These reviews include thoughts on the quality of the writing, as well as my personal reactions and connections to the content. I include media reviews in each of my newsletters, and have extracted them for this page. I also post full articles with media analysis.
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August 2026 Reviews
Good Spirits by B.K. Borison
No spoilers
This was a lovely story. It was definitely strange to read a Christmas book in August, but I’m so happy I did. It’s an actual, genuinely cozy book.
Setting: It takes place in December and one of the main characters runs an antique shop she inherited from an aunt, and in her spare time she snuggles up at home watching movies in Christmas pajama sets and drinking warm beverages. She “has” a neighborhood cat she feeds, and lives in a neighborhood with a mailman who somehow does his job very wrong for many years yet still has his job. It’s all very charming.
Plot: Nothing terrible happens!! I get so irritated with people calling books cozy that are actually very sad or disturbing. There is tension and mystery in Good Spirits, and big emotions, and conflict, but all of those things are within the gentle difficulty of human experience, rather than the big swings of trauma. One of the characters is a ghost, which is difficult conceptually, but as a romance I expected things to “work out in the end” and of course they do. He doesn’t remember much of his living life, so there isn’t much of a sense of longing that could have made it more painful.
The romance in Good Spirits is a type I’m always looking for and rarely find. There actually wasn’t the big beat that usually exists near the end of a romance novel where the characters who’ve spent most of a novel building something lovely have a falling out. The author skipped this and I am so grateful. The characters start off on the wrong foot, but in a way that is environmentally set up, rather than clashing personalities, and once they like each other, they stay liking each other. No one pushes the other away for silly reasons and there are no huge misunderstandings. There’s even a piece where one is keeping something from the other, and it when it comes out, there is no conflict at all.
Before I met my partner, I had conflict in most of my relationships that was major misunderstanding and fear around abandonment. But when I met Maxx, everything was easy and never stopped being easy. We’ve been together for almost six years, and while we of course have conflict, we don’t even have arguments. Sometimes people are just nice to each other. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. It’s not like I’d truly want to change anything; I love the life I’ve lived and it’s lead me here. But I guess really what I mean is I wish more people knew this earlier in life than I learned it. You don’t have to have big stretches of anxiety, disappointment, or misunderstanding with someone. I think some people are kind of fiery by nature, and I get that some people argue more than others, but ultimately even if you argue, an argument shouldn’t be about not trusting each other in the big way.
So I loved that this book was gentle and the characters did not turn on each other. I’ve read several books where the big fight didn’t make sense to me, and undermined what the author had built. So I wish more people just chose to ignore that second big fight element of the romance novel format and just created an external problem to solve, like this one.
This book really reminded me what it felt like to fall in love. It’s such a specific feeling, and it fades, because you can’t fall forever; at some point you’re just where you were falling to. So it was really lovely to have that feeling brought back to the surface, and remember what it was like to be at the beginning of loving my partner. I do read romance because I enjoy people; it’s like any other story. But one of the benefits of reading a romance novel is the fantasy of falling in love. If I were single, or dating, that fantasy would be an exciting forward-thinking. What I want now is a fantasy that is past-recalling. I think a perfect romance novel can do both.
A Prince Among Pirates by Katie Abdou
No spoilers
I loved this book! I had a lot of fun reading it, and I enjoyed every scene.
The premise of A Prince Among Pirates is that a young British aristocrat, Kit, is set up for an arranged marriage, which he is not interested in going through with. The night before he’s supposed to have his wedding, he runs away in the middle of the night, goes to the local dock, and gets on an arbitrary ship, asking to be taken wherever they’re going, not knowing that it is a pirate ship. It’s a really fun premise, and I really enjoyed that the author pulled off “accidentally joins a pirate crew” in a way that, I think, is very believable.
I felt like I really went somewhere while reading, partly because I had a hard (literally hardback) copy. My partner and I visited a local bookstore one weekend, and bought it because it was the one book we were both interested in (we have a lot of books, so, getting two sounded less appealing). The cover is beautiful and the pages are a nice weight of paper, and so whenever I opened it I felt like I was disappearing into the world of the book. The author’s note at the beginning says that it’s an adventure with a romance, rather than a romance novel, and that seemed true to me. It made it so there was not much relationship drama, and the romance stretched over a reasonable amount of time. I felt like I was at sea with the protagonist, learning with him as he learns how to be on a ship for the first time.
This book was very racially diverse, with a protagonist and a love interest who are people of color (the protagonist is mixed and the other man is Black, I believe). I loved this! It’s not super alienating when characters are all white, but it is soothing when I relate in this extra way, especially with queer books.
It’s a young adult novel, which I didn’t realize until I’d already finished it. I thought it was really, really well done. I’m glad I didn’t know it was YA, because I don’t really read YA books in general; I haven’t since I actually was a teenager. This one felt very reasonable for both a teen and an adult to read, and I love that. It explored themes about entering adulthood, family and chosen family, and what it means to feel and be loved. I can imagine this book opening up a lot of possibility for a queer teenager with a rough family, and/or creating empathy for difficult situations without making the reader suffer. But it also really spoke to me as an adult who has already learned a lot of lessons about love and chosen family, too.
Because the protagonist is an aristocrat, it’s easy to imagine his personality any age from 18 (which he is) to probably 28, because many of the ways his immaturity shows are shaped by his privileged background. The places where he seemed truly his age in a very essential way came much later in the book, and were really moving to me. Also I have no idea why I didn’t realize a book about an 18 year old was YA, don’t ask!
I think this handled adult and difficult topics in a way that was appropriate for young people, and that was nice to see. I remember running into adult topics as a teen, and even in YA getting overwhelmed sometimes. This book touched on slavery, sexual assault, and racism in a way that was serious and considered, but not drawn out.
In general read a lot of romance, so I read books with very explicit sex in them, and it was a nice change of pace to read one with sexuality but not much sex. It’s also always great to read a book about two men that I enjoy, because a lot of them are related to types of gay male culture I don’t really like or fully understand. Sometimes gay male culture seems a little mean, and I don’t relate or enjoy mean social groups. I enjoy when gay books about men are gentle.
I loved how much this book was about a bunch of men who love each other in a variety of ways. I loved that it was someone drastically changing life situations, and growing so genuinely through it.
I’m not someone who seeks out adventure stories, but I love the ocean and I had a great time spending a week (of real time) at sea with these characters.
For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce
Includes spoilers - short review is “well written but I don’t recommend it, for your health”
For some reason, I followed that up by reading one of the most upsetting books I’ve ever read. For Human Use centers around a venture capitalist whose company is funding a “dating” app where people order sort of magically-seeming preserved corpses as companions? It’s a lot of sort of interesting social commentary, and I don’t exactly regret that I read it but don’t?? read it?? I would not say it’s particularly worth the emotional exhaustion. The venture capitalist (I don’t understand what his specific job was? sort of accounting?) reasonably thinks this is shocking and horrible, so it’s not like the book is spent with people who like it, but the character doesn’t quit his job either!! For about half the book. Then he does, and around halfway through, it becomes a kind of regular “contemporary/romance” book and then gets upsetting again in the last third, but (spoiler??) it ends happily! As much as possible I guess!! The app guy does go to jail and the romance would be pretty good if it were not immersed in an upsetting everything else.
I think I read this because I was morbidly curious (I assume that’s the point?) and then got too far in to let go of knowing what happens I guess, and fully burrowed into reading it and stayed up until 3am and slept for four hours that night!! It was, as you might expect, not really worth it. But sometimes a person just does things that aren’t worth it, I guess.
The book was pretty well written in my opinion, and the characters were certainly interesting. It’s a good book in some ways, but also, why put yourself through this??
In the acknowledgments, the author said it took her eight years to write this. That is not particularly surprising but also sounds like hell!! To think about this for almost a decade?? I read it in less than two days and that was a lot.
July 2026 Reviews
I read five full books in July and I’ve also been flipping between a few others, which I’ll talk about more in August!
No major spoilers in this section this month! There are thematic and smaller details, but no big reveals.
I really enjoyed this collection. The stories felt both mundane and unexpected. I think my favorite story was “Timeline”, because it was a little silly. In “Timeline”, the protagonist, Lucy, has just moved in with her brother after abruptly leaving a very specific kind of relationship. She didn’t live with that person; she just decided to move far away, which is very dramatic and I enjoy that. The character seems very quiet and non-dramatic, and I think it’s good writing that I could believe this kind of person would also make drastic life choices—it was maybe a dramatic decision to avoid out-loud social drama. The story has very serious events, but overall it felt lighthearted and strange.
There was a lot of sadness in this book, but it felt easy to read. The stories all gave me something to think about without depressing me. There were two stories about mothers struggling with their relationships fraying with their preteen daughters, which was an interesting percentage to me. The others didn’t really have repeated focuses. There are a couple of stories that have sexual violence in them, so I’ll add that warning. It felt more troubling than emotionally distressing, because of the neutral tone.
I got the impression the author wants the reader to consider all of these things more than to feel them intensely, which I hadn’t thought much explicitly about as a part of tone. When I was a kid, I had trouble with literature that teachers wanted us to read to make us empathize with something horrific, because every time I would end up empathizing way too vividly, and sort of stored it all as a fact that historical-event level traumas are normal and I should expect them. It was bad! Either my personality or OCD makes this still common for me, so I still struggle with stories that are working hard to make you feel the pain of the characters. Sometimes it’s worth it! Sometimes it feels like the author is just causing pain in a way that isn’t necessary to understand the story, in my opinion. So I liked that this collection had difficult life situations in it, but was more about considering them than suffering with other people.
