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 16: Nimona by ND Stevenson

My sister wants to show me the movie version of this and had also given me the graphic novel last Christmas, so it was finally time! This was a fascinating example of me having a sense of what the story was about and discovering that I was incorrect, but not being mad about it. I thought it was about a girl with two dads, and instead it's about a monster who adopts a supervillain and has to deal with his arch nemesis. Those two ideas overlap, for sure, but I think part of the joy and revelation in this book is where the story goes versus where you think it will. Anyway Nimona is right and everyone should know it!!

Grade: A  

Book 33: Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a lovely queer Beauty and the Beast retelling, in which the standard beauty's father ends up in the cursed house with the beast instead. It's set during the early days of WWII on the south coast of England, and the beast in this instance is actually a dragon. There's not much more to say about the plot than that; if you know the original fairytale, the queer version of it is fairly straightforward, but the writing is brisk and draws you in, and the ending satisfies. A good read for a cold evening under a blanket. 

Grade: B

Book 18: Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen

A queer mystery set at a mansion! This book is pitched as "Knives Out with a queer historical twist," which was enough to make me interested. I have to say that I went in expecting a different historical setting; rather than the turn of the 20th century Edwardian backdrop, we were in the Bay Area in the early 1950s. Our protagonist is Andy, a former San Francisco detective who was fired in disgrace when he was caught with his pants down in a gay bar raid. Before he can drink himself to death, he's hired by a mysterious and wealthy woman named Pearl who wants him to investigate whether her wife Irene died tragically or was in fact murdered. Pearl and Irene lived together on a large estate in Marin County with a whole cast of queer family members and staff, and Andy needs to figure out who might have wanted Irene dead and why. 

This was an enjoyable, fast read and certainly fits the "country house murder but gay" genre, but I think I may have gone in with slightly too high expectations, or possibly just hopes for a slightly different book. One of the themes of the story is how the closet acts as a cage, and we see the impact that had on Andy while he was a closeted and then exposed cop. But we also see how living in a house where everyone knows who you are can make it difficult to survive outside of that house, no matter how beautiful it is. I think I was hoping for a lighter gay mystery novel, but once I realized what kind of story it was, I really enjoyed it. I'm already adding the sequel coming out this fall to my reading list, sigh (one step forward, two steps back, as always). 

Grade: B 

Book 15: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma

Well, it's the start of February and I finally read the winter Solstice book I bought in December! Not bad. 

This is a queer, poly, multi-faith book about magic and love and family. It starts with Layla hearing that her boyfriend Meraud is missing from Nat, who is Meraud's other partner. Meraud is a wizard who has practiced a risky kind of magic, and is now stuck and hidden in an in between state, neither alive nor dead. The only way to find him and bring him back is for Layla and Nat, as his beloveds, to work together and follow the breadcrumbs to him. 

It's essentially an enemies-to-family story, where the relationship we see develop and deepen is between these two people who have nothing in common other than Meraud. At times Meraud feels more like a mcguffin than a character, but what Layla and Nat (and the other people in their separate lives) go through in order to bring him back is compelling enough that I didn't mind, in the end. A lovely, quick story to read with a mug of tea. 

Grade: B

Book 24: In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan

Another portal fantasy! And another book I have owned for a very long time and kept waiting for the "right time" to read, for some reason, even though I have read many other things by this author that I've enjoyed. And shockingly, I enjoyed this one, too!

Elliot is thirteen when he first crosses over into the Borderlands, and discovers that in this magical portal land, there's a training camp where everyone either learns how to fight or how to engage in diplomacy. But no one is actually very interested in using diplomacy as a means of resolving disputes among humans and elves and trolls and banshees and mermaids and so forth, at least not before he arrived. He also immediately falls in love with a beautiful elf named Serene, and in hate with a beautiful boy named Luke Sunborn, who comes from a famous family of warriors. And then it's adventures and battles and multiple romances and misunderstandings and family of origin woes and found family woes and comings out and pining and, of course, a unicorn sighting. It is a delight, in other words, though I think the pacing could have been tightened up a bit in the second half of the novel, but even when things seemed to go on a bit longer than they actually needed to, I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A 

Book 14: Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

Well, I clearly needed a change of pace in my reading, and this is definitely a lighter book than what I've been reading recently! It's a book club book, and for once I've managed to finish it well before we're meeting. This is partly because the entire story is told through Slack conversations in various channels of a PR firm, which makes it an extremely quick read. It centers on Gerard, who one day discovers that he has somehow become disconnected from his physical body and now only exists in Slack.

