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 

Book 31: Range by David Epstein

This book absolutely blew me away. I first heard about it when the author was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, which interviews nonfiction writers about their careers and process and all that, and it's essentially taking a look at the argument for being a generalist vs. being a specialist.

The intro looks at and then kind of dismisses the ten thousand hours explanation of genius, where Tiger Woods is a brilliant golfer because he got in the necessary number of hours of practice in specialized, repeated drills when he was very young. The counterargument is Roger Federer, who played lots of different kinds of sports when he was a kid, and didn't focus on tennis to the exclusion of others until he was a teenager. But the broader, more applicable lesson is that broad, flexible learning is the thing that human brains are actually exceptionally good at, when compared with computers, and attempting to become experts via drills and rote learning actually just results in us being not very good robots instead of exceptional humans.

Every chapter explores this concept of breadth having a much greater value than people want to believe to be the case in a variety of settings, and I found the book to be both fascinating and extremely challenging and also a bit scary, because of how much the central argument of the book feels almost impossible to implement in academia or scientific research or policy development, to say nothing of individual lives. Also, the chapter on the women musicians of 17th and 18th century Venice alone is well worth reading. Just thinking about this book makes me want to re-read it.

Grade: A  

Book 30: Circe by Madeline Miller

Man, I loved this book. I read it for one of my book clubs, and it took a while for it to grow on me -- I found myself frustrated by the protagonist for the first hundred or so pages, and then once it hooked me I was really and truly hooked.

The central concept of the book is a retelling of various ancient Greek myths from the perspective of Circe, who is a minor character in The Odyssey and now takes central billing in this re-centering. I have never read The Odyssey, and most of my knowledge of Greek myths feels at best second-hand, although there is the argument that all knowledge of the myths don't exist from primary sources. But it meant that I have very little sense of exactly how transformative the book is or is not; my impression is that it's quite a leap, but I truly don't know. I loved what this journey is, though, and the way it made me think about the plays and poems I've read, and how many of them are translated and interpreted by men, and prioritize the male experience to the exclusion of basically everyone else.

Part of what I loved about this book was how the passage of time was experienced by a goddess, and how that contrasted with all mortals, and what that means for all the myths about the gods and their disputes. I came away from this book wanting to read Emily Miller's translation of The Odyssey, and to go back and reread the Greek plays and poems I read and only barely understood in college. If the story of a goddess who's framed as a witch in a story about a man but is centered as the protagonist in in this novel appeals to you, I would definitely recommend reading this.

Grade: A