richardderus's twelfth 2022 thread

American chestnut tree blooming; the species is ready to take to the air about now. Sadly the victims of climate change in decades past, there was a huge blight that took the Eastern population of these magnificent 100-foot-tall, ten-foot-canopied trees from three or four billion (yes, billion!) to a few hundred thousand.

There are efforts underway to see if the remaining trees can be crossed with other, blight-resistant strains to enable the ecological niche to be repopulated; but the American chestnut tree, as it was for many millions of years, is effectively extinct. In the end there might be a descendant of it in its place but we killed an entire species of billions of members without even noticing until the disease was too advanced to cure.

Happy Pride Month, everyone.

For 2022, I state my goal of posting an average of 4 or 5 book reviews a week on my blog, for an annual total of 250. This year's total of ~200 (I need to do more to sync the data on my reads between my blog, Goodreads, and here this year for real) posts in 50 weeks of blogging shows it's doable. My *actual* blogged total for 2021 was 229.

I've long Pearl Ruled books I'm not enjoying, but making notes on Goodreads & LibraryThing about why I'm abandoning the read has been less successful. I gave up. I just didn't care about this goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books after not remembering picking them up in the first place. What I've decided to do is have post >7 richardderus: be the Pearl-Rule Tracking post!

And now that I've gotten >3 richardderus: Burgoineing as a habit, I'm going to make a monthly blog-only post with my that-month's Burgoined books. It will appear the last Sunday of each month.



My Last Thread of 2009 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2010 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2011 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2012 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2013 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2014 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2015 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2016 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2017 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2018 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2019 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2020 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.
My Last Thread of 2021 Is Here:
Reviews are back-linked there.

Reviews one through eight? Seek them thitherward.

Looking for nine through sixteen? Click that link!

Reviews seventeen up to twenty-six? You know what to do.

I know you think reviews twenty-seven to thirty-three are here...well, you're right, they are.

Seekest ye the reviews entitled thirty-four to thirty-eight? They anent just so.

I understand you're curious about thirty-nine to forty-seven. Go back there.

Longing to view reviews forty-eight to fifty-four? Advance towards the rear.

The reviews numberèd fifty-five through sixty-four are por detrás.

Sixty-five, -six, and -seven, eh? Seekest thou in arrears.

Sixty-eight up to seventy-four aren't hard to find by using that link.

There are reviews numbered seventy-five through ninety, you know. This post links you to them.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

091 The Guncle amused, post 34.

092 Yes, Daddy stunned, post 57.

093 The Town of Babylon satisfied, post 68.

094 No Sanctuary chilled, post 83.

095 The Woman in the Library: A Novel entertained, post 93.

096 Nightcrawling gobsmacked, post 98.

097 Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir delighted, post 117.

098 Woman of Light elucidated, post 121.

099 Greenland explicated, post 136.

100 Just by Looking at Him served, post 140.

101 Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America enthralled, post 148.

102 Love, Hate & Clickbait cheered, post 168.

103 Solo Dance exhausted, post 181.

104 Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey enlightened, post 209.

105 ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons did the job, post 221.

106 Pancakes in Paris: Living the American Dream in France m'enchanté, post 239.

107 Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir rocked my world, post 255.

108 Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York INFURIATED, post 270.

109 Revolutions of All Colors impressed, post 276.

110 Bright Future: An Anthology satisfied, post 290.

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea of the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!




JUNE 2022's BURGOINES

#36 Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) is in post 279.

***

MAY 2022's BURGOINES

#34 and #35 are linked in this post here.

#31 through 33 stay linked right here.

***

APRIL 2022's BURGOINES

#25 through 30 are backlinked here.

#20 through 24 are backlinked in this post.

The first two for April are linked here.

MARCH 2022's BURGOINES

The last one for March is linked here.

The first 4 in March are back-linked here.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's BURGOINES (through #12) are here.

***
JANUARY 2022's BURGOINES are here.

This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. I just didn't care about this goal as a separate goal, but I need to learn to because I *re*Pearl-Ruled five books this December just passed after not remembering picking them up in the first place. I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to really track my Pearl Rules!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each thread's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.



