myqueeryear

[myqueeryear]

I was about halfway through this before I realized I had inadvertently skipped the fourth book in the series. Oops! That would explain why I couldn't remember any of the major plot developments that kept getting referenced!

It's difficult to really review a book several volumes into a complex series, and even harder when you accidentally skipped the last one and finished this one several months ago. Instead, I might dodge and talk a little about why I didn't want to make this an "Own Voices" challenge. The idea was to read books by queer authors or queer characters. My first reason is simple and shallow – I like to read stories about other queer people, and the truth is I've read books by cishet authors about queer protagonist that I really enjoyed. My second is more serious – while I think the ideas behind "Own Voices" are important and useful, I have been disturbed by readers and reviewers making assumptions about authors' sexuality and gender. In recent years we have seen one author come out as bisexual and then get her dating and social media history scrutinized for evidence that she's lying, and another get forced out when it sounds like he was not done figuring out his gender or sexuality. Not to mention writers who have come out years into their career, or writers like CJ Cherryh whose public life doesn't easily fit into binary notions of out/in – in a lifetime relationship with another woman which was a fairly open secret, now married. I wanted to read a lot of different types of books and types of stories this year, and my hope is by making this yes/and – authors and characters – I can leave the door open to a lot of different experiences.

I have heard the Cherryh is an author who you are either gonna vibe with or you are really, really not. As some of you unfortunately know all too well, I vibed. Anyway this was full of the usual Cherryh content – deep cultural differences, a keen awareness of how power is displayed and leveraged, the fact that going into space changes you, the ways that trade and material survival are integral to history, trauma, altered consciousness, younger men being sexually exploited by older women, and weird syntax. The real joy of this book was finally getting Hilfy, a character we first met as an impulsive teenager, as our main POV character.

Just a note, I usually "read" these books on audiobook and find it really enhances my experience. The dialog is mostly aliens talking to other aliens in pidgin (and that's before we get to the weird syntax), and I usually read dialog fairly flatly so having a narrator deliver it really helps it come alive for me. Unfortunately, this book had a different narrator than the earlier ones in the series and she made some choices with what kind of accent she would do for some of the alien species that, regardless of intent, made me somewhat uncomfortable as a listener.

[myqueeryear]

I received an e-galley of this book through a Publishers Weekly giveaway.

This review will be short since, like this book, I do not have much to say.

While I don't want to be flippant, you probably already know everything that happens in this book. Weimar Berlin: doomed. Nazis: rising. Gays and Jews: persecuted. Love: real. This book doesn't go deep enough in its setting to take advantage of its richness or offer anything new, and its relatively pedestrian narrative is dragged down by some way too on-the-nose moments. The writing on the page is actually pretty strong, both dialog and internal narration – I really believed these were two people (successfully) flirting – and some of the panel layouts were creative and evocative. But between the shallow historical treatment and pedestrian narrative and characters, this is a book that doesn't really have anything new or even interesting to offer.

Finally, in the spirit of full disclosure I should let you know I read one "cheat" book – The Quiet Americans – because I had had it on hold before this project started. Not much to say about it except I was also underwhelmed by it and thought it was much weaker than Scott Anderson's last book, though I can't tell if he was softballing his analysis or I just had no patience for it.

[myqueeryear]

It seems ironic that a novel about a surrealist playwright ends up sinking into litfic banalities in the last act.

Cat was the next big thing in theater before the New York Times panned her Broadway debut. Now she’s in Los Angeles, crashing with her friend and his boyfriend who are on the verge of breaking up, hiding from her shame and the possibly the police. Struggling with what to do now, she is drawn into the orbit of a charismatic older filmmaker who is making a documentary about a group of teenage girls who formed their own fight club — and begins to wonder where the line between documentary making and manipulation is.