Luckily (?) for him, he's still able to do his job fully remotely, and since he no longer needs sleep or can do anything else, his productivity has skyrocketed. He's helped by Pradeep, one of his co-workers, who helps keep his body alive while he's stuck in Slack, and the slackbot, who shows him how to explore all of the channels and is generally quite helpful and also slightly creepy. It is a fun exploration of how communication happens online and I really enjoyed it.

Grade: B   

Book 8: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

Boy, this book really fucked me up! Which isn't exactly unexpected, it's the final novel in a trilogy about WWI, so it's not a surprise that an anti-war novel would affect me like this. But it took me a long time to get through the final hundred pages, because I dreaded what was coming so much. 

This third book is about the process of Billy Prior preparing to go back to France at the end of the summer in 1918, intercut with Dr. River's memories of his childhood and family friendship with Charles Dodgson and his experiences studying death rituals in Melanesia. The narrative follows Billy back to France, using diary entries and a letter home as well as prose to tell the story of the final months of the war. He was assigned to the same unit as Wilfred Owen, who I knew just enough about as a historical figure to know that my dread was warranted. 

While Billy and the troops are at war, bored for 23 hours a day and then terrified for the other one, Dr. Rivers continues to work with injured men and contemplate his own role in the entire endeavor. Billy leaves his now-fiancée to head back to the front and loves and misses her desperately, while also sating his constant need with men and women when he can. And while I was prepared for more death and destruction caused by war, I was somehow not expecting the first appearance of the influenza pandemic, which was harder to deal with at the moment for obvious reasons. There's a lot to this book, and this trilogy, and it makes me want to both reread the whole series and to read all of the war poetry of this era and just a whole lot of history about this war and what led to it, but first I think I'm going to take a break and read some romance novels or something, because boy.  

Grade: A 

Book 1: The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

 The first book of the year! And boy, it kind of did me in. It's the second book in the Regeneration trilogy, and I think I may actually like it even better than the first one. But that may be because I have a better understanding of who these characters are now, rather than the inherent quality, and either way reading the second book made me want to immediately reread the first one. 

Part of what made this book hit so hard is that the focus is narrower; the protagonist is very clearly Billy Prior, who we follow through most of the novel. He's left the hospital for shellshocked soldiers and is now working for the Office of Munitions in London, helping the government spy on the pacifist movement. He's also having quite a bit of sex, some of it with a man named Charles Manning, who's an upper class officer out of the war with a leg wound. Another reason why I immediately liked this book is definitely that it's gay in a very different way than the first one. Pat Barker writes about bodies and how they fit together with such simple yet visceral language, and using that for both sex of all varieties as well as war violence as well as medical treatments is so effective. There's a common thread there that feels so grounded, which matches the character of Prior. He's grounded in his body, but his mind is split - he disassociates and blacks out, repeatedly, which also gives the book something of a mystery feel. 

Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. Rivers both come back as well, Sassoon after he's wounded in France. And he's also split, between what he told himself in order to accept going back and what the reality was. Dr. Rivers is also coming apart, even as he patches each of them back together. 

The women in this novel are also wonderful: Prior's girlfriend Sarah, who he only gets two days with, and two women from his childhood who are both convicted on trumped up charges of anti-war behavior. The book captures the division between civilian life and the front beautifully, and you see how unworkable the fracture was, what the people back at home had to believe, or else the only thing they could do was work against the war effort. But of course, from Prior's point of view, that didn't help any of the boys in France, either. 

I believe the first book in the trilogy was either the final novel assigned in a literature course I took, but we never got there in the syllabus, or it was required reading for a class I wanted to take but wasn't able to. Either way, I regret not having had the opportunity to study these books; there's so much in them that I actually want to be able to take the time with them and discuss them with others. But this will have to do. Onto the final one next. 

Grade: A

Book 16: Regeneration by Pat Barker

A book I have owned forever! I genuinely have no memory of why I decided I needed to buy this, but it has the permanently affixed used book price sticker from my college bookstore, so I have owned it for at least...twenty years. And after finally reading it, I can say: it is very good! 

This is set during World War I in Scotland, at the mental hospital where soldiers and officers are sent when their bodies are well enough to fight but their minds are not. The focus is on fictionalized portrayals of a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who has been hospitalized for his pacifist views, and Wilfred Owens, a young man who experienced significant shell shock and also begins to write about it with Sassoon's encouragement, as well as a number of fictional characters. It is bracing and infuriating and also it had a really strong resonance for me today; the feeling of being stuck in something terrible and also so much larger than yourself that there's so little you can actually do about any of it is quite familiar! It's a book that I think I would have enjoyed if I had read it when I was in my early twenties, but I don't think I would have gotten the same punch from it. Or maybe I would have: that was just when the U.S. was about to invade Afghanistan, an invasion that has lasted for almost as long as I've owned this book. 

