it all. And I'm glad I did, because boy does it eventually pack a real emotional punch. 

The very short narrative logline for this story is that there's this alien Ro who's a linguist, and his species has the ability to jump into a different species and observe their language and report back. He's kind of an anthropologist, and they're trying to figure out how to help this other species, and so he jumps and learns much more than he was expecting to, in a variety of ways. I don't actually want to say much more because, well, that's the story, but in many way it's more of a morality play than a full story, which made it an ideal bookclub book to discuss and the read itself went by fast enough and gave me a lot to think about. Not my favorite kind of book but very compelling! 

Grade: B

Book 8: Benefit by Siobhan Phillips

A book that made me realize how much a story set in the 2000s really is a period piece now. Which is fine! It's nice to know that I'm not alone in looking back at the decade of my twenties and reflecting on how it has shaped, oh, all of current American society. This one is also about the false promise of academia, which is a topic many many books out there tackle at the moment for obvious reasons, and about what it means to be a part of the elite culture and what it's built on. The chapters on the history and present day realities of sugar production really took my breath away, and the specific depiction of the main character's lesbian friend Greta and her marriage and child-rearing felt almost unbearably recognizable. It's extremely first novel-y, in that you can feel how many of the chapters could have been short stories, and they're explicitly playing with form and structure and tone so you're always aware of the shift, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way, especially because it fits the themes of the novel so well. I haven't been reading a ton of literary fiction these days, but this is one of the good ones. 

Grade: B

Book 6: Fall Into You by Dylan Morrison

Time for some vacation reads at a house in the woods! The first one is this extremely classic gay romance about a guy named Will who fled his parents' farm when he was 18 and never looked back, until his father died and left him a farm. When he returns, he meets Casey, who had been taking care of the apple farm for the final 6 years of Will's dad's life, and sparks fly! Is selling the farm to the real estate developer the right move? Was Will ever really happy living in the big city? I bet you know the answers to those questions, and as always, the fun is in the telling of it. I would have liked a bit more development of the romance between Will and Casey, but overall I really liked this story of someone finding the right version of home for them. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Sheep Calm and Merry On by Ashlyn Kane

This is a perfectly adequate Christmas romance novella in which two retired hockey players end up in a bit of a Canadian shack situation and realize that maybe they're meant to be together! It's cute but doesn't do anything more than what's on the tin, and even at a novella length still had to invent a reason for a second location/is he going to call me bit of drama. It's fine!

Grade: B

Book 4: The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray

Set in the dying days of World War I, two former public school boy friends find each other again while convalescing from the front. One has lost a leg, the other an arm, and they begin to rekindle the romance that never quite bloomed while they were at school together. 

I really loved so much of this - it's an era that I keep going back to, in part because the brutality of that war destroyed so much and never quite got dealt with. That's a bit of an issue with this novel, for me. I appreciated the lack of a quick fix for either of them, but I also wanted an ending and a resolution that presented at least a clearer way forward, if not a complete emotional and mental recovery for both of them. I don't entirely know how to do that beyond a magical cure for PTSD before anyone really knew what that was, but I felt more off-balance by the ending than I had hoped.

Grade: B

Reread: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

The last of my GGK rereads before I finally read his most recent two novels! This book is such a curious one - it takes place only fifty years prior to the events of Children of Earth and Sky, and it connects to them but in the kind of way where as soon as I finished this one I wanted to reread that one again, so I could better slot it all in. It's also curious in that it's deliberately to the side of major world events - the fall of Sarantium (aka Constantinople) and the remaking of the world's order, is out of focus while the almost petty citystate wars of Batiara (aka Italy) take center stage. This book takes a long time to fully immerse myself in the stakes of the story, and as soon as it does everyone is hit from the side by much more important developments. Which I suppose is reflective of living through the world in real time; I can formulate many reasons why a Canadian author might have written this in the aftermath of Trump's first election. It does however mean that it's the least sticky of all of GGK's novels for me, and while I had a lovely time becoming reacquainted with these characters, none of them burrowed deep into my chest as others have. It was still a remarkable book to finish while visiting Istanbul for the first time, however. 

Grade: B

Book 2: Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a gay romance novel that spans multiple decades and follows the romance of a soviet spy and an American spy who are partnered to solve a mystery of sorts and embark on a roadtrip across late 1950s America. It's both a charming romance in which both of them are hiding a secret (Gennady is supposed to be honey trapping Daniel, and Daniel has been demoted for having a gay affair with another FBI agent), and a look at how the closet hurts people's lives over many decades. I expected something different from this novel--less of a historical examination and more of a classic romance novel in which two characters decide their love requires them to risk it all--and it took me a bit to come around to the slower, more agonized love depicted. But maybe we need a slightly more honest version of this story right now. 