JUNE 2022's PEARL-RULES

***

MAY 2022's PEARL-RULES

#32 is linked in this post right here.

#31 is linked here.

***

APRIL 2022's PEARL-RULES are backlinked here: post 75.

The first one in April is linked here.

***

MARCH 2022's ONLY PEARL-RULE

It's linked in right here.

***

FEBRUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

***
JANUARY 2022's PEARL-RULES are here.

I've decided to use BookRiot's 2022 Read Harder Challenge as a spice-me-up of meeting my reading goals. Since I'll post 225+ reviews (posts aren't the same as reviews posted, as some posts cover as many as four books!) on my blog this year *easily* I think I need to get a little more pushy. 225 reviews posted seems like a cheat as a goal since I'm on track for that now. I'm thinking 250...approximately 10% increase over 2021's actual total.

This is the list:

1. Read a biography of an author you admire.


2. Read a book set in a bookstore.


3. Read any book from the Women’s Prize shortlist/longlist/winner list.


4. Read a book in any genre by a POC that’s about joy and not trauma.
   30 Things I Love About Myself FTW!


5. Read an anthology featuring diverse voices.


6. Read a nonfiction YA comic.
   The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is illustrated and that'll have to do.


7. Read a romance where at least one of the protagonists is over 40.


8. Read a classic written by a POC.


9. Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest.
   Central Station was awarded to me on NetGalley in 2016!


10. Read a political thriller by a marginalized author (BIPOC, or LGBTQIA+).


11. Read a book with an asexual and/or aromantic main character.


12. Read an entire poetry collection.


13. Read an adventure story by a BIPOC author.
    We Could Be Heroes did the business


14. Read a book whose movie or TV adaptation you’ve seen (but haven’t read the book).
    Against the Ice: The Classic Arctic Survival Story out on Netflix now...saved the book for me, no smallest doubt.


15. Read a new-to-you literary magazine (print or digital).


16. Read a book recommended by a friend with different reading tastes.


17. Read a memoir written by someone who is trans or nonbinary.
    High-Risk Homosexual! What a read.


18. Read a “Best _ Writing of the year” book for a topic and year of your choice.


19. Read a horror novel by a BIPOC author.
    Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda is just flat terrifying!


20. Read an award-winning book from the year you were born.


21. Read a queer retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, folklore, or myth.
    Briarley FTW! I can start 2022 with one task accomplished.


22. Read a history about a period you know little about.
    The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R. chilled me with its January 6th parallels only 90 years earlier.


23. Read a book by a disabled author.


24. Pick a challenge from any of the previous years’ challenges to repeat!
    I choose 2018: Read a mystery by a person of color who is also LGBTQ+
    

I liked all of them except the comic and I'm still looking for GNs that don't make me want to scream and barf, so it's a good challenge.

I'm wondering if, in lieu of setting a numerical goal for Burgoines (see >6 richardderus:), I could just agree with myself to use the technique on 3-stars-and-under reads about which I don't much care and count them as reviews here. I've decided that I'll post 'em & collate them in each thread's post #6. Then I'll just blog 'em in gangs, once a month on the last Sunday in the month...I dunno, but I read a lot of books I don't talk about because someone loved it & I loathed it or just didn't care much about it, or I simply have no useful response...it filled time, it failed to offend or delight me. Is that information useful to anyone? Would you care if I did that and gored your reading ox?

I suppose we shall find out.

