Book 3: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

This is a book that is simultaneously very, very well written and is culturally specific about details that I didn't even know would or could resonant with me as strongly as they would, while also not being the kind of story that I personally need or even especially want to read right now. I feel very conflicted!

The story is set in Montana in the early '90s, and begins just after Cameron's parents are killed in a car accident. One of her first reactions to this news is relief, because the big secret she's carrying around is that she and her female best friend have kissed, and now her parents will never know, and thank god. Cameron is three years older than I was during those years, and while I grew up in a very different area of the country, I definitely grew up in the same culture, both in terms of how her queerness interacted with the world and how she learned about what it meant to be a lesbian, and also in terms of what it generally felt like to be a teenager at that time, queer or straight. She has a summer girlfriend who's on a rival swim team, and that girlfriend teaches her about the specific counterculture that came out of the pacific northwest, and all I could think about was my personal equivalent of that girlfriend and how painfully real the whole thing felt.

"Painfully real" is probably a good way to describe the entire book, for me, even the second half which goes in a very different direction than my own life did (or that I expected the book to go; I essentially got spoiled for the second half by an article describing the movie version of this story, which impacted my reading of it quite a bit). I spent most of the book bracing myself for what might happen to her next, betrayal or violence or intense loneliness or loss of self. I don't want to get too deep into the plot, but I found the ending to be both deeply affecting and beautiful and right, and yet also not enough: it stops at precisely the correct moment for this coming of age story to end, but I was desperate to know how her life continues. I could only read it as an adult needing to know how she turned out, and in some ways I know too much about the specific ways things were hard for queer youth in the '90s to content myself with the idea that it would simply get better for her. I think it could--it did for me and many of my friends--but I really wanted the narrative to tell me how, and that's not an answer this novel was going to provide. It's the right ending for this story, but not for me, I think.

Grade: B

Book 2: Mr. Winterbourne's Christmas by Joanna Chambers

This is the sequel to Introducing Mr. Winterbourne, and it's the reason I read both of the books, and man I wish that this Christmas novella had hit the spot for me more!

The story picks up more or less where we left off, in that it's eighteen months later and Lysander has been living with and working for Adam during that whole time. But neither of them are certain of the other's feelings, Lysander because he doesn't know if Adam just likes having him work there and Adam because he doesn't know if Lysander feels obligated because he's technically his employer. The Earl invites Adam to join the Winterbourne family for the holidays, theoretically because he's the brother of the Earl's son-in-law but actually because he needs more money from him and wants Lysander to return home to manage the Winterbourne estate instead of the Freeman family. Add to this an old friend of Lysander who may have felt more for Lysander than he ever realized and some ill-advised kissing in the garden and there's a whole lot of plot but not very much in the way of stakes, because literally everything can be neatly solved by just having a conversation or two (and by being far less self-destructive and/or dumb when it comes to being obvious about your gay love affair). I still like Adam and Lysander quite a bit, and there's a clear next couple being lined up for any sequels, but I was hoping for more on the conflict front than 'I don't know how he feels because I refuse to have any conversation about feelings whatsoever.'

Grade: C

Book 1: Introducing Mr. Winterbourne by Joanna Chambers

The first book I read this year was really more of a novella, which I read entirely so that I could read its sequel, which is Christmas-themed. (Yes, I know it's January. I got very behind on all of my holiday-related tasks last year.) It is a sweet enough story on its own, though!

The titular Mr. Winterbourne is Lysander, the youngest son of an earl who has mismanaged the family estate and is now deeply in debt. Lysander's sister is engaged to the son of a wealthy mill owner, who can settle the family debts but is also not of their class. His father instructs Lysander to show Adam Freeman, the older brother of Lysander's sister's fiance, around London and essentially placate him.

Lysander is a delightful fop with secret depth, and Adam is a very nice rich man who nevertheless is constantly disrespected and so he doesn't attempt to hide his disdain for the aristocracy in turn. There's a delightful fencing bout between the two of them, and the resolution of Lysander becoming Adam's estate manager after his father refuses to allow Lysander to manage the Winterbourne estate is both satisfying and reasonably believable, in terms of giving them a permanent happy ending. A very nice little romance if you're not in the mood for much drama or angst.

Grade: B

2019 Master List

Hey, look at this! I'm posting my master list for the year and it's still January. Progress!

Last year I read 41 books, which didn't come close to the 96 books I had on my list, but was far more than the 12 I read in 2017. And this year I have 77 books on the to read list, so I am slowly but surely chipping away at this pile. My goal for this year is to read all of them, or about two books per week, with the understanding that I will inevitably acquire new books I also want to read and my book club should start up again in a couple of months and so getting that number up to 104 is pretty realistic. Especially since I already have 29 books in my 'want to read' tab on iBooks, which I haven't included in this list because I don't actually have those books yet. There's a lot out there to read! I also want to do three (possibly four) deliberate rereads: it's been almost three years (!) since I read the Lymond Chronicles for the first time, so I want to do that, and I want to reread all of Guy Gavriel Kay's books (especially since his new one is coming out in May), and I want to reread the Graceling series, and I possibly want to finish the Anne of Green Gables series and read her other books, too. Oh and I want to reread Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Depending on how fast I actually manage to read this year, those rereads may count toward the 104 or they may not. But below the cut are the new to me books I intend to read this year, with some of them becoming an annual tradition at this point.

Book 41: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer

This is a hard book for me to figure out how to write about! That will be (part of) my excuse for why it took me so long to actually write this post.