That is something I’ve liked about reading Toni Morrison’s work. She wrote about more horrific things than exist in this collection, but it was similar—she just stated the awful things and I think she trusted the reader to get it, and ultimately the characters as people were more vivid than their suffering. This collection wasn’t Nobel-Prize winning writing like Toni Morrison’s, but it was good and I do recommend it!
I read two horror novels this month, the first of which was We Used to Live Here. It was gripping; it only took me 24 hours to read it. Part of why I read this novel so quickly was the amount of dread it provoked; I needed to be done! It was one of those novels that gave me anxiety and made me feel a little sick. I think because the protagonist has chronic anxiety, it felt particularly unsettling to watch her experience things that felt potentially unreal. I hadn’t read a horror novel where the protagonist is actually already mentally ill. I thought the premise was interesting and the way the characters were developed was good.
We Used to Live Here starts with the protagonist, Eve, being confronted by a polite family at her front door asking to come take a look at her new house, because one of the adults used to live there as a child. The family is a man, a woman, and three children. The woman is wearing a cross. Eve is looking forward to a night on her own with her partner, and is a gay former Christian. Everything about this is uncomfortable and she wants to say no, but struggles to be someone who can say no. She pretends to call her partner, Charlie, then says Charlie says no. Seeing the despondent youngest child, she ends up acquiescing and letting them in “for 15 minutes”. But they end up staying much longer.
One of the things I really enjoyed about this book was how polite and normal the spooky family is. The man who asks to be let in behaves in a very reasonable way, is gracious and apologetic. He doesn’t appear manipulative.
The idea of “my anxiety might be right” is truly a horror for me! Am I the target audience?
The ending was reasonably satisfying. I would recommend this book with the caveat that it might be hard if you are mentally ill. I would not re-read it! But I am still thinking about it, in a positive (and negative) way. I think a good novel follows me for a while.
This has no major spoilers, but I think it would affect how I go into the book if I’d read this beforehand, so that’s the spoiler warning.
This book also stuck with me. I enjoyed it, and it was also disturbing. I devoted long stretches of reading time to this one; I think I read it in two and a half days? I spent half of a Saturday reading it. It was slow-paced but a page-turner too, which is, I think, hard to pull off in general.
The title is a little misleading. I thought this book would be kind of campy, and that it would be both very serious and a bit silly. I was expecting the tone of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dark themes, but a story empowering women who might be underestimated.
It was kind of about empowering women, but in a very different way and with a lot more frustration leading up to it. There also aren’t as many vampires as I expected.
Really, I think the book is more about white wealthy women struggling to decide to empower and trust themselves, at the risk of upsetting their sexist husbands and their status. This book was more about race, class, and gender than about vampires. Which I did like! I thought it was interesting and surprising. It was also very exhausting to witness, and I’m considering whether I like that or not.
I also thought it was interesting that this story could have been nearly identical without the vampire element. The vampire in the book’s description could have just been an incredibly shitty regular human “monster”.
I did like that. I have heard vampire stories about class, but I liked that this story was about several social elements that I thought the author combined well. It was a story with one worst monster, but also left me thinking about the monstrosity of the choices to abandon other people to maintain the benefits of aligning with the worst monster.
I don’t think these are new thoughts, but I did enjoy how it was told. It also filled me with horror dread, and it was interesting to experience the in-between of the genres of monster horror and thriller.
It also takes place over an entire decade, and that felt kind of surreal in a way I enjoyed. Horror usually takes place in a pretty short amount of time—the idea of spreading that dread out over years was very different. I liked that the characters could change at a realistic pace.
If you want to experience a campy empowerment fantasy I’d skip it. But if you want an engaging story about privilege dynamics of the 1990s, you might really like this one.
I’ll also warn that there is a really big element of child sexual abuse and “stranger danger” being…real. I generally don’t like stories adding to a sense that we shouldn’t trust each other, but overall this story was interesting enough. I’m also not really sure if it was meant to convey that we shouldn’t trust people—the monster was literal, and uncommon. The book club from the title is a true-crime book club, and this novel seems to be half-mocking the way this genuinely can turn people overly paranoid, while also presenting a story where it isn’t paranoia. I’m still not sure how I feel about that! I’m really against true-crime obsessions. I think it makes people less mentally healthy and makes communities harder to form. Crimes are not avoidable by hating and avoiding everyone, and in real danger, having listened to 500 episodes of true crime podcasts doesn’t actually make people safer, it just makes all the time in between more upsetting and unpleasant and alienating.
So, if people take away from this story a metaphor about the “real danger” of trusting neighbors, I would hate that. But as a story about trusting yourself when your husband is friends with the worst man you’ve ever met, just because he’s rich, sure, that’s a lesson I can get behind.
June 2026 Reviews
I loved this memoir! High School is written by the members of the lesbian band Tegan and Sara. People often assume they’re a couple because they’re both gay, but they’re not; they’re actually twins. Which, once you know that, you might ask yourself, “Why was I willing to not only accept but assume these identical people are a couple?” I’m still thinking about that one! Is this an indictment of people who date people who look like themselves? Are we just so tired of people assuming couples are sisters we forgot they could be gay sisters? Did most of us just not look at a real photo of them?
They’re both really good writers. They take turns talking through their experience from grade ten through high school graduation. It was a really interesting and compelling story; I felt very immersed in their world and their individual experiences. I felt like I got to know a lot of people, a little bit, while reading this, and it gave me a pleasant nostalgia for the late 20th century.
I enjoyed every minute of reading it. I’ve read a number of books this year where parts dragged or I wanted the story to be done near the end, but High School was engaging the whole time, and I was a little sad when I saw I was near the end. I was honestly surprised, because I’m not generally that interested in stories just about high school experience, but this one was told so well. It felt like hanging out in someone’s memories in a nice, invited way.
If you like this band and want to know more about the artists, or if you’d just like to read a well-written memoir about being a gay teenager (and a second gay teenager) in ‘90s Calgary who also pick up playing the guitar very well (and also do a lot of drugs but are not having a hard time) I recommend this book so much! It was also really nice to hear about a family that’s pretty healthy. It seems like they had pretty chill but not overly permissive parents, which seems like a rare combo.
I love reading queer nonfiction in June, so this was a really great start to the month.
Contains major spoilers
This book has an interesting premise, and there were things I enjoyed about it, but I was disappointed with the ending. It’s pretty slow-paced, and I think that was a little hard with an ending I didn’t like very much.
Significant Others is about two women, Jess and Ren, who are extremely close best friends. The chapters alternate between their perspectives. They aren’t a couple, but they behave like partners in a lot of ways—they own a house together, sleep in the same bed a lot of the time, and just have a very entangled life in general.
Ren works at a bar, and one night Jess goes to the bar despite not really enjoying it, and turns down the advances of a tourist named Quincy, who later ends up going home with Ren instead. Shortly after, Ren learns she is pregnant from that night. In a previous chapter, she talked about wanting a child, so it makes sense that she quickly decides to keep the baby. Because she woke up with Quincy gone, without a note, she assumes he wouldn’t care and she doesn’t tell him. She’s single, and she and Jess decide to raise the baby together.
Spoilers start here.
The back of the book talks about Quincy coming into “the picture” and that disrupting the structure of Jess and Ren’s arrangement. I was really intrigued by thinking about the tension between the attractiveness of a traditional life/family and an untraditional one, and thinking about platonic life partnership. Also navigating different ways of being queer, and an untraditional family if you aren’t queer (Ren identifies as straight).
I enjoyed following these characters, and seeing how their relationships shifted and grew over the course of the book. Though it felt more like being invested in drama I was hearing about from a friend, more than being really intimately in the perspective of anyone. I felt like Ren didn’t have a lot of depth, and I didn’t particularly like Jess. I think Quincy was my favorite character, which is fine, but kind of disappointing.
I was irritated by the ending. One of the big twists of the book is that Quincy and Jess start sleeping together and don’t tell Ren for months. Which is absolutely wild. And it makes a kind of sense—I could see people doing that. But ultimately Ren and Jess stop living together, and all three of them live separately. Jess becomes an aunt and not a parent, which is presented as “actually she never wanted to parent”, though that’s not well set up, in my opinion. And this is also presented as them disentangling from an unhealthy dependence. Which was so, so boring to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my sense of a story as “choices some individuals could make” vs “putting a narrative into the world”. This story totally made sense as a group of people and choices to exist, but it felt like such a missed opportunity to put an interesting narrative into the world.
I felt very disappointed by the set up of a non-traditional intimacy ending with “well, and then they realize they should go separate ways and do something more typical.” Part of this is that the author skipped the conversation about it!!! Near the end, when it comes out about Jess and Quincy’s affair, the two women don’t speak for a month, then there’s a scene where Jess approaches Ren, and Ren smiles, and that’s the end. The epilogue describes their lives several months after the baby is born. I really needed the part between the end and the epilogue to justify the massive shift as an interesting ending!!
As a narrative, it feels like a statement that this kind of relationship is just an unhealthy and limiting friendship. There are plenty of people with unhealthy friendships, but there are not many stories published about platonic friends doing life together, and that would have been really cool—especially because most of that story was already there.
