Book 10: How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

When I put this book on hold at the library, it was with the optimistic belief that at some point in the future, I would be up for reading a memoir that deals with growing up in the south as a gay black boy being raised by a single mother with a heart condition. I had read Jones's work before, so I knew it would be written well, but also that is a lot to handle! But his light touch in exploring his past and his memories and what he did and what was done to him made it so easy to read, until it suddenly punched you right in the gut. It seemed to float until it landed, and you realized it had been on that trajectory the entire time, and you just didn't know.

So much of his experience discovering who he was as a queer man felt familiar to me, and part of that is in reading about someone coming of age when I did, too - the '90s are now a decade of self-reflection, of origin stories, and that lodged in my chest in a particular way. But of course, so many of his experiences don't reflect my own, and he teases them out and holds up a mirror to them all. I loved it.

Grade: A

Book 9: Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I feel like I have read this book instead of all of the mid-century books written by men about their terrible marriages to women, and I think that is the correct choice. But I'm still not entirely sure what I think about this book.

It is a classic book where the people feel real and yet I don't actually like any of them, or perhaps that's why they're so unlikable, because of how real they are. Toby is a 40 year old doctor separated from his wife Rachel, and it's a shock to the system to be reading books about 40 year olds getting divorced, because I am forty! These people are me, or could be! And yet they are not - they are people I know, though, and they are people who I could have become, and this is the sort of book, the sort of story, that makes me say oh thank god. Thank god I didn't decide to marry a man.

And yet, it's also a book that makes me grapple with how I have deliberately opted out of some things, without actually making a choice to opt in to others. The narrator for most of this book isn't Toby, or Rachel, it's one of Toby's oldest friends Elizabeth, who is also going through her own marriage and life struggles, the struggle of who she once was and who she is now and what she gave up along the way. And so we're getting the tale of Toby and Rachel's marriage from an outsider, but one who fundamentally sides with Toby, except for when she doesn't, when the narrator herself becomes a part of the story in a completely different way.

It's an impressive book, one that navigates these perspectives in ways that I both admire and was affected by, and by the end of the book, when we finally meet Rachel, it is like a shock to the system. And yet, while I recognize everyone in this book, I don't know that this is the story I want to be reading, or that I need to be reading. It is true without necessarily being right. And yet I've been thinking about it for a month. So maybe it was, after after.

Grade: B 

Book 8: Family of Origin by CJ Hauser

I read this book because I had read and loved an essay written by the author called The Crane Wife. This was the book that she had been researching as part of the trip described in the essay, and while I don't know what I was anticipating from the novel, it definitely wasn't what it was? But I still really enjoyed it.

It's hard to know how to describe the book - it's probably closest to magical realism, but it's also a book about family secrets, and about what secrets do to people, and about the taboos that people want desperately to violate, just to see that we can. It's also about a cult on a small island off the Gulf Coast of the U.S., and the sense of a world that has stopped moving forward and is instead falling backwards, and the appeal of an escape to a new world. It's about a woman whose father has died, a scientist who threw his life away after moving to this small island to do research, and who either killed himself or died in an accident, and the research he left behind. She goes there, extremely unwillingly, with her younger half-brother, someone she hadn't seen in ten years.

There's a tension in the writing between what the characters know, and what the reader does, and also what the characters don't know, and the reader suspects but cannot prove. I read the whole book on a train ride from Boston to New York, and I think it's a book that probably benefits from being read in one sitting: I felt contained by it, like the reality of the story was the only reality that was real, and yet completely impossible to understand.

Grade: B

Book 7: Know My Name by Chanel Miller

I didn't know if I was going to be able to read this. It's a memoir written by the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who got six months of jail time by a judge who didn't think he should be punished for a 'mistake.' I hadn't read the buzzfeed publication of her sentencing letter to the court, or looked for much information on the case beyond celebrating when the judge in the case was successfully removed by the voters in his county. But I felt like it was something that I wanted to read, if I was able to, and I'm so glad that I could.

The writing is beautiful, and painful, and shows how wide the gulf is between what you know before you're in the middle of a sexual assault trial, and what you know after: what you know about how the justice system works, and doesn't, and what you know about public opinion, and about having a voice, and living a life that's yours. It's the power of the repetition of how unfair our culture's expectations are for women, and their pasts, and what can be blamed on them, and the hypothetical future of the men, whose ruined futures are always referred to in a passive tense - his future was ruined - rather than an active - he ruined his future. A woman is raped, rather than a man raped someone.

It is a hard book to recommend, except that it's not, because it is beautiful and real and fairly devastating, and I hope very much to be able to read works by this author in the future. If there are other stories she wishes to tell, I want to hear them.

Grade: A

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