Authority is the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy that begins with Annihilation. I went into the second book having been slightly sort of spoiled for something because of a plot point that a book club member had seen on wikipedia and repeated before I said that I was planning to read the whole trilogy and so didn't want spoilers, but honestly I feel like having had any expectation for what the rest of the trilogy would be made the second book even more disorienting. After spending the entire first book with the biologist as our narrator, Authority is told from the perspective of a complete new character. John Rodriguez, who is identified as Control in much the same way that the biologist is simply the biologist, is the new director at Southern Reach, and he's been sent there in order to find out what happened during the biologist's expedition. Similarly to the first book, there are layers after layers of disorientation and unreliable narratives that slowly peel back, but unlike the first book one of the main (and most frustrating) obstacles is that of bureaucracy. I constantly wanted to just get to the part where I knew what was going on in a very different way than I did with the first book, because the mystery of the first book is inherent and the mystery of the second book felt man-made in a way that was infinitely more infuriating, to me.

It was fascinating to feel how defensive I was of the biologist whenever Control would attempt to speak with her; she was mine, even though the first book is careful to maintain a distance, and I felt like I knew the truth of her experience and Control never would, even though every narrator in these books, both internally and externally, has been the definition of unreliable. By the end of the book, however, it made me desperate to know what would be happening to and with both of them. I don't know if the final book of the trilogy will reframe how I see this book in the same way that this book changed how I think of the first one, but I'm definitely anxious to finally get to the front of the line of my library's hold list.

Grade: B

Book 40: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially.

This is the second related but not directly connected book of this kind by this author, a story based on fairy or folk tales that goes in a different direction than the original. As may be obvious from the title, the foundational myth for this book is Rumpelstiltskin, but it goes far beyond that.

The story revolves around the choices of three women whose lives become interwoven. Miryem is the daughter of the town moneylender in a village that ranges from suspicious of her Jewish family to outright violent toward them. Wanda is the daughter of a drunk man who can't pay off his debts to Miryem's father and so Wanda (and eventually her two brothers) come to work for and with Miryem. And Irina is the plain daughter of a duke who wants his child to marry as well as she can for his own benefit with no regard to her wishes, and eventually succeeds in marrying her to the tsar. Each of them is framed by their world in the context of the men in their lives, their fathers and brothers and prospective husbands. Each of them rejects this narrow view of them, although it's not possible for them to truly transcend their surroundings.

Miryem first spins silver by being able and willing to collect on the debts that her father could not, solidifying the family's welfare in an incredibly hostile world. When that no longer suffices, she discovers she can spin that silver into gold and satisfy the greater threat to all members of the village, the Staryk monsters who raid for gold.

I don't want to discuss much more of the actual plot, both because I don't want to spoil any of it but also because this book is as much about how it made me feel as it is about what actually happens. I read it in the fall before the weather had actually turned, but the entire story felt like winter, that cold crisp clear silence in the clearing of a forest after a snowfall. The pacing of the story meant that with only fifty and then twenty and then ten pages left I had no idea how everything would be resolved, and it turned out that the answer was with a dagger to my heart in the final two pages. I could have read many pages more of the story, but I didn't need them, because the emotions landed so strongly for me. I want to reread this and her earlier book Uprooted next year, to see how they feel when I know what happens (but may not remember precisely how). I loved this book and I love all three of these women and I have many, many feels about the world created and how fantastical it is while also being deeply, sometimes distressingly real.

Grade: A

Book 39: His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I actually read this book back in September and have had ‘write book blog post’ on my to do list every day since then for this and two other books, but I finally have some time while home for Christmas and I’m getting things done before the New Year, dammit. So let’s see if I remember what I thought about this book.

We chose this book for our book club, and I was really excited about it because I had read an article about it back when it first came out and loved the concept behind it. It’s a novel that’s told as a true crime book about a gruesome murder in mid-19th century Scotland, with the texts of the novel being the journal account of the crime as written by the murderer in jail, various newspaper accounts of the trial, the writings of an advocate and a researcher on poor peoples’ propensity to commit crimes and it being an indication of their inherently base nature, and autopsy reports of the victims. There’s never any doubt in the novel as to whether Roddie Macrae committed the murders, but the trial revolves around his mental state at the time, and the novel itself is more concerned with why he murdered them, and what it says about the lives of poor villagers in that era.

I really liked a lot of aspects of the novel; the various ‘primary sources’ were all well-written and distinctive and really hammered home how biased all points of view are, no matter how ‘truthful’ they may claim to be, and the way a reader’s opinion of the murders can change with each additional source is really compelling. I felt for Roddie and how he was essentially pushed into believing that murder was his best option in life, because so much was so unfair to him, and yet only one of the three victims could in any way be thought to deserve to die, and various inconsistencies among the accounts of what happened make it (intentionally) hard to fully believe his version. Mostly the book made me mad at the way that the poor in general but specifically poor women and children were treated by men and rich people and rich men most of all. The life of a male laborer or farmer in that era was pretty terrible by modern standards, but I found it hard to fully sympathize with Roddie or any of the men, mostly because I wanted to murder all of them on behalf of the women in their lives. Which either means that the book was completely successful in the way the author intended, or that I can’t read fiction without that as a lens these days. I wanted better for Roddie, but I also desperately wanted better of Roddie. That shouldn’t be that strange to desire of a murderer, but for me it was less about the fact that he killed people (or at least one of the people) and more because of how and why he killed the other two.

Grade: B