There’s a quick line about “in a movie version of this, Jess and Quincy get together and the three of them raise the baby”, and I found that so strange and irritating. I wanted that ending! I thought it would be really cool for this person, who has struggled with sex because she kept trying with strangers, to find someone she enjoys it with and have a happy relationship, and for these people to have a happy, non-traditional family where various kinds of partnership are valued. It made me really sad for the author to acknowledge that she considered that and decided against it—it made me want to know why, but not in an intriguing way; I just felt disappointed. I found this book under the library’s “LGBTQ” label, and the author is queer, and I felt just kind of baffled by it all.
Obviously people can write whatever they want, and this isn’t a bad story, but I didn’t like it, and it made me feel less good about having spent a lot of time with it.
I really enjoyed reading this! It’s a travel memoir about the author, Krista Burton, traveling to the 20 known lesbian bars that were open in the US at that time (2021 and 2022). It takes place right after her getting the initial doses of the COVID vaccine, and getting a deal with a publisher to write the book. She talks about how the thing she recalls missing most during the lockdown period was being around queer people in queer bars. It was interesting learning about places that required vaccine cards and ones that didn’t, among many other things in this book.
I wish I’d gone into this book thinking about it as a travel memoir, but I don’t read travel writing very much, so I approached it as more of an informational book with some personal elements, since the author was writing about her experience in the bars. She did say at the top that it’s not a history book! But I just didn’t have much context for the type of writing this was. I also had kind of a hard time picturing the spaces, but that’s probably almost entirely my brain having a hard time with visualizing.
Despite being a little disoriented by my own experience, I really enjoyed the ride of this book. It was fun to come along and see all of these places a little, and I liked Krista as a writer/perspective “character”. Most of the bars are in cities I’ve never traveled to, and getting a glimpse of queer culture around the country was really cool. I have also been to two of them! The one in Seattle and the one in Richmond, Virginia, so that was fun too. Due to the visualization thing, I don’t remember what those look like from my own mind, either.
I recommend this if you want a little taste of queer culture around the US and some memoir from a fellow queer person!
An interesting theme was that almost all of the bars made a point of stating being welcoming to everyone, and that seemed to be true to the author’s experience (she’s very femme and her partner is a trans man, so either of them could feel excluded theoretically in lesbian spaces, but they both have a good time and saw other kinds of trans people and cis queer people have a good time!)
There’s an ongoing conversation about why there aren’t many lesbian bars. There are a lot of reasons. There have always been fewer, partly because it’s historically been easier for men to start businesses, and because gay women often want different things than gay men out of social space. Some said it’s that partly that more queer assimilation has lead to a lot of exclusively-gay bars closing. Personally, I think there are also probably a lot of bars that aren’t in cities and no one is talking about in national media. There are multiple women’s bars in Seattle, for example, that aren’t on that list—and maybe they are not lesbian bars, but have all lesbian bars called themselves that? I’m sure it’s a mix of many factors. Some nice news at the end (I guess a spoiler? but it’s just real life) is that the author learned of several that opened or reopened since they finished writing! And the bars she visited were doing really well when she visited them. I’m happy we have whatever spaces we have together, and it’s good to hear that most lesbian spaces are nicer than the Internet makes them sound.
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May 2026 Reviews
I almost liked this book! I liked it for the first two thirds, and then it became increasingly frustrating and ultimately very heterosexual, in a bad way. I usually do enjoy straight romances that I pick, but this one ended with the man protagonist harassing the woman protagonist to get her back, which was supposed to be fine, I guess, because he knew she loved him?! Unlike when her coworker she didn’t like was harassing her in exactly the same way?
The premise of the story is that a woman named Stella is autistic and has always struggled with dating and sex. She hires Michael, a sex worker, to teach her how to be “better at sex”. They of course fall in love instead. Partly because she decides that sex could be learned in a relationship, but she’s bad at that, so hires him to be a practice boyfriend instead—but he isn’t planning to cash her check, because he wants to prove to himself he is a good person, “unlike his dad”, who we don’t get much information about until near the end. This isn’t done in a way I thought was interesting; Michael is just convinced he’s born bad or something because his dad sucks. It is kind of believable but also not very interesting.
He’s doing sex work out of necessity and hates it, and I expected her to buy away his problems at the end and “save him”, which culturally is not really a story we need, though I can buy it for individual characters. If he has one big financial problem (his mother’s medical bills), it’s not absurd for someone to fix it, it’s not like general poverty. This did happen, but not exactly as I thought. She donates money to the hospital itself, so many families’ debt goes away, not only his. I would have probably found this satisfying enough if the ending was otherwise compelling, but I didn’t think it was. I liked their relationship less as the book went on, rather than more.
At first I really liked Michael (though same name is weird!) and really understood Stella’s attraction to him; I found Stella to be…fine? I was describing this plot to Maxx early on and they asked me if Stella “is a character” and they were right—she was not very fleshed out, she is mostly just autistic. She wasn’t likable or unlikable to me, because there wasn’t much to her.
Early on in the book, I really related to her feelings around this man—I thought this was a fantasy of being an autistic woman and a cool, sexy guy being into you even though you’re weird. I remember that desire from back before I transitioned! But I really wanted more to her than autism and more to him than “I’m terrible even though I’ve never been terrible to anyone.” Except he is at the end! To her!! And then of course they get engaged immediately, after knowing each other for two or three months and not even knowing the other person was into them!
That’s what I mean by heterosexual in a bad way. Many straight couples are actually friends and love and respect each other, but other times it seems like the expectation and/or reality is just marrying someone you think is sexually attractive and then trying to make it work. This felt a lot like that. There was a sense of an emotional bond, but I don’t know why. There’s more sexual interaction than deep conversation—she doesn’t even tell him she’s autistic, he figures it out himself, after a long time. He doesn’t tell her about his baggage with his dad until the end. And a deep emotional connection is certainly not just sharing struggles, but it can be sharing interests (which they don’t) or experiences (which they don’t).
So yeah, I don’t really think this one is worth it if you want a nice and believable romance. But! I did think the sex scenes were well done and pretty sexy, and the way she becomes comfortable with sex seemed realistic for someone who’s struggled with sex due to sensory and communication/self esteem issues. I enjoyed the first two thirds, but was disappointed by the ending.
No spoilers
I mostly enjoyed this one! It’s the third book in a series I started last year called No Other Gods. I did like the plot (especially in the second half, just like both of the previous two in the series), and I enjoy these characters. I continue to wonder why the protagonist makes such bad decisions, but I also kind of enjoy a “chosen one” who actually needs a lot of support and isn’t just great at everything.
However, it’s a romance fantasy series, and I did unfortunately lose any desire to root for the main couple after this one. Her supernatural demon boyfriend who’s 3000 years old is already a premise I feel weird about, but was willing to just not really think about, since at least this character is a full adult, even if there’s no age of a normal lifespan that can match up to “literally ancient”.
But in this book, there are several scenes of him being obnoxiously and possessively jealous, and that completely lost me. I was irritated that this was met with approval instead of disgust. I’m not sure if I would have felt so strongly about it if I had not just read The Kiss Quotient, because I was already past my limit on toxic heterosexual dynamics.
It’s also a bummer because this character is bi, and I know that plenty of bisexual women still settle for men who suck, but I think if the author’s desire is to put more bisexual lit in the world (as advertised), and in a story where there’s approval for the “men are trash” narrative, I’m kind of surprised that a man being so obnoxious and kinda scary is acceptable and even desirable. I have been talking with friends about the “men are trash” narrative a lot lately, and I think this is my number one issue with people taking that on as a full belief (as opposed to just venting). If you truly believe men are trash, then if you want to be with men, you have to accept trash behavior. But there are many, many men who are kind and giving and good. And if you don’t believe they exist, you might not shove aside all the men treating you like an object. Shoving them aside is very important!
I’ve heard around the Internet the idea that men with bisexual wives often have the same vibe, and I think one reason many men with bisexual wives have the same gentle kindness comes from the fact that they had to be good enough for someone who didn’t have to settle for any man, and don’t tolerate bad treatment from them. But straight women don’t have to do that either!! Holding out for a good guy is an option! So I hate the narrative than men are bad, because then any man who’s kinda good is already passing by the “bar that’s literally on the floor”. I want people of every gender to demand better and to hold out for kind friends and partners. Being angry about men behaving in predictable shitty ways doesn’t have to loop around to accepting it as inevitable. I have empathy for complicated fantasies, but this still bothered me a lot.
If I keep the outside world impact out of it, and this is one bisexual woman character, then what it does to the story is make it impossible to ignore anymore that this man has been following her around her whole life. He is immortal, and they have known each other through thousands of years of her reincarnations. In the present life, he followed her around as an “imaginary” fox, then a “hallucinated” man (who for some reason never revealed himself to anyone else and let her think she was just crazy). So—if she’s a bisexual woman who doesn’t ever want to commit to any of her “non-imaginary” lovers, why is she not appalled by the toxic masculinity of an ancient man? Seems like it’s because he’s been in her life…forever. So, “I’m just going to ignore it” doesn’t work for me anymore.
I don’t know if that’s intentional and will be addressed? It doesn’t seem like it. It seems presented as a fully romantic situation. He’s also a demon, but this story presents demons as morally neutral, which is part of the premise of the whole story.
