Book 47: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Hey so this here book is good!

I read it after having seen the miniseries version of Good Omens over the summer, and I spent the first two episodes attempting and failing to figure out if I had actually read the book back when I was a kid and it was on my brothers' bookshelves, or if it was like the Lord of the Rings: one I had seen so often it felt like I must have read it, but in fact never had. I did determine eventually that I hadn't read it; while a lot of the miniseries felt familiar to me, it was in that cultural osmosis sort of way, and not in the 'oh I read this a long long time ago' way.

It was also familiar in a 'oh, this is like a Douglas Adams book written by a couple of other people' way. There is a sensibility and wackiness in it that is just quintessentially a certain kind of British, where as an American you read about a thing and you can't quite tell if it's a gag in a book or if it's just something that reads that way and is actually thought of as entirely normal in the UK. But anyway! The book reads like the miniseries feels, which makes sense, given Gaiman's involvement in the miniseries. There are a couple of aspects of the book that did not age well at all, and which feel remarkably out of place, since on the whole the book holds up pretty well. But that didn't impact my enjoyment of reading it. Honestly, my main feeling when reading it was thinking over and over again what a successful adaptation it made. But the book itself is still worth reading, even so.

Grade: A 

Book 46: Honestly, We Meant Well by Grant Ginder

So I found out about this book after reading the instant classic twitter thread about a gay dude who, when he was a teenager in the '90s, created a folder of pictures of hot dudes called Beefcake on the family computer and, when asked about it by his dad, blamed his MOM. (His eventual coming out to them was not exactly a surprise.) I went to his bio and when I saw that he was an author I decided to read one of his books, and I enjoyed it!

This is kind of a classic beach read, in some ways - it's light and a bit frothy and there's a whole lot of drama but the stakes of all of the drama is never particularly high. It's about a classics professor and her family, a husband who cheated on her a year ago but has promised he's reformed, and their son, who just graduated from college and is feeling completely unmoored. She gets the chance to go back for the summer to the small island in Greece where she spent a year as a college student herself all those years ago, and when her husband and son join her there, all of them begin to discover their various interwoven secrets.

I really enjoyed this book, even though I found all of the characters to be extremely frustrating at times - this is not a story that allows people's bad behavior to go unchallenged, which is good, but it also at times becomes exhausting that basically no one is without seriously questionable behavior. However, in the end the people you want to succeed the most do, and the people who you most want to see receive their comeuppance do, and all of the characters feel extraordinarily recognizable (which may be why they feel as frustrating as they do - they are exactly as stupid as people are in reality). Sometimes you just want to read a novel where the writer really knows what they're doing, and this is definitely that.

Grade: B

Book 45: Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

I read this book badly. I took too long between sections, and I also ended up having to wait for almost a year for it to come in at the library, and I think that the disjointed way I read it impacted how much I felt the revelations in this third book of the trilogy.

Having said all of that, I really liked this book. It was similar to the first two in that there were things you thought you sort of understood, and then you were given more information or just a different perspective of the same information, and it totally changed how you viewed it. Also, the lighthouse keeper is one of my favorite characters in the entire series, and he made me have a lot of feelings.

I feel like it might be worth it for me to go back and reread the entire trilogy basically in one go at some point, simply because I am certain aspects of the first and second books read completely differently when you have knowledge of where some parts of the plot are going. There are still many things the trilogy doesn't answer in the end, but I don't think that's a flaw of the books; it seems completely intentional and part of the point, really. So yes; my experience of the book was probably a B, but that's because my reading of it was a C.

Grade: A

Book 44: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

This book is basically what you get if you combine a space opera with the bureaucracy of the Byzantium Empire, and use that as a vehicle for examining how we build and tell and internalize the cultural stories of empires. It is full of court intrigue, with missing information in a much more literal sense than we often get from these kinds of stories. Our protagonist is the classic fish out of water, a new ambassador to the City from a small outpost, who is underprepared for this post and also has a secret she's trying to keep while navigating a world she doesn't quite know what to do with. But she's done the homework she's supposed to do; if anything, she's a fan of this empire, and has internalized so much of what it finds valuable. But she still exists outside of it, no matter how well she knows the ancient poetry. I really loved this book and the themes it explores, and how there are no easy answers for any of the questions it poses about culture.

Grade: A

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