I really wanted to like this book more unreservedly. The way it deftly skewers the art scenes (theater and film) is a pleasure, and I loved its cast of genuinely complex female characters. We have younger women, older women, ambitious, angry, self-pitying, self-reliant, unreliable. I actually found Cat quite a sympathetic narrator, not because she was "likeable" but because she seemed like a real person. Plus, I have done my time with the Tara Jean Slaters of the world, so I felt her. I was very open to having a story about someone who has just briefly had and suddenly lost the life she always wanted and just doesn't know where to go. I think I found this title because it was up for the Lambda Award for bisexual fiction, and one of the most striking things about it was how it nailed a lot of those experiences. I found the way that Cat's relationship with a teenage lesbian character – not quite mentorship, but a recognition that Cat has some kind of responsibility to her – becomes one of her motivators both true to life and affecting.

One thing that sunk the LA plot for me as a reader was that while Carolyn is supposed to be charismatic even though Cat and the reader know she probably has less than pure motives, I found her to be obviously a vampire from the start and incredibly unpleasant to spend time around. So I was having to suspend my disbelief about Cat finding her compelling when I was just imagining with horror being stuck at a dinner party next to this woman. I also don’t know how you write a book about teenage girls, image-making, fame, and control without mentioning social media even once — if anything, I was wondering why, once they learned that “Female teenage fight club” was a narrative people would eat up, the girls didn’t just grab their iPhones and start filming it for themselves. And finally the last third of the book was extremely weak, less sharply observed, and fairly directionless. It felt like it was just killing time for the final scene, which was strong but by the time we got there I had tuned all the way out.

[myqueeryear]

PSA

Hi everybody, I know this blog has never operated on a strict schedule, but I wanted to post a warning that I may be particularly slow for the next 6 weeks. I have one review already in the pipeline but my life will be extremely busy until mid August, so I’m not sure what my opportunities to read or write will be.

[myqueeryear]

I was lucky enough to get an ARC of this, although obviously I finished it after the first print run came out.

Bad Gays is an excellent podcast, so I was really excited when I managed to grab this. For those who are not familiar, Bad Gays focuses on “evil and complicated” queer people from history. The podcast is structured as a conversation between the hosts, where they do a biographical sketch of the person’s life and discuss what larger issues, particularly related to queerness and different understandings of sexuality, we can draw from it. My somewhat dry description might be selling it short — this is really one of my favorite history podcasts and I’m always excited when there’s a new season.

The book is structured around the different ways we have understood same-sex sexuality, from a behavior to an identity, from Hadrian to the present. It’s about half material that was covered on the show and half new chapters. The new chapters are all very interesting and fairly strong — they include a chapter on Weimar Berlin that had some really interesting stuff about sexology research, Margaret Meade, and Yukio Mishima (at last). But unfortunately, I came away feeling like ultimately something was lost in the format transition. One of the things I really appreciate about the podcast is that the hosts are extremely fair, giving condemnation and sympathy when each are due and leaving a lot of room for nuance and humanity without sacrificing final judgement. The conversation format allows them to disagree and talk issues out, and they often end by discussing whether their subject is in fact bad or just complicated. The history of sexuality format gave the book structure but also constrained where the individual chapters could go, and I found some of the material actually less nuanced and considerate than the podcast episodes. It’s also published by Verso, so you know, be prepared for some leftist materialist historical analysis.

I was actually lucky enough to see one of the authors on the US leg of the book tour, and he mentioned that despite the podcast having a million downloads (and now a book), they are frequently told by media companies that young queer people simply aren’t interested in queer history. Personally I did already know a lot of the history of sexuality stuff that was included in this book, so I didn’t find that format particularly interesting, but I think for those who are not super-nerds who have been reading about this stuff for over a decade but are curious and want to learn, it could be a great entry. I would likewise recommend it to people who enjoy the podcast and want to read some new and interesting material from the authors. But the podcast is still, in my opinion, a stronger and more interesting project.

[myqueeryear]

I tend to see certain genres and certain foods as being similar. Don't order an ice cream sundae if you don't want marshmallow sauce and whipped cream on your ice cream*, and don't read a romance novel if you don't want big feelings, confessions of love, and a scene where there is only one bed.