I was talking to Maxx about it, and I was saying that if I were an immortal in this endless cycle of re-meeting someone, I would either leave them alone until they were like, thirty, or if I felt compelled to hang around and protect them I would not let them see me!!! He literally is hidden from everyone else. He let her think she was just mentally ill. It’s so bad and I’m so irritated by how that story has turned out. Especially because I was willing to wave away how weird that all was as a silly fantasy (I get the fantasy of your imaginary friend growing up with you into a romantic person!) But it played out…exactly as weird as it seemed. Pretty uncritically, so far.
Unfortunately I am invested in the rest of what’s happening, and I do like the characters overall, so even though I don’t want her to be with this guy, I am almost certainly going to read the last book when it comes out, anyway. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Either way I’ll get to know what happens.
Light spoilers
So I’m a hypocrite for all the things I just said, because I did read this entire book and the first half of its sequel, and it had even more toxic heterosexuality, way earlier on. I guess I was just in it at this point. I wouldn’t really recommend this series. But, there were elements I enjoyed, and I did finish book one.
The premise of Angel’s Blood is that the protagonist, Elena, is a vampire hunter who’s been hired to hunt an angel. In this world, vampires are made by angels, and angels hire hunters to bring vampires back in line. I thought that was a really cool decision about the world it takes place in! That’s what hooked me and prompted me to check it out.
There’s a really gruesome “crime thriller” element, which I found pretty interesting, but I wish I’d skimmed some of the grossest parts.
There’s also a romance between her and the archangel who hired her. Angels in this aren’t particularly tied to the religions in real life that have angels as figures. They’re just supernatural and have the wings. I thought that was really interesting too.
The romance seems like greatly a fantasy about being a powerful woman and finding an even more powerful man to dwarf your power, which I hate. I also get it. It’s having both things you’re expected to want, by different cultural forces. And it was very close to being more of a monster-man fetish type of thing, which I think I hate less. But I think both this and The Serpent and the Siren could have leaned further into that and I would have liked it more. Ultimately they felt more like boring real monster than exciting unrealistic monster.
I thought these three books I read this month were super interesting to compare, because they all had the “weird possessive man and it’s desirable” element, but in very different ways. In some ways I found this one the most explicitly that, but also less irritating than the last book, because it wasn’t trying to be progressive? But maybe it was. This story from 2009 brought me back to the expectations of women at that time. I don’t know if that’s changed, honestly, because I joined extremely progressive to highly left-wing social circles and also left being a woman. But from 2009, I do remember this sense that women should be self-possessed, independent, and intolerant of bad male behavior, but that ultimately it also meant something bad about you if you weren’t able to be delicate and loved as a submissive creature. It was interesting to see that tension play out in this. I wonder how it goes for the rest of the series, but I don’t think I’m going to read 17 more of them.
I picked up the book because of the interesting angel-vampire dynamic, and because I hadn’t thought to look for fiction featuring angels as weird creatures or romantic interests until I read The Serpent and the Siren, which has a major character who’s an angel.
Anyway, after 1.5 of these books, I got tired of the back and forth about power and also the gruesome elements, so I’m done for now. I was really hoping that after some events at the end of the first book, the rest of the series would have them on more equal footing, but no! It’s still about her being less powerful than him. There also seems to be a dynamic where they’re kind of taming each other? Where he’s making her feel more soft (which seems like a relief to her, and also…is so sexist) and also she’s making him literally more mortal and less powerful in some supernatural way because they love each other? Which is fascinating! But I need a break.
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
I really enjoyed The Haunting of Hill House. The characters were very interesting, and I loved their banter throughout. The contrast of the spooky elements and the light clever dialogue was really enjoyable. It’s fairly short, less than 200 pages, and so the characters are not deeply fleshed out, and the plot is fairly simple. I enjoyed the pacing, and I think Jackson did an interesting job with how much detail she painted in for each character.
It has a really different feel than Diavola (reviewed below), and that made me think about how much the style of horror has changed over the years. This has a sense of dread too, but it was different; gentler, more external. It didn’t feel as much like the dread was being shoved directly into me. I think one reason is context—it has characters who signed up to stay in a haunted house, which was immediately less stressful to me than people trapped unwittingly. The cultural distance might also have lent itself to the story feeling more external. This book was published in 1959, with several upper-class characters, and the differences in language and social dynamics felt just unfamiliar enough for some comforting distance.
This novel is also categorized as “gothic horror,” which makes sense to me. I was reading about gothic horror; I liked the definition on the New York Public Library’s page on gothic horror: “The battle between humanity and unnatural forces of evil (sometimes man-made, sometimes supernatural) within an oppressive, inescapable, and bleak landscape is considered to be the true trademark of a gothic horror novel.” This tracks with The Haunting of Hill House, and also made me think about Diavola, which could also be described this way.
A major element I’m excited to talk with my book club about is the overwhelming homoerotic elements of the story, and I am so curious if other people read it this way, and what they took away from it as reality vs the main character’s perspective.
I’m also noticing I wanted to say “main character” rather than “protagonist” because I don’t know that I was particularly rooting for the character the narration is focused on—it feels almost arbitrary for most of the book, which I think is interesting. A lot of the narrative is internal to that character, Eleanor, and I thought that was also an intriguing choice, especially reflecting on it after reading the whole story. I often wanted to know what other people were thinking—but that may have been less interesting, because so much of it was about her perceptions of them. This isn’t usually how I feel about close third person narration (that’s where the story is in third person, but you only hear one character’s thoughts and follow only their actions). I don’t usually wonder how other characters are experiencing them. It felt different than “unreliable narrator” too, it doesn’t seem like she might be misperceiving in objective ways, just the normal ways people can’t tell what is going on socially sometimes.
I recommend it, and if you’ve read it please tell me your thoughts, especially about the gay stuff!
Diavola by Jennifer Thorne
Diavola is a haunted house story. It’s also a novel about the dread and stress of difficult family dynamics, enflamed by supernatural elements.
The haunted house is a vacation rental in Italy for the American protagonist, Anna, and her family—her parents, twin brother and his boyfriend, her older sister, and her sister’s husband and two children. The book opens with Anna stating that she started off the family vacation with a lie. The family is traveling to a small Italian town, and she arrives late, claiming to be trapped at work for a few more days—but she really just stays elsewhere to get some time alone.
Throughout most of the novel she is very passive socially, just trying to get through the vacation without offending anyone, and it turns out that’s very difficult, because she appears to be the black sheep of the family. When I was done reading, I thought about whether other versions of this story could make her seem like an unreliable narrator—why would her family be so hostile for no reason? But each scene is described in such detail, and the family does occasionally bring up their reasons, all strangely distant moments (10, 15 years in the past) where she was simply inconsiderate. I appreciated that as a way of signaling that sometimes people just behave in unkind ways for reasons that make sense to them but may not make sense to others.
I thought all of the characters were realistic people—they represented very different familial relationships that are stressful, complicated.
I enjoyed the ending, and there are some good quotes near the end about life—what we want to control, what and who we can’t control, and the choices we have and make for our lives. I recommend this book, if you like horror.
Get a Life, Cloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
Get a Life, Cloe Brown is a romance about a woman who decides, after almost getting hit by a car, that she needs to do more with her life. That it’s time to take more risks and be more independent and adventurous!
A large part of why her life has been stagnant is that she became disabled with fibromyalgia in her young adulthood, after a temporary but very severe physical illness. She developed a lot of fear, both of doing things that will tire or injure her, and of forming close human connections.
After this brush with death, she moves out of her parents’ home and into her own apartment, where she meets Red, her superintendent who she cannot manage to have a positive interaction with, but who is, of course, the love interest of the book.
I’m not usually one for “enemies to lovers” plots, but I found this one pretty reasonable. Their misunderstandings are fairly short, and their falling in love is cute and interesting to me. It was sexy. I found Red more likable than Cloe, which was interesting—I found myself both more interested in the pieces in his perspective, but also enjoying the fantasy of him as the love interest. Is that what most people experience with romance books? If you’re a romance reader, do you usually have one person you’d be attracted to if they were real, or is it all very separate from you? Are you usually in both perspectives? Does it depend on the book?
However, I did understand Cloe. I also have fibromyalgia, and it was really great to read a book that accurately portrays my chronic illness, and what it looks like to attempt more adventure with it, how isolating it can feel (though I have had a better time finding community than Cloe has), and to just see my experience present. Sometimes I do wonder if “representation matters” much and then I see myself in something and remember how much it does matter. How much people’s perspective on the world is impacted by stories, and how much less alone I feel when I see myself in stories, even if I know people like me in that way in real life.
Class and race dynamics are also present in this novel. Cloe is from a wealthy background and is black; Red is from a poorer background and is white. These dynamics were less prominent than the elements around disability and the rest of the plot, but it was nice to have some other meta social dynamics touched on without it weighing a fun romance book down much, which I know is challenging. The book also explores PTSD, social rejection, and handling triggers in romantic relationships.
My one major criticism of this book is that the genre-required “final conflict” was too close to the end, and I think the writer owed us another sex scene or intimate romance scene post heartbreak-then-reconciliation. I’m joking but I’m also not. The writer put me through a lot!
I like a lot of romance novels that aren’t particularly sexy, or where the couple only make just enough sense, but this book was very sexy and very sweet. I liked how lovely and caring Red was without being a silly level of fantasy-man.
