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