This book delivered some really satisfying emotional hits, which is another way of saying it deliberately pressed my buttons and I loved it. I was really pleased that, unlike many authors who come from a certain background, this author sold me on the characters immediately. The side characters were also stronger and more memorable than in a lot of romances – in fact, if the author wanted to turn this into a series and do a romance featuring any of the female characters (or even Agent Rakal? Think about it, Maxwell!) I would be delighted. I liked the fact that we had protagonists who are somewhere in their mid to late 20s (I presume), as well as the fact that the author established there was a mutual physical connection before teasing us for most of the rest of the book with the get-together. The last romance novel I read spent so much time assuring the reader they deeply mutually respected each other I started to wonder whether they were actually into each other, but I digress. But I was for sure in the mood to sigh in sympathy and gasp in shock, which it delivered.

You notice I refer to this as a romance novel, because the "space politics" part of the plot is extremely weak. In general Winter's Orbit is best when it focuses on personal feelings and things the characters directly experience, and less good when it focuses on the interstellar stuff and revelations via received information. The interplanetary/intercultural stuff worked well, but the galactic stakes never felt real, possibly because they weren't well integrated into the personal-stakes plot. At one point I found myself thinking "This is no CJ Cherryh" – but then again, what is.

Everina Maxwell has another book coming out later this year and I'll be excited to see how she evolves as a writer.

On a side note, I know this novel has caught some heat for the way it handled gender expression. Personally I didn't think it was trying to imply this was a superior way of handling things, especially since we hear about the different ways of expressing gender through characters feeling frustrated with the way another culture does it. I also wondered if it might be an attempt at addressing the criticisms of another, much more popular recent space opera, which IMO made several mistakes beginning by implying characters can tell multiple genders, uncoupled from assigned sex, apart but not telling us how.

*if you prefer chocolate sauce I don't want to hear about it

[myqueeryear]

Everybody Else is Perfect by Gabrielle Korn

I found myself thinking of this book as a sandwich – two bland parts holding an incredible center. After reading the introduction I nearly decided to put it down, since I personally see fashion (press included) as one of world's most infamously brutal and misogynistic industries, and reading about someone who entered into it and found it misogynistic and brutal seemed like a "dog bites man" article. But I didn't want to wuss out on my first book of the year, plus I was curious. Nylon has no cultural pull for me so "editor in chief of Nylon" wasn't a draw it itself, but even I have noticed that over the last ~10 years the scope of who gets to be fashionable in the mainstream press has expanded tremendously, and I was curious to hear from someone who was part of making that happen.

This is more a personal essay collection than a memoir, and like all personal essay collections some are stronger than others. One that I derisively thought of as the sexual harassment/Obama to Trump transition/blue jeans chapter particularly devolved into platitudes and didn’t really tie everything together by the end. And I wasn’t able to put my skepticism about the fashion and beauty industry aside enough to stop wondering if she was sometimes using irregular verbs – I use my women’s studies and activist background to bring important representation to the fashion industry, you co-opt feminist and social justice rhetoric for clout.

I really enjoy anything set in a hyperspecific subculture with lots of detail, so I did actually like the fashion industry sections of the book – if anything, I would have liked more stories about what exactly she was doing all day. There's a publishing industry story in here as well, although it gets dialed down partway through. Still, having worked in periodicals at various times in my life I enjoyed hearing what it was like on the other end of the production chain. Korn frequently refers to what I presume are well-known figures obliquely, and a reader who's more in tune with the fashion industry than I am would probably have a lot of fun spotting the designers/bloggers/media people she's talking about. But my lack of knowledge also meant I held a seed of skepticism for many of her claims about the effect Nylon had on the industry, since I was very aware that if she was overstating her claims I would have no way of knowing. I also got tired of her stopping to make a disclaimer that of course, she is a white, thin, conventionally attractive woman — by the middle of the book, the reader knows that*. In general this book has a problem with repetition, something that can happen when an author is used to writing short, individual pieces (like personal essays, or online magazine articles) but should have been tightened up during editing.