I probably cried at this book—there’s a part where Cloe is stressed by Red cooking for her, and he tells her that he can cook right now and she can’t, and that’s what caring about people is, “filling in each other’s gaps.” That hit me hard, because my spouse cooks for me all the time, and I often feel so guilty about not helping enough. It was an excellent reminder—yes, that’s what partnership, friendship, family should be—filling in each other’s gaps. No guilt or shame. I realize I am still fighting shame about my disability even when I have had loved ones for many years who always believe me about my limitations.
Thank you for the reminder to appreciate my spouse and my friends without guilt, Talia Hibbert.
Disobedience by Naomi Alderman
This book hit me so much harder than I expected! I watched the movie adaptation years ago, and I remember being kind of confused by the plot; it was very vibes. I decided to try reading the book to get some more depth.
It’s a book about two odd and queer women who were both raised in a very specific Orthodox Jewish community in London. It seems to take place when it was published in the early 2000’s, so this would place them as born in the early 1970s. One of them (Ronit) left the community, city, and country in her young adulthood, the other (Esti) stayed and married a man despite being gay. The plot revolves around Ronit returning after her father, the community’s Rabbi, has passed away. She has to confront her feelings about the community she grew up in; Esti has to reckon with the return of this person she had mostly lost, and the feelings that come with it. Everyone in the story is also experiencing change related to the passing of Ronit’s father.
Something about the writing style felt immediately so familiar to me, but I haven’t pinpointed why. Ronit, the one who moved, went to New York City, and I wonder if some of what feels familiar is capturing a way of speaking that’s east-coast USA, where I’m from? But the author is English?
Each chapter is broken up into two perspectives; there’s a bit of Jewish philosophy and then Esti’s or her husband Dovid’s point of view, all in third person; then there’s a first-person section from Ronit’s point of view. As I read, I more and more appreciated this writing choice. Ronit views herself as very independent, making active choices in every moment, and Esti seems to be somewhat dissociated, just floating through her expectations. She doesn’t seem unhappy, until she suddenly does. In some moments she is observing her own behavior without quite perceiving making a choice. To me, this was well represented by having her internal perspective further away. It also made sense to have the perspective of this community as one section and the perspective of the character who left as an independent, first person perspective—I think that’s how leaving and coming back can feel—separate, in your head, disjointed.
Reading Disobedience personally affected me in a way I didn’t really expect. I partly read this because I thought it would be interesting to hear a non-Christian ex-religious person story. As an American queer person, I have a huge number of friends and acquaintance who are ex-Christian. I feel pretty saturated with that story. I’ve also been hurt by just the ambient Christianity in my culture.
What I didn’t expect was learning something about myself and why I am so fascinated and pained by stories of people leaving their religion and community. I did not have a religiously restrictive childhood, but I had a generally restrictive one. When I left that, I kind of broke down and had to rebuild myself. I am still trying to shake off parts of that. So when I hear or read about people in that experience, I feel deeply connected to it. In this country, Christianity is the driving force of restriction. I didn’t have much of Muslim community growing up, but the people I knew through school had a stricter religious life than me, and imagining adding that layer to my already restricted life always felt crushing and confusing. I wanted to be more religious but could not tolerate being bound even tighter.
I grieve not having a spiritual community. I have really enjoyed being included in Jewish rituals and communities with loved ones. My experience of Judaism from a slight distance is that it is much less restrictive, which is gives me a lot of peace. I enjoy that some religions do not feel painful, and it feels important to me that other people know that. I’ve known so many people who consider all religion to be this patriarchal controlling force that Christianity is. But that isn’t all spiritual or religiously cultural life, even in the US, let alone other places.
Reading this book about a non-Muslim and non-Christian restrictive life pushed me to confront that I have not had good language to connect with anyone over the ways my young life was smothering without religion, and the ways ambient Christianity and more controlling forms of Islam hurt because they felt close to what I was experiencing.
I think Disobedience is well crafted, the characters are interesting, the author does a good job of sprinkling enough information to get a sense of the Orthodox Jewish culture and what specific cultural traditions mean to give context to the story, and I found it all very moving. I will say that talking to my partner, their impression is some of the details in this book are not even a typical Orthodox experience, so I think grain of salt on generalizing from it.
The sense of being deep in a tome when reading from Esti’s perspective vs the very individual, loud, unrestrictive style of Ronit’s perspective was such an interesting way to get across the way that a restricted life feels surreal and thick, and a chosen life feels freer and clearer and more real in some way. How dazed I felt in a restrictive environment felt so tangible in this book. I also think she does a good job of making those third-person pieces feel less foggy as the characters grow. I think this book says some really interesting things about what you get from leaving vs staying where you grew up, facing yourself, and the choices we all have.
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
This book changed me and maybe changed my life. I highlighted so many passages and had a big shift in my perspective about myself and my life as a writer. This book is so much about the value of storytelling, being a writer, and the place of writers in societies and families--and really, what storytelling means to humanity in general.
I went through a lot of emotions while reading this, about being disabled, being a storyteller, having high immigrant-parent expectations, and just human connection while reading this. Trying to explain why this was moving to me feels like trying to explain a dream. So I’ll just say it was good. Your mileage may vary of course; I think a lot of what was moving was personal to me. But I think if you are a writer or storyteller you might enjoy this, or if you share the other experiences I mentioned.
As far as what you can expect from genre, this book is sci-fi and I’d say literature. Okorofar also categorizes her books as African-futurism (which she coined, according to Wikipedia, separate from Afro-futurism). There’s writers, robots, sci-fi technology, a lot of feelings about family and disability, intimacy, and a robust plot journey. It was almost hard to read, but simultaneously gripping and I could tell when I hit the 60% mark I’d be sad to leave these characters when the book was done. I recommend it.
I'll Have What He's Having by Adib Khorram
This one is 5/5 stars, no notes! (Okay, one note: there were a few off-screen nonbinary characters and it would have been nice to throw them a real line/personality).
This novel was such a good time. I rarely have the experience of a romance novel having the correct amount of conflict—realistic, with long periods of joy in between the obstacles—and this one had that. I really recommend it if you enjoy romance novels. The characters felt very real with very real bodies. Their chemistry was so fun and lovely and felt realistic to me. I enjoyed spending time with all of the characters.
It is a novel about two men, one I described as “the wine guy” (who is Black) actually named David, and one I describe as “the Iranian guy” (because that identity ties into so much of his narrative), named Farzan, when I’ve talked about the plot out loud. I often don’t enjoy novels about gay men; I think that has never been my culture as a queer trans man. This one I’ve been really enjoying, and I think neither of them being white is part of it, honestly. They are also very in their late-thirties; it is mentioned often. I really appreciated that. Often, even if characters aren’t especially young, no one talks about having a body that isn’t young (knees popping, etc.)
Often with gay novels about men, I feel they are connected to a cis gay culture I just don’t relate to. Since I’ve never been a cis gay man, it just feels like an awkward distance from me. I think it is notable that my go-to descriptor of these men is “vocation” and “ethnicity”. The author is Iranian-American and it makes sense that ethnic culture is fleshed out more for that character. It starts out from that character’s (Farzan’s) perspective too, in the way that sets up what in a straight novel would be David (the wine guy) as the male love interest. In queer novels I’ve read there still seems to be a primary protagonist. If anyone knows about any man/woman romance novels with the man as the main protagonist please let me know!
The writing is just very good. I feel like the obstacles that the author places between these men are reasonable and realistic, misunderstandings don’t go on agonizingly long, and each character feels like a person I want to get to know. Read it!! It is very refreshing.
The Fox and the Falcon by Piper CJ
The Fox and the Falcon was okay. Like the first book in this series, it was only “fine” for the first like 60%, then had a very exciting latter 40%. It was good enough to keep me reading, but not super exciting. This time though I knew it might pick up, so I stuck with it.
The idea of sticking with a book comfortably is incredibly new for me. In the past that would feel like a trap, and I’d be stuck not reading the book or any other book for months. I have given myself full permission to abandon any book. I can look up a summary if I want to know the end without reading, even!
But I was enjoying this enough and I am reading fast enough now it didn’t feel draining to just read and see if it got better. I’m so excited to experience that.
Anyway, I felt medium about the book but still very much want to read the rest of the series when it comes out. It’s good at the series thing—leaving things both tied up and not at the end of each book. The protagonist also keeps being left out of the plan a lot, which makes sense because all the other characters are gods or something, but I hope it changes.
I am realizing that this series is the same genre of romance that Twilight is; it’s the “weak human with powerful supernatural man; by the end she becomes powerful too by being special enough.” I don’t hate that; it’s not really my fantasy but I understand it for sure. I will also warn that a lot of the plot of these books revolves around having a religiously abusive childhood, so look out if that is going to stress you out.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
I really enjoyed this book. I didn’t at first—I only read past the first chapter because my partner wanted to talk about it and it was so short (about 150 pages). It felt very lonely, despite the protagonist being around other people. I generally dislike lonely books and movies and games.
But, I kept reading, and it was so good in the end. I was talking to friends yesterday about it; about how it doesn’t feel like it fits neatly into any genre. It feels like a genuinely creative novel in ways that inspired me.
I want to get back into fiction writing. I write nonfiction so much more easily. Fiction requires a mode for me. A mode where I can be in someone else’s mind and ask not just where they want to go, but where I want them to go and why. I can be a character, I can ask who they know and love and hate, I can hang out in their world in my head, but the kind of things I get past a page on are confusing and complex. I know almost no one on this subscriber list has seen my short stories. They are fantasy horror, I guess? I like to create an unclear fantastical situation.