Grade: B

Book 43: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Final book club book of the year! A lovely little novella about a future version of California that has split off from the U.S., and the food service bots who form their own restaurant collective and build their own community of bots and humans. It's very sweet and enjoyable, with some fairly obvious but still effective allegories, and I enjoyed my time with it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 39: Katabasis by RF Kuang

A book club book! We've got dark oxbridge academia, we've got Dante, we've got two protagonists with Secrets and a Past, we've got a story that is kind of surprise set in the 1980s, we've got chalk logic arguments as a magical system - we've got so much! And yet, for me, this is something less than the sum of its parts. It's not bad, and the book certainly does the thing, and there are elements of the metaphor that really work for me (did you know that surviving grad school is like walking backwards out of hell, etc.). But it didn't really coalesce for me, and I confess that there's a certain level of fatigue for me in reading about a woman who's determined to not be like those other women who only complain about how hard it is to be a successful woman within patriarchy and then realizes that she's not actually immune to all the same bullshit. It's not bad, but I also couldn't stop myself from arguing with both the characters and the story as a whole.

Grade: B 

Book 30: Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially

I am fairly certain that I read about half of this book when it first came out, put it aside with the intention of returning to it, and then never did. And honestly, I understand why; it deals with a lot of very heavy stuff! Primarily but not entirely connected to the kidnapping and enslavement of West African people by European and colonial powers, with a whole bunch of dragon plague and death to boot. There's a seriousness and a reality to the narrative, and I both admire it and clearly didn't want to deal with it however many years ago I first tried it. 

It's an important book within the larger story of the series, though, and without it I think the series would have been taking the easy way out. The ending also demonstrates the great moral fortitude of both Temeraire and Laurence, especially the way that Laurence allows himself to be guided by his dragon, even when it goes against everything his own society has instilled in him. Very good but on the whole probably the book from this series I'm the least likely to reread outside of a full series reread. 

Grade: B  

Book 29: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

I read this after watching all of the show, and while I was very happy I did purely from a desire to see how books are adapted into television shows or movies, boy does the book suffer in comparison. I don't really think it's the book's fault, though, and I also don't know how the show would have hit me if I had seen it in the 2010's rather than watching it post-Covid, and I don't know how much the book's clear commentary on how 9/11 and the subsequent wars would have hit me differently in a time when I didn't know what was coming in later years. So many elements that probably played out as extreme satire or allegory just read as fact to me, and that's a weird place to be in! It did make me want to read other books by this author, though, who has a view into Gen X suburbia that I think is very interesting. 

Grade: B 

Book 24: Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

A story in a genre that already feels like a classic, even though it's really only been a thing for about twenty years at this point. We have two more or less enemies at a magical university, who end up thrown together via an illegal bond, and then they have to go on an adventure together to solve this problem and learn some important things about each other and correct misconceptions!! Is there attraction? You bet? Is there the most obvious set up of conflict and misunderstanding to lead into the sequel? Oh yes! Am I mad about any of this? Absolutely not. I personally like a bit more sexual tension and payoff in stories like this, but the fantasy worldbuilding is solid enough that the balance didn't make me mad, and I liked both of the leads quite a bit. Looking forward to the next one!

Grade: B

Book 19: The Book Censor's Library by Burthaina Al Eissa

A book club book! This is one of those books where I get what it's doing, and it's interesting enough, but it didn't quite pull together in the end to be something new or bigger, for me? Part of my reaction to that is definitely related to a fatigue regarding dystopia narratives--I am not completely opposed to them, but it takes a lot more for me to emotionally engage with them at the moment, and I really need to them to go someplace new or profound for the story to stick. This was an interesting parable about censorship and the ways books change us and why that's so dangerous to authoritarians, but it didn't ultimately hit, for me. A perfectly fine read, but not what I was hoping for.

Grade: B

Book 18: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

A book club book! This is a sci-fi space allegory about castes and what we tell ourselves when we create processes to lift up those who have been restricted. It's basically got a Snowpiercer vibe but about academia. It read a bit more like an intellectual exercise than a story, but I did enjoy it, and it should be a good discussion starter.

Grade: B

Book 16: A Gentleman's Gentleman by TJ Alexander

This was recommended by someone I follow on bluesky, and at first glance it looked like a standard (and delightful!) m/m regency romance novel. And while it certainly is that, it's got a bit more going on as well. 

Christopher is a reclusive lord who doesn't want to be an active part of Society because he's got a secret: he's trans. But in order to secure his family seat and inheritance, he must marry before he turns 25. Which means he has to go to London, and no gentleman would travel without his valet, the titular gentleman's gentleman. And that is how he meets James Harding, who is far better at being a valet than Christopher is at being a lord. 

About 85% of the way through the novel I got a bit worried about how the various conflicts and romances would be resolved, but I shouldn't have been concerned. The book manages to pave the way to a future that felt both of the time and like it would actually make all parties involved happy. The romance at the center didn't have quite enough longing and suspense to be an all-timer for me, but I had a lovely time reading this. 

Grade: B

Book 15: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

A book club book! This is a charming fable that felt like it was an old fairy tale that I had somehow never heard of before. There's a river that has two giant willows on either side of it, and a land called Arcadia north of those willows, and two sisters who are part of the family that has sung to the willows that enables the roots to create and build grammar. It's a bit metaphorical! The first twenty pages of this novella are basically entirely without characters and plot! But once it gets going, I found the story really lovely, and the liminal spaces it explored to be deeply meaningful. I did wonder whether this was a story that began as a short story and then got filled out a bit, because it felt like there was a lot that went unsaid, and I couldn't entirely tell whether that was a story choice and whether that was a function of the size of the story. But all in all, I enjoyed this quite a bit!

Grade: B