I stole this from PC's thread in 2020. I like these prompts, so I've decided to re-do them every December!
***
1. Name any book you read at any time most recently that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Street Where I Live by Alan Jay Lerner (2010)
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
St. Mary's and the Great Toilet Roll Crisis by Jodi Taylor
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple & Anita Anand because I lost interest
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard...how easy it is to fail, to do the wrong thing
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow by Christina Henry...Sleepy Hollow's about 100mi from here
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Queer people's history and the Quaker resistance to slavery
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard which I managed to get several LTers and tweeple to pick up *buffs nails*
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray, a gay WWII-set retelling of Beauty and the Beast, that I finished this week (and reviewed!)
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy was a #The1976Club read, and was so disappointing that I went on to read The Malacia Tapestry by Brian W. Aldiss to cleanse my reading palate
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Aster Glenn Gray
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The Multiverse in Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
How to Catch a Vet; the Afghanistan War
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
There isn't enough space for all the book-bullets y'all careless, inconsiderate-of-my-poverty fiends pepper me with (bold added for emphasis)
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Toast of Time is part of The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor, so it involves the future, the past, and the Multiverse
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Ife-Iyoku, Tale of Imadeyunuagbon by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Your Honor, it is my intention to assert my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to any and all questions pursuing this subject
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Brian Aldiss, 2017
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
good goddesses, I don't remember...Goodnight Moon to my daughter?— STET
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Officially it's part of the Jack Lennon series, though he barely even appears in it, so The Ghosts of Belfast via Stuart Neville gets the nod.
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The World Well Lost, ~28pp
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
see #4. I just...quit caring.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
see #9
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker, art by David Lester

I liked Sandy's Bonus Question for the meme above, so I adopted it:

26. What is the title and year of the oldest book you have reviewed on LT in 2021? (modification in itals)
The Sleeping Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot, 1962.

2021's five-star or damn-near five-star reviews totaled 28, a marked decrease from last year's 46. Fewer authors saw their book launches rescheduled, but publishers still had to cancel many of their tours and events because COVID-19. The inflationary pressure that supply-chain issues are exerting causes a lot of economic drag on the market, though there is as of yet a lot less trouble than I expected getting tree-book copies of things.

My annual six-stars-of-five read is Cove (my book review), a perfect, spare, evocative story of the pain of existing when you genuinely can't process what is happening to you, around you, despite your best and most well-practiced efforts there is just no righting the boat. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2022. I can not forget this read. I refer to it in my head, I think about its stark, vividly limned images. I am so deeply glad Author Cynan wrote it. To quote myself from my review: "This is the book I wish The Old Man and the Sea had been, but was not."

In 2020, I posted over 215 reviews here. In 2022, my goals are:

to post 250 reviews on my blog

to post three-sentence Burgoines of books I don't either adore or despise

to complete at least 275 total reviews of all types

Most important to me again this year is to report on DRCs I don't care enough about to review at my usual level. I still don't want to keep just leaving them unacknowledged! There are publishers who want to see a solid, positive relationship between DRCs granted and reviews posted, and I do not blame them a bit. To 1 June 2022, I've posted 136 reviews of all types on my blog. That makes an annual total of 275 requiring only 139 more posts (almost exactly the same amount!), and a goal of 288 seem attainable.

Ask and ye shall receive! 'Nathan Burgoine's Twitter account hath taught me. See >3 richardderus: above. I just need to keep getting better about *applying* it, being less prolix and more productive!

And that, as the saying goes, is that. Please make yourselves comfortable, and welcome to the twelfth version of the thread.

Am I first? Well. Yay for me.

Happy Pride Month to you, too, dear one.

*smooch*

Happy New Thread!

And Happy Pride Month, as well!

>9 karenmarie: You are indeed the first past the post, Horrible! Have Catherine the Great's crown:


Thank you for the Pride Month wishes, and the same to Jenna, you, and Bill. *smooch*

ETA size! Wow!

>10 mahsdad: Thank you, Jeff, and happy Pride to you and yours as well!

Happy new thread, Richard dear, happy Pride month!

>1 richardderus: Extinction, so sad, especially because "we" caused it :'(

Happy New Thread, RD! I can’t believe you’re already on a new one. I’ll have to go back to the last to catch up on your reviews. That’s a purty chestnut tree up there.

Our crabapple and dogwood trees looked briefly great. Because of our weird cold/hot spring, they were in full bloom only for a few days, darn it.

>1 richardderus: As a schoolboy I was bonkers for conkers! Love the chestnut tree.

Happy new one dear fellow.

Happy New Thread, Richard dear.

Happy new one, RD.

>17 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie, it's new-thread day around here.