But I do love to hear people’s stories, and fortunately Korn is strongest and most interesting in the middle chapters when she tells hers. Her experiences with being a lesbian in fashion, a world that is famously (straight) female and gay (male) were fascinating – the way that she could at various times be tokenized, fetishized, dismissed, and othered. Another interesting thing, from a queer perspective, was that she was in a legally-committed relationship (domestic partnership) during most of her 20s and ended up being single and dating when she was older, which is both a reversal of the expected script and a relatively new type of queer experience. And the heart of the book were the chapters where she talked about her experience with disordered eating. Pushing for body positivity and expanded beauty standards while ruthlessly punishing her own body for its perceived imperfections. Being convinced that she was only desirable with a low weight and hard body – while not being attracted to that body type in other women. And finally trying to get in recovery while working in an industry where everybody is controlling and judging their food intake and weight – while wrapping it in the language of empowerment and self-love. These were extremely rich – sharply observed, self-reflective, and not only helped me understand her experience with ED but also changed the way I think about it.

Verdict: Borrow it.

*I would also add that she is rather affluent, although this is mentioned leas frequently.

[myqueeryear]

A Quick May Recap

Just in case you want a baseline of what I'm already reading.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu – My boss asked "How's Interior Chinatown treating you?" and I responded "When it hits, it really hits."

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich – There is a reason Erdrich is one of the greatest living English-language novelists. I have been dreading the onslaught of Pandemic Novels but this was sharply and subtly observed and among other things, really captured the precarious and strange feeling of being an essential worker.

Men At Arms: Lawrence and the Arab Revolts 1914-1918 by David Nicoll – As an Osprey book, it's packed with details and absolutely no explanation for anything but great for photos and drawings of guys in outfits.

A Snake Lies Waiting by Jin Yong – I actually "read" these on audiobook and Daniel York Loh's reading is really transcendent, adding emotional depths that I never would have read into the text on my own. That said I felt like this installment was a bit of a mixed bag, sometimes very thrilling and sometimes meandering.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing – Speaking of meandering. Conceptually ambitious, but more interested in observations and questions than arguments and answers, so make your peace before starting. I have a few chapters to go still.

Metro by Magdy el Shafee – Love the thematic stuff about how a megacity can also be a cage, but I'm ambivalent on the art/panel flow so this might end up being a DNF for me.

[myqueeryear]

A Year of Queer Books

Welcome to My Queer Year, where I will read only books by/about queer people for a year.

Earlier this month I was looking for a list of recent nonfiction titles by queer authors for a Pride display at my work. Not being full of ideas I just googled "queer book list 2022" and... wow, there's a lot. I found myself scrolling through lists thinking "Forget a month, you could spend a whole year on this."

And then I thought, "Well, why don't I?"

I decided my year would be June 2022-June 2023, because June is next month and I'm excited for this now, but also because it would make it a Queer Year in both senses of the term. But beyond that I wanted to get going as soon as possible, while I was still excited about something.

The truth is that the accumulated stress of the last two years has had a really deleterious effect on my concentration and ability to read, as well as my being able to organize and articulate my thoughts and just general engagement with life. When I have read, it's been mostly my comfort zone of nonfiction about my niche interests, science fiction, and spy novels. Getting Covid this spring did not help things. Furthermore, unlike most people my age I absolutely hate having an opinion online and have only gotten more avoidant as I get older. So it seemed like this would be a project that wouldn't just address several of these problems, but that I was actually excited for.

I'm going to be reading mostly recent titles or books that were already on my TBR at the library, which is extremely long. In preparation for this month I went through and weeded most of the ineligible titles out. I read a lot of nonfiction by journalists and academics, a category of people who don't usually have their personal life/identity as part of their promotional bios, but I was curious how many of those titles were eligible so now my Google history includes phrases like "Frank Dikötter gay."

While I was working I came up with a few rules.

Adult titles only, not because I don't think books for younger readers can't be interesting (I specifically enjoy middle grade), but because I'm at the point in my life when I'm more interested in stories that don't involve coming of age themes and I think that especially queer YA already gets plenty of attention online.

No schedule or required number of books. This isn't a 50 book challenge. Part of the point of this was to read for fun, and I don't respond well to pressure.

Exceptions will be made for books I already had on hold at the library, books I already started and haven't finished yet (a category that's way too large), books that are time-sensitive (aka current events nonfiction), and books someone else lends me or asks me to read.

And finally as you may have noticed, this isn't an ownvoices challenge so I will be reading some queer authors with non-queer subjects, and some non-queer authors with queer subjects.