This is the first in a trilogy, and my hope is to read the second and third books at the start of 2022. Here's hoping. 

Grade: A

Book 15: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Another book club book! A huge percentage of the books I managed to read this year have been book club books, but I've also enjoyed the majority of them, so that's great. And this one was definitely worth reading for any reason. 

This book starts out with a young girl in a family with her father and older brother, trying to survive a famine in a setting reminiscent of 14th century China. When her father and brother both die, she assumes her brother's name (Zhu Chongba) and even more importantly, his foretold destiny. She then goes to a monastery, causes some trouble and makes a friend, and eventually finds herself in the center of, well, everything. 

There's also one of the most fucked up king and lionheart relationships I've ever read, a delightful mistrusted brother figure whose skills aren't valued, and a queer marriage that is somehow straight, lesbian, trans and none of the above, all at once. The political machinations are intense, and it's a harsh world and story that isn't in any way grimdark. It ends at a firm conclusion, but the sequel is going to break apart everything again, and I can't wait. 

Grade: A 

Book 13: Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

 If you are looking for a lovely queer women historical novella, with a nice bit of mystery and magical realism, all set within San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1940s, then boy do I have a book for you. 

The novella starts out with a framing story that it took me a little bit to get into, but once I realized it was only the present day prologue to the main events which took place in the past, I sank into it. And by the end I loved it even more. It's a story about the community of queer people in San Francisco, and the kinds of lives they were able to create to exist as themselves, and it's also about magic, both metaphorical and literal. I don't really want to give away more of the plot than that because of how it slips through your fingers, but it's a love story and it's about taking big chances in order to be how you want to be, and I loved it. 

Grade: A

Book 12: One Life by Megan Rapinoe

 Well! I can't exactly say why I didn't read a single book for over four months this year, but that's what happened. I finally started to get a bit back into reading in August, but I'm still trying to re-establish a habit. Fingers crossed. 

I did enjoy this quite a bit - it's a fairly classic ghost-written autobiography about a public figure I know a lot about, but there was a lot of background fleshing out of various public events that I hadn't known about. And I also just appreciated both Rapinoe laying out her philosophy on public service and being an activist and what it required of her, and fun confirmation of various pieces of soccer gossip that I always suspected (she and Abby Wambach were totally dating!) but had never known for sure. There's not much more to it than that, at least not for someone who's been following her career and personal celebrity for a decade at this point, but it was an enjoyable read. It definitely made me appreciate more her experience between the 2016 Olympics and the 2019 World Cup, and how much she risked and how easily it could have all gone very differently. 

Grade: B

Book 9: The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy

 This is a Tor novella that is part of a LGBTQ story anthology. I...liked it? Sort of? It's got a Hannibal-esque horror feeling to me, with certain other elements of like myth and gutterpunks and a vaguely post-apocalyptic vibe, but none of the story really stuck with me, and I never felt like I had a good grasp on the protagonist. One of those "I am sure that this story is really for someone, but that someone is not me" books. 

Grade: B

Book 75: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

 I bought this book basically knowing one and a half things about it: that it's gay and set in a vaguely historical setting. And both of those are true! The setting feels roughly like a Mediterranean/North African culture, and the main character is Aqib, the youngest son of a man who manages a menagerie for the court, and who lost a lot of status when he married Aqib's mother. For complicated reasons, the whole family depends on Aqib, who is beautiful and effeminate, to marry a high born woman and allow the entire family to rise in society again. But this becomes very complicated for Aqib when he meets Lucrio, a captain who is stationed in their city, and who Aqib falls deeply in love with the first night they meet. 

The structure of this book is really interesting, as is the way that language is used to distinguish the characters and their worlds, and the overall narrative thrust. I began to get quite worried about how the story would end, because you want Aqib and Lucrio to choose each other so much, but there is a lot that leads you to believe one or both of them may not. I really liked where it took us, although I could have done with even more focus on the love story, in some ways. A really lovely read, and an interesting follow up to Haunting in a lot of ways. 

Grade: B 

Book 69: We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

This is one of those books that I took out from the library after hearing about it...somewhere, probably because it's gay and YA (or close) and well, that is how I roll. And it was both of those things, but it's also about grief and trying to figure out who you are when your link to your past is suddenly gone, and the space between what you've been told and what's the truth grows wider and wider. 

