#the way john grady cole is a realized alan strang

[cheekedupwhiteboy]

All the Pretty Horses vs Equus

[cadencekismet]

My best of 2017

I was just going to do this in my journal, but I like to recommend books and this gives me a way to do so without pushing my recommendations on people who aren’t looking for them.

(I’m sorry. If I knew how to put things under a read more thing, I would. My tumblr skills are still appallingly basic)

I do have to start with my three favorite TV shows/movies I watched this year though. (And I’m still really mad that Sherlock can’t make this list.) 

1. London Spy - This was heartbreakingly good. I recently was talking with a friend about depressing movies/TV Shows, and this was the one that trumped all the others, but it’s so GOOD that that doesn’t even matter. The understated music, the attention to detail, the fantastic actors, even the weirdness of the plot... It was a pleasure to watch.

2. Pride - The one about coal miners and queer people, not the other one that I haven’t seen yet. It was so much fun to watch this movie. It was smart and funny and real and I’ve been recommending it to all of my queer friends and a lot of my straight people too. SO. GOOD.

3. Yuri on Ice - I’m still... not certain how I feel about this one. I love it, obviously. Phichit and Yurio alone put it on this list. But some things got overly simplified, so that I can read a headcanon or a fic with a dark and manipulative Victor who stays removed and follow it up with one about how devoted Victor is to Yuri and how depressed he was before he met Yuri and they both ring true.

As for books, in no particular order except that which I read them in...

1. The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, which I think I’ve raved about here before. Basically we’ve got a radical lesbian POC accountant trying to work against the Not-the-British-Empire and starting and ending rebellions with her accounting. Name one piece of this that’s not fantastic. Go on, I dare you.

2. Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges. I’m cheating a little bit here. I still haven’t finished it. But every time I go back to it, I feel like I’m picking up an old friend. It’s not just that Alan Turing comes to life in the pages, although he does, nor that Andrew Hodges’ prose is sly and explains strange concepts well, which it is and does. It’s not even that the book is so much better than the movie that I wonder if anyone involved with The Imitation Game actually read the book. It’s the sort of book that takes a devoted fiction reader who almost never reads non-fiction for more than a couple hundred pages at a time and drags me in so that I can’t quite decide to give up on it.

3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. This book is brilliant. I know I’m about four years behind everyone else, but she’s brilliant, it’s brilliant. The prose sparkles. The characters pop off the page. And she does this thing, where she’ll refer to Cromwell as ‘he’ when I’m expecting a name, because he hasn’t been in the scene yet, and each time it forces the reader to realign themself with Cromwell as an old friend, the sort that doesn’t need an introduction; he’s just there. So well done. Quite possibly my number one book I read this year.

4. Artful by Ali Smith was so fun. I read a couple of her books this year, but this one stands out for the strange things she does with the structure. It’s half-novel, half-essay, and it wanders back and forth. Sometimes you notice the seams, but more often I’d look up and realize I’d been reading an essay for the past four pages. It’s new, innovative, exciting, queer. All the cool things I’ve come to expect from Ali Smith. Read it.

5. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. I have to admit that, even apart from the fact that this is a queer Civil War novel that points out some of the atrocities we inflicted on the Native Americans, the thing that delights me most about this novel is that the secondary main character is named John Cole. One of my all-time favorite books is All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, another author who problemitizes the whole notion of the American West, and the main character is a boy named John Grady Cole. There’s a big thing in the first section about how his mother was the last of the Gradys. The boy’s name was Cole. John Grady Cole. And then he proceeds to call him John Grady 90% of the time anyway. So the fact that this John Cole is called John Cole... That delighted me.

6. Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap is a set of short stories by a Thai American author. His characters are so thoughtfully realized, they pop off the page. I’m not a huge fan of short stories but these are really well-done. It’s the sort of book that I finished and then began loaning out and campaigning to get other people to read.

7. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. This is another one I’ve been meaning to read for a while. The first section started off slowly and I almost gave up on it. But luckily for me I enjoyed the italicized parts (from the titular character’s point of view) enough to keep going to the second and third parts, which are from different, stranger and more enjoyable points of view. (Enjoyable might not be the right word. Some parts of this book were disturbing. If you aren’t like me, and you don’t love to be disturbed - to a point - maybe read with caution.)

8. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li is the second short story collection I’m featuring today. I just... Fell in love with these characters a bit. All of them, as ugly and imperfect as they are. My favorite story was either “Love in the Marketplace” or “Persimmons”, but really, they were all interesting stories that illuminated things.

9. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee was fascinating. I normally don’t go for books that cover such large swatches of time, but Min Jin Lee kept my interest as she moved from main character to main character by making the story less about any one character - although it was, of course, about all of them - as it was about the relationship between Koreans and Japan. I knew nothing about Asian politics, in spite of a series of required history courses in “non-western history” that claimed to bring me up to speed, or nothing about Asian politics in the last century or two, and Pachinko gave me a crash course without ever feeling didactic.

10. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, which was a re-read and so is probably cheating, but last time I loved it for being queer and feminist while the Trump movement closed in on us, and this time I loved it for saying meaningful things about life and death while we waited for my grandmother to pass away. It gave me a whole different set of answers and questions this time.