Book 33: Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

I went into this book expecting to like it, but man, it really left me reeling emotionally. I had read one of the essays in the book before I started it, a piece about growing up in Houston and attending a megachurch and the connection between the divine and the euphoria of club drug use, and it was extremely good and well written, but it also didn't feel all that relatable to my personal experience. It was a window into someone else's life, which I enjoyed, but was also able to maintain an emotional distance from. And boy was that not the case of every essay in this book!

The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.

The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.

There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.

Grade: A

Book 32: Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

When I first read about this book, I knew that it sounded extremely familiar, and in fact it had originally been posted as an original work on Ao3 sometime in the last couple of years. It's a really lovely story incorporating the Green Man myth, someone who has survived in a Wood for centuries and is part of the forest himself. This particular telling also involves two gay love stories, one old and one new, and a fetching stranger who may know more than he initially lets on, and wood sprites and a secret and a reveal and final confrontation that I'm not entirely sure I completely understood, but I enjoyed it regardless. It is a quick read, something nice for a fall weekend afternoon in a cozy chair.

Grade: B 

Book 31: Range by David Epstein

This book absolutely blew me away. I first heard about it when the author was interviewed on the Longform Podcast, which interviews nonfiction writers about their careers and process and all that, and it's essentially taking a look at the argument for being a generalist vs. being a specialist.

The intro looks at and then kind of dismisses the ten thousand hours explanation of genius, where Tiger Woods is a brilliant golfer because he got in the necessary number of hours of practice in specialized, repeated drills when he was very young. The counterargument is Roger Federer, who played lots of different kinds of sports when he was a kid, and didn't focus on tennis to the exclusion of others until he was a teenager. But the broader, more applicable lesson is that broad, flexible learning is the thing that human brains are actually exceptionally good at, when compared with computers, and attempting to become experts via drills and rote learning actually just results in us being not very good robots instead of exceptional humans.

Every chapter explores this concept of breadth having a much greater value than people want to believe to be the case in a variety of settings, and I found the book to be both fascinating and extremely challenging and also a bit scary, because of how much the central argument of the book feels almost impossible to implement in academia or scientific research or policy development, to say nothing of individual lives. Also, the chapter on the women musicians of 17th and 18th century Venice alone is well worth reading. Just thinking about this book makes me want to re-read it.

Grade: A  

Book 30: Circe by Madeline Miller

Man, I loved this book. I read it for one of my book clubs, and it took a while for it to grow on me -- I found myself frustrated by the protagonist for the first hundred or so pages, and then once it hooked me I was really and truly hooked.

The central concept of the book is a retelling of various ancient Greek myths from the perspective of Circe, who is a minor character in The Odyssey and now takes central billing in this re-centering. I have never read The Odyssey, and most of my knowledge of Greek myths feels at best second-hand, although there is the argument that all knowledge of the myths don't exist from primary sources. But it meant that I have very little sense of exactly how transformative the book is or is not; my impression is that it's quite a leap, but I truly don't know. I loved what this journey is, though, and the way it made me think about the plays and poems I've read, and how many of them are translated and interpreted by men, and prioritize the male experience to the exclusion of basically everyone else.

Part of what I loved about this book was how the passage of time was experienced by a goddess, and how that contrasted with all mortals, and what that means for all the myths about the gods and their disputes. I came away from this book wanting to read Emily Miller's translation of The Odyssey, and to go back and reread the Greek plays and poems I read and only barely understood in college. If the story of a goddess who's framed as a witch in a story about a man but is centered as the protagonist in in this novel appeals to you, I would definitely recommend reading this.

Grade: A 

Book 29: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another book club book! And another book that feels like it's in conversation with other stories I've consumed recently - The Raven Tower and Hadestown. This story of mythmaking and gods and the underworld takes place in Jazz Age Mexico, and focuses on the journey a young woman named Casiopea takes with Hun-Kame, a Mayan god of death, in order to free him from his brother's bindings. She is coerced into helping him when she opens the trunk her terrible grandfather kept locked in his bedroom and discovers his bones inside.

