Book 16: Dearly Departed by Chip Pons

This book was mentioned on a newsletter as being a great m/m romance, and that was enough for me to request it on Libby! And there's so much in it that I like, and even more that I WANT to like, but. 

It's a classic grumpy-sunshine romance, where the grumpy is a funeral home director who always wears black and the sunshine is a florist, oh and also the funeral home director is literally Hades made mortal and the sunshine one is essentially Persephone only without the dubcon and so forth (but still with the grief!). Things I liked: great gay best friends for Levi (our Persephone), frank inclusions of bottoming prep including douching, and discussions of PrEP, and poppers appearing at a club, and in general these aren't queer men who exist as solo beacons in a straight world, they exist in a queer community in this decade. Now, would there be a gay club full of grinding men hooking up on the dancefloor in suburban New Jersey? Not in my experience, but they live in a Hallmark small town that's like every '90s show that has an inexplicable club in town. Call it Twin Peaks, call it Buffy, that's all fine. 

Things I liked less, or more to the point needed more of: this is one of those books where the concept is great, and a lot of the details are fun, but the actual feeling of the romance and them getting together just doesn't land for me. Part of it is that even with everything I liked above, they keep almost getting together physically and then waiting, waiting, waiting. And I love a slow burn, but there's a certain level of 'yes yes, one of you is literally a god who's been cast out, but what's the actual conflict' to the book. By the time they did finally kiss and then fuck for the first time, I felt like the story was done, and in fact we were only halfway through. 

This book also suffered from the thing where not only is it abundantly clear to the reader what the major issue each of the main characters is dealing with, they're also too aware of it. Bring back characters who have no self-awareness!!! It makes it all so pat and boring. 

Anyway! I don't regret reading it, even if I spent more time analyzing what did and didn't work and less time being swept away. 

Grade: B  

Book 15: The Wolf at the Door by Charlie Adhara

This month I'm reading a lot of monster-type fantasy in honor of spooky season in between a bunch of nonfiction books I've been meaning to get to, and this is the first one I finished! It's...fine. One part werewolves are real and known and so there's a joint task force of sorts between human police and wolf law enforcement to investigate a string of murders that appear to be wolf-related up in Maine, and one part love story between the new partners who are leading a case together and don't get along! And listen, I've read a metric ton of The Sentinel fanfic, that's a setup that I'm really here for generally speaking. But because you know the genre is romance, you know they're getting together, and the pacing of all of the reveals feels way too slow and just off. It's okay to be a bit ahead of your pov character, but in this case the shoe drops so late for him that he feels much dumber than I think he's meant to be. Both the romance and the mystery at the heart of the story are fine, but this book took the long way to get there. 

Also, the lead character's names just felt wrong for him, I kept reading scenes with seventeen different cops in them and forgetting which one was our guy because the name was so incongruous for whatever reason. A minor complaint, but just one more way in which the book didn't fully hold me. There's a sequel, and I was hoping this would be a fun gay werewolf series for me to read, but unfortunately I think it's a one and done. 

Grade: C

Book 14: Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

A book a friend mentioned in a group chat and I decided to see if the library had it, and indeed it did! A short novel about a woman in New Orleans and the absolute disaster of a man who she loves, that takes place in a hazy idea of then-contemporary day (the book was published in 1985). It depicts an idea of the white South that floats between eras; the first scene is at a wedding, and I thought it was in the 1920s, but then a passing reference made it clear it was post-WWII, so I thought maybe the early 1960s, and then there are enough other identifying objects that mean it can only be in the mid-1980s. But the lost in time, the gentile South, the Lost Cause of it all is such a key element of the novel that it might as well have been in 1927 in the days right before things came crashing down, just like 1985 was part of the yuppie days right before the post-Reagan recession. 

This is also the kind of book that introduces a small boy in a way where you can feel his incoming death and how that will unmoor everyone, but what will stick with me is how out of time the whole story feels. It longs for a time past and considers the South to be a completely different world from the rest of the country (and certainly the East), and maybe that's right. 

Grade: B

Book 13: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin

I started reading this book at the beginning of the year, before the first season of the show based on these novellas came out, but waited to read the second and third novellas until after. And that may have been a mistake, only because I enjoyed the versions of the characters on the show much more than I did the ones in the novellas. I was excited to read these because after reading GRRM's "history" of Fire and Blood I thought that I would probably enjoy his actual stories better than half-told wikipedia entries of a made-up history. And I was right, I did, but unfortunately I think I may have lost a bit of my taste for his style of writing at this point - I remember loving the ASOIAF books that I read, but I'm not sure if I still would if I went back to reread them now. I look forward to more stories of Dunk and Egg on my screen, but I hope that the creators of that show continue to adapt rather than transcribe his work for the series. 

Grade: B 

Book 12: Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce

A book club book that I didn't manage to read in time to participate, but wanted to read anyway. This is a novella that felt like it didn't get to the meat of the story until about 2/3rds of the way through it, and then I wanted more at that point. It's a story set in Reconstruction, in a magical realism world, about a young Black woman who accepts the responsibility of planning her aunt's funeral service. She longs to have freedom from her mother and from who her mother would have her marry, and there's a secret at the heart of why her mother and her aunt were estranged, and there's so much of interest here, but the pace of the story just didn't quite work for me - too slow to begin with, and then much too fast, when I would have loved more time. The world was really compelling, though, and the concept of easing a person's passing within the magical systems of this place was beautiful. 

Grade: B

Book 11: The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang

A bookclub book! Specifically a novella, and it's the sort of space scifi mystery type story that I'm so glad is the length that it is. This is both because it involves lots of different species and translation and beings moving through space in ways that my brain simply will not picture while I'm reading, and so there was a lot of me just letting certain descriptive elements wash over me rather than stressing about it all. And I'm glad I did, because boy does it eventually pack a real emotional punch. 

The very short narrative logline for this story is that there's this alien Ro who's a linguist, and his species has the ability to jump into a different species and observe their language and report back. He's kind of an anthropologist, and they're trying to figure out how to help this other species, and so he jumps and learns much more than he was expecting to, in a variety of ways. I don't actually want to say much more because, well, that's the story, but in many way it's more of a morality play than a full story, which made it an ideal bookclub book to discuss and the read itself went by fast enough and gave me a lot to think about. Not my favorite kind of book but very compelling! 

Grade: B

Book 10: The Odyssey by Homer (Translated by Emily Wilson)

I had never read a translation of The Odyssey, and I decided I wanted to before seeing the Nolan adaptation this summer. I'm really glad I did, both because I think that knowing what Nolan chose to do with his adaptation adds to the experience of the movie, and because this translation is incredibly readable and powerful on its own. There is a confidence in using language based on meter more than lyricism, and the simplicity of the language is almost deceptive - this translation doesn't force you to struggle, which makes the impact of the events the language is describing greater at times. Wilson's work made me want to read a whole bunch more, especially her introduction, and that's a sure sign of me being affected by a book. 

Grade: A