It's also a book about an unreliable narrator, and telling a story with tension so you keep reading it in order to find out what the Thing was, why we're in the place in the present that the story is about, and it's extremely well-done and effective, but also the structure felt stronger to me than the actual story at times. I did desperately want to know how Marin had ended up where she was (alone, a freshman in college with no family and nothing tethering her to anything), but the explanation felt both too big and also not big enough, somehow. It was hard for me to not poke holes in it, which isn't a great way to go into a story. 

Still, the language was beautiful, and the specificity of her college town and life in the Mission back in San Francisco both rang extremely true for me. I just wanted a bit more oomph from the eventual reveal. 

Grade: B

Book 62: Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

 A retelling of Cinderella where the fairy tale is all a lie and the kingdom has been suffering as a result for two hundred years. There's still an annual ball where young ladies are paraded out so they can be chosen, and it's all very bad, and there's one girl named Sophie who wants to escape (and bring her girlfriend with her), but she can't! At least not until she meets a girl named Constance who is also determined to bring the king down, along with the whole kingdom. 

I wanted to like this book more than I did; it's a fairy tale retelling with a queer protagonist about overthrowing patriarchal authoritarianism. But the telling itself never really grabbed me, and the shift from her relationship with Erin to her new relationship with Constance didn't really work for me. The overall world and final reveal was pretty interesting, so I was glad I finished it to find that out, but overall it's more of a miss for me. 

Grade: C 

Book 55: You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson

What a charming book! This is for me pretty much the platonic ideal of a contemporary YA story about a young queer Black girl just trying to make it through high school and find enough money to go to her dream college. In this particular case, Liz goes to school in Indiana, where the prom every spring is the biggest event in town, and being crowned King or Queen is worth a ten thousand dollar scholarship. And so she has to enter, even though she's a bit of a wallflower and this means she'll have to spend time with her former best friend Jordan, the most popular kid on the football team.

There's a great friends group with constant teenage angst, and a fantastic queer love interest named Mack who loves the same band she does, and a really interesting and complicated family life, and it's just a really nice read where you never worry too much about whether it'll all turn out okay, and the stakes are real and mistakes and choices matter, but nothing is life-ending. I really enjoyed it and can't wait to buy it for a GSA library.

Grade: B

Book 45: Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

A book club book that I've read more than 2 hours in advance of the event! What an accomplishment. Part of why that was possible is because this is a novella and a very quick read, but the other reason why is that it is a lovely read. The story takes place in a vaguely defined dystopia that feels like the Wild Wild West of Westwood, but it is explained that petrol and other modern day technologies are reserved for "the war effort." The main narrative focuses on Esther, who has stowed away from her town in the Southwest after her lover Beatrice was hanged. She joins the Librarians, who are responsible for delivery the approved literature to all the various towns, but of course are doing much more undercover. It's a lovely little story about someone who thinks their life has ended finding her people and a purpose, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 39: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Man. I understand why this book got great reviews and won awards, etc.--it is solid literary fiction, about Chicago during the mid-'80s AIDS crisis, plus a contemporary plot, so it's got the back and forth narrative structure of uncertainty and discovery that those sorts of plots create, and the characters are interesting and are neither so good that they don't feel like real people nor so horrible that you don't want them to be real people, but I kept reading it thinking 'well I guess if you've never read Tony Kushner or Larry Kramer or Michael Cunningham this might be really affecting.' Which is both unfair but also not, in my view; I am not entirely sure what the perspective of a straight white woman writing a fictional work about this time added, frankly.

And that goes double for the contemporary piece of the narrative, which I did not care about at all. If it was trying to explore the way trauma affects the survivors of a plague, it didn't land for me, and if it wasn't doing that then I have even less understanding of the point.

The story isn't a direct comparison with Angels in America, but the main couple has enough of Prior and Louis in them that when Yale, the Prior of this story, gets the virus in perhaps the most contrived narrative in the whole story, it feels like a bait and switch to me: you thought he was going to improbably dodge it, and now he's going to get it in the most stupid way possible. And it's not that people didn't either get it when statistically it was very likely, or get it when they probably shouldn't, but it felt like the work of a story, to spare him from the expected transmission and then pull the rug out from the reader. And because it goes to the present day, you have a feeling he can't survive from the beginning, but part of the strength of something like Angels in America is in Prior making it to the end. It's important to have works that really dig into the hole left in our culture by the entire generation of gay and bisexual men who died, but that wasn't what this felt like, either. It's a story about reality that offended me in what it decided to create to tell it as fiction. I am sure others felt differently, but I don't know what I was supposed to take from this story.

Grade: C