It's a story that is incredibly readable and that flows, even while exploring a cultural tradition and foundational myths that I knew very little of going into the story. I kept finding parallels to polytheistic traditions I have more familiarity with, but it also feels incredibly grounded in the specific time and place of the story. It made me want to learn more about both pre- and post-colonial Mexican history, but the book holds up on its own, even without a deeper knowledge. I really enjoyed both the POV of Casiopea and the authorial voice.

Grade: B  

Book 28: Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor

I read this right after finishing Just Kids, and while none of the book takes place in New York City, the entire book is informed by the title character's experience there in the early nineties, just after Robert Mapplethorpe's death and the end of that memoir. It was a clear thruline, although not intended, and Patti Smith is mentioned often, and so are so many other aspects of culture referenced throughout that memoir.

This book isn't a memoir, and can't be, really--Paul is a shapeshifter, whose primary form is that of a young gay man, but who shifts into the body of a lesbian in order to go to Michigan with his best friend, a dyke named Jane, and often shifts into whichever queer body he needs to inhabit to explore both himself and the world. The book takes us from Iowa to Michigan to his hometown in upstate New York to Provincetown in the winter and finally, of course, to San Francisco, with flashbacks to his time at Pride in New York City. And it takes us to every single version of queer identity and culture and sex that existed in 1993 America, with a clarity and knowledge that made me laugh out loud multiple times and marvel at things I had once known but forgotten, and yet could not hope to remember how I had learned of it for the first time. I haven't felt so known by a piece of queer culture since first hearing the song "Ring of Keys" (and now that I write that, it's obvious to me that how I know of so much of the culture depicted in this book is from Dykes to Watch Out For), and the book just hit a part of my heart that I didn't know I needed to have pinged: what it was to be queer through the nineties, even if the character Paul is about ten years older than I am.

Paul's gender identity and sexual behaviors are both fluid, as is his exploration of what kind of queer he's going to be, regardless of how he presents. It's such a fascinating use of magical realism, this depiction of someone who truly lives between worlds and genders and identities, always the outsider, always finding his way through a porous barrier. The sex is frequent and explicit and the sort that I almost can't believe is still shocking, except that of course it is, and every cultural reference (with the exception of one that is so egregious an error I almost have to believe that it's me misremembering rather than it being something that made it through editing, except that I know it's wrong) is so pitch perfect it felt almost disorienting to look up from the pages and still be in 2019. I don't miss the early nineties; I was in my early teens, and even beyond that, queer life in America is better now, no matter how rosy the glasses of nostalgia are. But in the same way that the music of your youth always sounds good to you in a way that music from no other era ever will, this book thrums a very specific chord that I will always respond to.

Grade: A

Book 27: Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a classic book of the past couple of years, in that I borrowed it to read for one of my book clubs, wasn't able to attend the meeting, but still finished the book after the meeting had already happened. Patti Smith is a musician and poet I knew of, but didn't actually know the work of; this book is a memoir of her lifelong relationship and friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work I was familiar with but whose life I knew little about.

The two of them met in the late sixties in a park in New York, and spent the next five years together living in artistic poverty together, first in Brooklyn (in my old neighborhood) and then in the village at the Chelsea Hotel and then a loft space, back when loft living in New York was actually how young and mostly broke artists lived. They were romantically and sexually involved during these years, even as Mapplethorpe's awareness and understanding of his sexuality came into focus, until they each found new partners and their relationship shifted into friendship and collaboration. 

I read this right after City of Girls, and it felt in so many ways like a continuation of the New York that was explored in that book, with neighborhoods and cultures that felt familiar but also completely cut off from my own experience. Both books have key scenes and moments that take place a block or two from places I go to frequently, and yet. There has been a serendipity in the order I've read books this past month, where one seems to inform the next one. I think of Mapplethorpe as being such a quintessentially queer artist that it was almost confronting to have his life told through the perspective of a straight person, even someone who by any reckoning was as close to him as anyone else during his adult life. But it was also a really fascinating exploration of how the counterculture of that era ran in opposition to so many norms, and on a purely personal level, it reaffirmed for me how extremely poorly I would have done as a starving artist in any era. 

Grade: A