That was present in Annihilation, an unclear fantastical situation. It lead places I haven’t been, and I really enjoyed that. I do recommend this book, and I’ve been told it is very different from the movie, so I would not really use that as a measure of whether you want to try this book. My partner said it has “the same world vibe but very different plot choices” (paraphrased). It’s spooky, got a sci-fi feel, and some really interesting world building and character exploration. The premise is an expedition to a mysterious “Area X”. I went into it expecting a dystopia but it…wasn’t really. It was in the sense of reference to real world climate change at points, but I don’t really count general present-day things as the same genre of speculative dystopia.
The Deer and the Dragon by Piper CJ
The Deer and the Dragon is a fantasy romance, the first in a series. I am not often into fantasy, but when they take place in current times I am more likely to try them. The fantasy of the past or a more upper class setting isn’t usually interesting to me (I haven’t ever been able to get into Lord of the Rings, etc.) This book takes place in my current culture, and introduces some magic to it, which I do enjoy.
This is the first time I’ve read a book by someone I first encountered on social media. Usually, when I read books I try not to look up the author until I’m done (or maybe never look them up at all). It was very different to know how this author looks, sounds, and moves, and a few details about her life. I personally could not stop assuming the character was a version of her (the idea of which is painful to me about my own writing and I take significant lengths to try to avoid the vulnerability of that). It might have been from the writing itself—I’ve thought that with other books by other authors I knew nothing about—but it definitely influenced my read to have a sense of the author, and having heard some of the aspects she has said came from her own experience.
In some ways, I liked that—it was kind of fun to be in someone’s imagined world where they might exist. In other ways it felt like a kind of vulnerability that hurts me, which is definitely my problem.
I liked the writing; the characters were really enjoyable and I wanted more of them. I definitely want to read the next in the series, and I think that’s the outcome people are going for with the first in a series, right? It had some sad pieces that made sense, and it added depth that didn’t feel random. I get really irritated with books that are romantic, erotic, or otherwise fun that just throw in some trauma to make it “real”. I felt like this book actually succeeded at what those stories are going for—a relevant piece of someone’s experience that makes the overcoming of obstacles or the achievement of joy and pleasure more satisfying, or just create a more rounded character whose actions actually seem influenced by those events.
I did feel like it had that problem where the story ramped up pressure pretty steadily but tied up the plot slightly too easily. It was an overall good story!
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
It’s definitely literary—I was sad the whole time reading it, but I also really enjoyed the experience. The words felt like being carried peacefully by water—once I caught the flow of it each time, I found myself falling one line to the next until many pages had gone by. It is a really sweet style.
The characters and plot felt very realistic, and the style follows the thoughts of several different characters. Reading how different people are processing the world is really interesting, and it’s pushed me to try harder to understand people a bit different than me. It felt very intimate to follow someone’s thoughts in the way they actually would have them, as opposed to typical narrative that relays everything as a memory or documentation.
There’s a character who’s pretty obviously autistic, and is relatable in a social way that I haven’t encountered in fiction before. He is paying attention and observant, but he’s still missing things. He’s aware he’s missing things, though, and I’ve never seen that in media. When I’ve seen autistic characters, they usually are completely oblivious to social cues and other people react to them more clearly like they’re disabled by this. This character is obviously disabled to me, but other people aren’t approaching him that way by default. I think it’s important to depict some autistic characters as oblivious to social cues, because some people are and if a piece of media tries to make that understandable to non-autistic people, I think that’s good. But I also really appreciate something I personally relate to on this axis. I am aware of social cues, and I often know when I’ve missed something. I’m also now wondering if characters are approaching him as disabled, and maybe me too, but I’m oblivious. Hmm.
I thought the plot was a really good depiction of grief. The tensions in this book felt very realistic, a little heartbreaking, but ultimately “okay” in the way people are ultimately okay at some point after a loss. It also depicts the ways that we can feel so bad even when nothing is wrong, because grief is a silent thing wrong for a long time, and it can be difficult to notice how it’s affecting us.
I understand why this book was so celebrated! I don’t often read a bestseller soon after it comes out, so it was fun to feel up on the trends for a moment. It was a gift and I’m very grateful for it!
This book also pushed me to examine how I react to age-gap relationships, because they are a big part of the plot. The two brothers in the novel are Peter and Ivan, 32- and 22-years-old; Peter has a 22-year-old girlfriend (Naomi); Ivan has a 36-year-old girlfriend, Margaret. The narration follows the perspectives of Peter, Ivan, and Margaret. Peter and Margaret are looking at their relationships very differently. Peter seems a little aware of the power dynamic, a thought that comes in and out, but he doesn’t really seem concerned about any long-term damage to her, even though she’s in a pretty vulnerable life situation beyond even the age difference. Margaret is really torn up about what she’s doing—she doesn’t want to ask friends for advice because she fears their judgement, but she can’t really trust the reassurance of Ivan.
Spoilers
I asked myself over the course of the novel how I would feel if I knew these people. I think if I knew Peter, his behavior fits pretty neatly into the category where I would just tell him he is being fucked up. If I knew Margaret, I don’t know. I asked myself why—is it that she cares? Is it that Ivan is in a much less vulnerable situation outside the relationship? Is it that she is a woman? Or do those things go all together—she is a woman, and women have to care more about how they’re perceived; that she’s conscientious and if his life were more unstable, it seems like that would be too much for her to ignore?
By the end, it felt like Margaret breaking up with Ivan because of their age seemed like it would be the thing to hurt him, and so whatever, maybe they’re fine. I felt like Peter was being super unfair to Naomi, despite a seemingly happy ending for them. I wasn’t sure if the narration was drawing conclusions—it seems like it was meant to be a positive ending, and it was a relief to me that everyone seemed happy enough. But I have been Naomi, and I know she probably wouldn’t be long term. I think a real Ivan would probably be okay, in the way that all relationships can be a let down or be good.
Honestly, I mostly found the attraction implausible. I haven’t met a lot of 22-year-olds in awhile, but the last one I met I definitely thought was 15. But maybe they don’t all look like that. Overall, because of that, I’ve felt harsher and harsher every year towards people in their thirties who could date anyone under 25. This book made me question if that’s fair, or just usually fair.
End of spoilers
It was interesting to examine this with a fictional character. I don’t know how to process that about my real values, because these were fictional people whose minds I could read. That’s not going to be the case in real life, so can this fictional scenario mean anything? It was at least an exercise for me in trying to be empathetic when my instinct is to be judgmental. I think it is important to be empathetic, even if in the end I choose to be judgmental anyway.
I don’t have much conclusion to that thought, but I’m curious what others think, especially if you have read this book, or another fictional scenario that asked you to empathize with a pretty real-life looking situation where you normally wouldn’t have much empathy. Or, do you always reach toward people with empathy before judgement? I can never tell if that’s something I want to aim for—if that would be personal development, or just a different way of operating. I very often reach for empathy, but not always.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book; it was well written, interesting, and thought provoking. I definitely recommend it.
Knit Tight by Annabeth Albert
Knit Tight is a romance novel about two men who are dealing with being primary caregivers (one for siblings, one for a sick aunt) and how they get to know each other and support each other. Also, one is biphobic and that is for some reason not a turn off for the other one, who is bi?
It’s cute, I liked it. It was a very fast read.
I sampled another one of her books and it was immediately so irritating (fatphobic so fast it’s really hard to not think that’s the author’s opinion). So I don’t know that I recommend her books…I am unsure I’ll try another. She’s a woman who only writes gay male romances and I feel kind of irritated by someone writing this objective-toned negative self talk about being unattractive for a demographic she’s not a part of…It’s off-putting. But, that’s an opinion, and I did like Knit Tight fine, so your mileage may vary and all that!
Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi
I’ll start by saying this book is brought to you by the same author of a book called Content Warning: Everything. This book is so disturbing and interesting. It’s a mix of sexy and sex-horrifying scenes, which really enveloped me in the confusion of the characters, confused myself about the tone of the events in the short time period covered in the first half of the novel. It has characters who do bad things but still make sense, and that’s something I don’t always see or can’t always process. My other favorite author is Toni Morrison, and one thing these authors have in common is one of the things I like most about Morrison—the ability to make something human-horrifying possible to stomach enough to process it. I think that brings me closer to other people (understanding survivors of things I haven’t experienced and comprehending those who do the violence) in a way that doesn’t wreck me.
Like all of Emezi's work, Little Rot has very well-written prose and characters. Most of the characters were empathetic in at least one moment, and I appreciate being pushed to empathize without excusing. I felt a bit exhausted but glad I read it. This book is thought-provoking, difficult, and a look straight at some of the normal horrors of life and what wealth does to cover it up.
I recommend it, but definitely with a heavy content warning for many types of violence. I did have to take a few breaks.
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley
I had an interesting intro to this book. The library notified me that my hold on it was ready, but I did not remember requesting it. I assumed a friend recommended it. I asked around, but none of my friends knew about it, so I must have gotten the recommendation from a podcast or something. I actually really enjoy library gifts from my past self, and I’m so grateful to have read it! It was a good holiday gift, to receive this book from past me and probably a stranger.
It’s about how healthy or productive conflicts escalate into “high conflict", the kind of conflict where people get deeply entrenched in “us vs them,” and includes examples all the way from the pettiest silly disputes over basically nothing all the way to literal civil warfare. It was helpful to look at all of that in one place, zooming out to what human reactions have in common.
