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.