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 14: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

 A book club book! And one which surprised me a lot, largely in how much I loved it.

This is the second book by Becky Chambers that I've read; the first one was fine, but didn't do much for me personally, and I had sort of expected that her work would remain in the category of "fiction that many people I know love, but that is not for me for whatever reason." But part of what's so nice about being in a book club is that sometimes I get nudged into giving an author or genre or whatever another chance, and in this case I could not be more delighted to have experienced this. 

This is a novella about a monk, who decides that the life they're living no longer works for them, and so they needs to make Big Changes and go out into the world. Do they have a plan? No. Do things immediately work out for them? No. Do they discover a previously unknown talent that makes it all worth it? No. But they get to live, and have an adventure, and go on a completely senseless roadtrip, and along the way they find what makes it worth it. 

The worldbuilding is wonderful, the relationships at the core of the story are so incredibly satisfying, and it's a story about reaching and searching that doesn't arrive at answers that are too easy, but it also doesn't punt on giving us answers the text implicitly promised us. I loved it and want to read it again immediately. 

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 11: Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

 A book club book! Another one of those where I managed to read the book but missed the actual book club, which is a shame because I think discussing it with others would have helped fix the story in my mind. I am writing this post about four months after I read it, and I had to read a review of it to remind myself of what the story was. But as soon as I did, I could feel the atmosphere of this story, one of loss and grief and of having something taken from a person and a people, under the guise of religion and moving on. 

Joan is First Nations in Ontario, someone who left her home and then came back with her husband Victor, the love of her life. When he disappears after an argument, he is presumed to either be dead or to have left her, but she never believes either. This is borne out when she sees her husband as part of a traveling revival, but her husband is no longer himself. The book is folklore and monsters combined with religion and colonizers, and at the heart of it is Joan's grief and her single-minded obsession with getting her husband back. It's a read that really centers you in her world and her grief, even when the POV shifts in incredibly disorienting and effective ways. Highly recommended. 

Grade: A 

Book 10: The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite

 Listen, are you in the mood for a delightful gay regency romance between a widow who now runs the family printing press with her grown son, and a woman beekeeper who is always just on the right side of polite society? Because if so, hop to it! This is a pleasure to read, a slowburn that's also a really lovely exploration of how queer people carved a space in the world for themselves long before the first stirrings of an open gay rights movement. Agatha is a classic older love interest who isn't sure what her place in the world is after the loss of her husband, and Penelope manages to both seem carefree while actually being incredibly thoughtful and clear-eyed about how her life is possible. A book that is a very nice way to spend an afternoon with something hot to drink. 

Grade: B