I think overall it was making a point about US politics, through providing a bunch of examples that a great number of Americans would not have a personal stake in, which for me, not relating to most of them, was very effective in forcing me look past my defensiveness and reactivity toward the people I’ve engaged in “high conflict” with.
If you are tired of having a cortisol response to things that aren’t a physical threat, or possibly even things that are, and you would like reassurance about leaving when you can, I do recommend it.
I just finished it this week (after only 3 days of reading; it’s very engaging), so I’m still processing my thoughts on it. My initial response is relief.
I have an incredibly difficult time bringing myself to try to understand people who I perceive as my enemies in the US (conservatives). But, I live in a safe place. I have space, so I’d like to understand.
I’m a judgemental and short-tempered person. I am also a deeply understanding person. I feel satisfaction in anger, but much more satisfaction in empathy, peace, and easy forgiveness. When something that infuriates me turns out to not be malicious, I am relieved. I want to believe people are “doing their best,” as a bunch of therapists have said to me (about myself, my friends, and everyone).
A few weeks ago, someone broke into my car (gently—they didn’t actually break anything). They rifled through all my things, and all they took was an empty notebook, which was baffling. I had chargers, jumper cables, and blankets, all of which were still there.
As we drove away, my fiance asked if I was okay. I was. I genuinely didn’t care very much. It was so odd. I was enjoying being baffled by this human behavior; wondering what in the world their motivation was. It wasn’t very inconvenient to me. I was sad to lose the notebook—it was from a subscription box, so I can’t replace it. But I also didn’t mind someone else enjoying it, even if they’d done something hurtful to get it.
The next day, I was driving us, and someone was stopped in the road in a way that irritated me. They needed to pull over so we could pass each other, since there was room on their end of the road and not mine. This made me angry for several minutes. I said, “You know what’s funny? I’m having a harder time letting go of that than the break in.” They thought this was wild, and yes, funny.
When I don’t understand something, it so easy for me to get angry and frustrated. Stealing my notebook was confusing, but sounded like a teenage behavior; I can picture a teenager feeling powerless and committing small crimes to deal with that in a way that feels thrilling and fun. I don’t like it, but I get it. And I have the power of an adult and can empathize with that in a way I couldn’t as an uptight teen (instead of an uptight adult).
When people bother me on the road, I don’t want to understand or empathize, at least at first. It pulls up all my insecurities that I am an inconvenient person, on the road and otherwise. I have a lot of anxiety about driving. I am a good driver overall, but a few years ago I got kind of too aware of what a car is, and get stuck on this panic about how dangerous it is to drive, inherently, even though most people do not get in serious car accidents. It’s tied up in specific mental health issues for me, and it’s hard to let go of it. Because I am so insecure, and so distressed by unexpected behavior in general, flames erupt in my chest when people do normal human irritating behavior while I’m driving. Am I like that? Surely not, surely they are inconsiderate as a person.
The author of High Conflict specifically calls out driving in the book. She describes a time she was lost and confused and ran a red light, hearing honking behind her and feeling embarrassed. She talks about how when someone else runs a red light, they’re an entitled asshole, but when she did it, she had reasons. She points out the very normal hypocrisy of this, that many of us share.
I’ve had it pointed out to me that maybe the person doing something weird on the road is a jerk all the time, but maybe they’re in a hurry because there’s an emergency, real or percieved. There’s no way to know which is happening, and isn’t it easier to believe people have a reason for what they do?
Being angry feels like an action, like it’s giving me power back when I’m afraid. But it isn’t an action, it’s a feeling, and it isn’t a pleasant one. When I consider others have reasons for what they do, I feel an emptiness where the temporary satisfaction of rage was, and then feel calm and alright again. It’s preferable, in the end.
I’ve realized that the internet as I use it, primarily with social media and news, gives me a constant wash of anger and sadness and frustration. There is joy and hope there too, but it’s too mixed up in the emotions that my mind tells me keep me safe.
But long term, it’s made me much less stable and comfortable and able to act.
I noted in my last newsletter that post-election I have been pleased to see the people who are finally sighing and going “Okay, the rage alone didn’t help. What can I do now?” and have started looking at how to engage in their local communities. It’s given me hope and happiness.
The author of High Conflict encourages disbanding binaries—if there are only two options (like our voting system) there is so easily an “us vs them”. When there are three or more options, it becomes immediately more complex. She recommends measures that give space and time to think. She also encourages people to expand “us” wherever possible. I found all of this helpful, and obvious, and not obvious at all.
Realizing that I am American, whether I like it or not, did some of that for me. There is an “us” that is my country. There is an “us” that is all humanity, too.
Do we need a “them”? I’ve spent years online being infuriated that some people could hate me so much. And being told that actually most people want me dead, actually. Which is absolutely not true.
As I’ve started to see slivers of the “other side” of US politics, the biggest and most revelatory surprise of Trump supporters I’ve had recently is that many of them seem to think of what he says as only a performance; that it’s silly to “take him literally”.
I read an article recently about a Latino man who voted for Trump despite having an undocumented son-in-law who he loves very much. He apparently did this because he didn’t take Trump seriously on anything. He thought that the mass deportation line was just an exaggeration, that he meant he’d deport the “bad ones,” whatever that means. I still don’t find that acceptable, but I find it comprehensible. I am trying to be able to just comprehend people whose views I hate. Not to win anything at the moment—just for my own sanity.
One of the people interviewed in High Conflict voted for Obama hoping he’d “shake things up” and then when things didn’t feel shaken up, she picked the candidate who seemed more likely to shake things up—Trump. And yeah, he did. For the worse. But this person wasn’t voting for the Trump that me and my friends take very very seriously, she was voting for whoever the weird one was. It doesn’t sound like she had a single demographic to hate. It seems like many, many people are fully unaware of the actual power and intention of his position.
Knowing that is a much better space to live in for me—knowing some people do hate me and people I care about, but most of them do not; even the ones tipping a domino that hurts me and my loved ones ultimately.
Those are probably people worth talking to. They can’t change if no one talks to them, and listens to them like they’re people. That doesn’t have to be everyone, but it should probably be me, sometimes, at least. I’m not exhausted right now.
That seems so basic, but I have lived in a very traumatized bubble for most of my adulthood. I formed my adult social circles around the pieces of me that were most vulnerable. That bubble felt protective, and at first it was, but then it convinced me that the world was actually only horror outside of it.
Reading this book brought home to me the most distilled version of what I’ve felt for years—I want to treat people as people, and not be so afraid that paying any attention to them will hurt me.
A few quotes from the book that I highlighted:
“[In healthy conflict] curiosity exists. There can be yelling, too. But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.”
“Violent conflict gives people a sense of meaning that they don’t want to lose. The hotter it gets, the more essential it feels. Fire starters accelerate this process. Conflict entrepreneurs encourage people to find meaning in conflict, and it’s not hard to do.”
“Listening doesn’t mean agreeing. It doesn’t mean legitimizing or amplifying what other people say. I still decide what to put in the story—and what to keep out. Listening deeply does not mean creating false equivalencies. The rush to assume it does comes from a superficial understanding conflict.”
Again, it seems basic but it hasn’t been.
Particularly the idea that listening to someone isn’t giving them power; it’s just listening. For many years, I had an intense desire to stamp out the ideas that I felt were immoral, but over time, that has come to feel like an American evangelical value. Talking to people like you respect them can change their minds, and in the meantime, just makes living with humanity less painful. I want to at least start out with respecting people.
I occasionally see people who are disappointed that covid precautions have greatly ended referring to people’s reversion to “normal” as being actively in favor of eugenics. When I see that, I feel sad, because that sounds like an exhausting and awful way to live, feeling that almost everyone is cruel and hateful. It’s also just not the same, to inadvertently hurt people vs holding the overt opinion that some lives are better ended. Most people are not hateful, violent, or in favor of eugenics. We all have biases, and support bad systems at least here and there. But I can’t live in a reality where I believe that most people are primarily violent.
I’m hoping for a future where I can tolerate the feelings that bubble over when I’m making assumptions about people, and move past them, confident that listening won’t change my values, and that I can stop listening when it’s too much. It makes sense to make assumptions when we don’t feel safe—but I hope to be able to identify when I am unsafe and when I am just reacting to the reminder of a separate situation where I would be unsafe.
I want to stop internalizing that things are simple and bad. I am also, after reading this book, feeling less weird and ashamed to have gotten caught up in “high conflict” over things I didn’t have to. It’s human.
My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
This was a birthday gift from a friend (thank you!). I think it's very well written. I enjoyed the tone and style; the short sentences feel in line with a very practical protagonist. It's dark in ways that don’t
feel typical. I saw reviews on the back calling it very funny, which was baffling to me for almost the entire time. By the end, I got why it was funny, all at once. It felt like a very, very long joke that I didn't realize would have a punchline, because it didn't seem like a joke until I hit that punchline. I felt so sad and stressed for the protagonist, but felt light at the end.
When I talked mid-reading to the friend who gifted it to me, she said that she's read other books by Nigerian authors (Braithwaite grew up in Nigeria and the UK, says her Wikipedia page) that have a similar sense of humor. I'm happy I got to experience a different cultural expectation around humor in literature.
If you have any recommendations for funny books by Nigerian authors, please let me know! I would love to compare (and enjoy some humor).
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
I found very interesting and enjoyable. It’s a dystopia, but the experience wasn’t like most other dystopian fiction I’ve consumed. The way the very flawed society is structured is very silly, and the silliness takes some of the bite out of it, making the reading experience pleasant. I often feel like I’m dragging myself emotionally through books where dark things are happening, but this one managed be appropriately upsetting and fun at the same time. I also think the silliness and strangeness made it feel less like “your society will end up like this” spooky and more “a society could end up like this” which honestly made it feel less Edgy and more “Let’s think about power and control and how it operates.” That feels more actionable to me—a lot of stories, or maybe just how people receive those stories, seems to be about being afraid, but the purpose of dystopian fiction should be to ask us to reflect and act where possible to keep nasty powers in check.
I think my favorite fixation about dystopian novels is that they tend to have an almost throwaway acknowledgement that the poorest working class is relatively free of whatever mind-games control bullshit the protagonist is going through.
I’m fascinated by the inclusion of the idea that people in the upper middle class and richer are playing life by different rules than everyone else—that the poor have laws and the rich have rules.
Poor people in these novels are often controlled by chasing enough physical resources, and people with plenty of physical resources lose themselves in more emotional and mental systems of control (until the point at which they face physical annihilation when they step outside those rules too much). I have a lot of branching thoughts about how those things blend in my own society—definitely poorer people are also controlled by mind-games control, but it does seem like we’re all playing by different rules that are hard to see from the outside. I wonder how the internet has affected this, with all our random thoughts flowing all over the place. Yet, even with the internet, I feel like I’ve mostly interacted with people similar to me, and that I don’t know what rules I haven’t had to play by.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
Bury Your Gays was a fun ride. I read about 2/3rds of it in one day! It was very easy to read, and as a horror mystery it was very gripping and scary, but not too emotionally distressing, at least around the horror bits. It’s definitely a plot in service of a metaphor, which is something I really enjoy when it’s done well. I enjoyed finding the layers of the metaphor throughout the story, and something about the characters made them feel like they were both very real and also clearly metaphorical? An example of an idea? I recommend it if you can handle light gore and Queer Feelings.
Also, having heard Chuck Tingle speak (SPOILER), I knew the whole time that the main characters would survive—there wouldn’t be any present-day tragedy for anyone specifically called out as queer—a nice contrast with the title. And that made all the scary stuff easier to handle, for me. There is a real catharsis in reading a book called Bury Your Gays where you know that you’re safe from the trope itself.
I think this is something unique about an author who writes horror, erotica, and romance. The book had a horror and romance structure at the same time. One of the benefits of the romance genre is that most of the time you know you’re safe from any sort of devastation. Some books stray from this, particularly some thrillers I’ve read (bending the genre in the opposite direction of Chuck Tingle’s book). Horror fiction often promises that you’ll get a thrill from fear, physically safe from danger, but probably not emotionally safe from a sense of loss.
Reading something that had the emotional safety of a romance novel with the thrill of horror was excellent.
Go Lightly was a lot, emotionally. It was about being 26 in 2017, and navigating relationships (of all kinds) and bisexuality and feelings of belonging. I was 26 in 2017, and was also a bit of a mess, and it felt very relatable in a lot of ways. The plot starts with an all-nighter of booze-and-cocaine, flirty, city-life partying. The protagonist, a performer with the hideous secret of also doing temp admin on the side for cash (while her peers struggle more between gigs). She floats between multiple flirtations, navigating intimacy with a woman she's drawn to and a man who I think is just ultimately drawn to her. I understand it so well; that is how I was in my 20s too— enjoying the draw of drama with male attention and deep emotional chaos with women and non-binary lovers.
It had really gentle stakes, and I enjoyed that. I have read so many novels with high stakes, and it is nice to just float somewhere
I recommend it for a gentle ride through navigating being messy in your 20s.
Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin
This is a fascinating memoir/history book.
It mostly explores a queer culture that I haven’t experienced, either because it’s around a type of gender interaction I haven’t ever chosen, or because it exists only in the past. It centers primarily around fairly masculine gay spaces, over the course of decades.
The book opens with the author’s life in present-day London (published 2022), then shifts between the earliest years of his adulthood in the early ‘90s and the broader 20th century experience of being gay/queer/homosexual in the US, especially in San Francisco, where the author spent his 20s.
The history eventually meets up with and blends into his experience of the ‘90s and early 2000s, coming back to the present. He dips back into the past as his life takes him to London, to explore history there. The history is set around the bars themselves, and his experiences with them.
It’s primarily a memoir, and focused on gay (or equivalent) bars (or similar public-private spaces) and I’d say focused on the experience of mostly white gay people, with various references to bars that either were for black & brown people, or who turned black & brown people away. The author himself is Asian-American though. He doesn’t mention that for a few chapters, which I found interesting. His race only comes up occasionally, but mostly in the chapters about most recent life; I think likley because current queer discourse has more mainstream room for discussions on race. About the author, I have been left with the impression that he had the kind of experience where you blend in with white people well “enough” they include you for their own comfort—which gives some tangible privilege but also a sense of constant unease. He doesn’t go much into this, and I would be interested to hear more of that experience. I did notice that his Asian-American identity is in the very first line of his website, and I am really curious about how that plays into his other works and why it didn’t explicitly in this one. I am wondering how much that is where some of the “don’t belong” tone that ran throughout. I say all that having had some of those experiences myself!
Having learned so much about just these aspects of 20th century queer experience, I am so curious about the many others. I haven’t done much focused reading on queer history in the last several years—I’m excited to look up some of the writers referenced in this book and see where that takes me!
This novel explores a lot of emotionally rough topics, but does flow in a way that was gentle enough for that aspect to not be too tiring. I thought it was a very interesting idea, and it read like mostly a thought experiment, with characters and plots being turned over in the author’s and readers’ hands, which I enjoyed more than I would have expected.
Wild Things by Laura Kay
I enjoyed it, but the romance was a little exhausting, because the queer pining is too familiar. But, the setting and characters were lovely and felt very real to me, and I do recommend it. It’s about what if you did leave the city and go live with your queer friends on a farm? (And also, of course, you’re secretly super infatuated with one of them.
A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Oh my gosh, I feel like I will be thinking about for a long time. There was so much richness yet the writing felt like such a light touch. Exploring these characters felt to me like examining a drawing in a fine-point pen with rich ink—many details, very gentle. Gentleness has been something I’m enjoying a lot in my recent reads. This novel also had pretty intense content, but for the most part I felt less immersed in the intensity because of the structure. It made moments of tension or grief feel more impactful, I think. I really recommend it, but I’d also look up content warnings if you are someone who values having those. If you or your parents are immigrants (especially to/from the US, Japan, or Canada), it may be particularly impactful. Coincidentally (perhaps), this was also published in 2013 and speaks to a lot of what I have been thinking about the internet lately, entwined with many other questions.
Perfect Person is an advice podcast where people write in mostly silly problems, and the host and a guest call them back and give them live advice ranging from actually good to very chaotic.
I can
tell some guests are unable to not take it
seriously, and that would be me, so I enjoy that.
The joke premise is the host is a “perfect person” as are the guests, which qualifies them to answer the questions. This podcast is sometimes a little stressful due to the chaos, but I enjoy it.
I enjoy that the host seems very genuine and kind, but is also coming from a comedy angle. I can be tired by comedians who don't seem like kind people, so I find this podcast especially pleasant.
Sometimes the advice is great and sometimes it's bad. It does seem like the more silly the problem, the more silly the advice. When people happen to have a real problem the host and guests seem to give better advice.
I love advice podcasts in general, and I recommend this one.
Happy Wife Happy Life a relationship-themed advice podcast
run by two lesbian comedians who are also an engaged couple. They start each
episode identifying themselves as “deeply unqualified but deeply in love
comedians”. They sometimes also answer write-in questions, other times they just talk
about a romantic relationship related topic. There are sometimes guests, and sometimes they’re just
talking to each other.
I find this podcast soothing and funny,
and rarely stressful to me. I get stressed out by second-hand embarrassment, and often comedy intentionally includes it, but this one rarely does.
It’s also been nice to hear people talk about a pretty healthy-sounding relationship online. It’s kind of rare. In fiction and non-fiction, drama is always interesting to an audience, so having a stable couple rely on other aspects for comedy has been lovely. I think it's important for people to have relationship role models. I personally feel that if I had had more of that in my 20s, I would not have entered so many awkward and unhealthy relationships! I really want those role models for younger people, so I'm always happy to think about young people listening to this podcast and seeing what consideration and good communication looks like; what it is like for a couple to actually like each other. And of course for a couple to be gay!
So True is fun but stressful to me, because the host , Caleb Hearon,
seems to be the kind of person who just says things and sorts out if he means it
later. For example, he is a gay man who intermittently jokes there are
no real bisexuals, but later states that he of course supports bisexuality
which is very real.
I half recommend this one; that aspect is stressful, but it is funny, and I am trying to practice tolerating social interactions wit people who
align with most of my values but stress me out a little. I see the
value of not being so afraid to fuck up online, so it’s helpful for me
to see that, even if it’s more laid back about it than I could handle
for myself. If that seems okay to you, I’ll say that it also varies by
guest a lot how funny it is, so I’d try out a couple. I do think it’s
funny (it’s not just a stress tolerance exercise). There’s one with
Chris Fleming and I recommend almost any video with Chris Fleming (my favorite comedian).
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