>16 ronincats: Thank you, Roni! *smooch*

>15 PaulCranswick: I think most kids who grow up around chestnuts are intrigued by conkers, they're so weird and alien and perfectly ordinary at the same time. Fun to have such weirdness so readily to hand!

Thanks, PC, see you around the plantation.

>14 jnwelch: Oh, the fruit trees are going to be very very confused for some time to come, Joe. Let's just hope we're not seeing an immutable future here.

Enjoy the catch-up...lots to see. I'm really productive right now!

>13 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! Thank you *smooches* back

Happy new thread, Richard.
I remember getting very confused between chestnuts and horse chestnuts as a child. Not to the point of trying to eat a conker, but that level of confusion. Nature has never been my strong point.

>19 Helenliz: Thanks, Helen. Nature's wonderful! So pretty! And the Cadillac window frames it admirably. Turn up the stereo, I like this song.

Happy new thread, Richard!

This is what I like to see Richard: a thread that isn't beyond my grasp. Lol. Hoping to try to keep up😳

>22 brenzi: No pressure, Bonnie, no one here takes attendance. Be here when here's where you want to be. *smooch*

>21 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita! *smooch*

Happy new thread, Richard!

I know someone who is working to bring the chestnut back. My hometown has (had?) a tree warden, and it's interesting looking back at the town reports when the blight was in full force.

>24 bell7: Thanks, Mary! I'm glad the work is being done, but like the Cavendish banana and the Gros Michel before it, there's really no way to bring back the same species. The blight will still be here. We'll have to keep the niche open by changing the species.

Better than nothing, but....

Sneaking in after cruising through the last bits of your prior thread. You are well underway on the June reviews!!

>1 richardderus: Effing climate change.

...maybe it's because I'm old...but this speaks to and for me. #Pride2022

>26 EBT1002: Hi Ellen! I'm good to go until Sunday, which I'm polishing up now. I still don't like it just yet. Then Tuesday's got to be written. Luckily it's a book I enjoyed, erm, uh, well...appreciated...and respected anyway so I'll have more trouble keeping it within readability tolerances.

>27 richardderus: I love it!!

Happy new one!

Happy new thread!

Happy everything, Richard!

‘Morning, RD! Happy Friday to you.

>11 richardderus: So many diamonds and pearls… 4,936 diamonds, 74 pearls, and 1 red spinel to be exact. I thought the stone was a ruby, and now know what a spinel is. I always learn exciting things here.

>26 EBT1002: Busy man.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

091 The Guncle by Steven Rowley

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is honestly a bit out of his league.

So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick’s brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of “Guncle Rules” ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting—even if temporary—isn’t solved with treats and jokes, Patrick’s eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you’re unfailingly human.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY AFTER MONTHS ON THE WAITING LIST. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE.

My Review: Last year's big beach read was damned near perfect for the job of being gay enough to really show people how this shit works in real life without making straight people squirm. No fewer than 26 (twenty-six!) mass-media straight venues listed it as a must-read! TWENTY-SIX! Ten years ago, I'd've fallen over in a heap; now I'm mightily impressed. And that, mes vieux, is what we call "progress" of the best sort.

But really, can you fault their discernment?

“You’re forty-three!” Maisie bellowed.

“Who are you, the DMV? Lower your voice.”

“That’s almost fifty!” Grant’s eyes grew big.

Patrick took the jab, then closed his eyes and bit his lower lip; the observation was just shy of a hate crime.

–and–

“Canada is harmless and the prime minister is a total snack, so we can do Paw Patrol. But another time, because we have to move beyond brunch and start planning our day. What are you guys thinking, do you have anything on your calendars?”

–and–

Books should be an experience, he thought, not a trophy for having read them.

Really, the most delicious Negroni (Aperol! faugh!) of fun and profundity for the masses! I can absolutely recommend this book to straight women, gay guys over thirty, and the very most adventurous straight men and lesbians.

...wait...that's it? That's the review?

Honestly, it could be. That's what the reviewer does, right? Tell you and those like you if a book is worth reading, and identify that group to the best of their ability. Illustrate with relevant (in the reviewer's opinion) examples, do one's best not to spoiler things for the sensitive fleurs who, inexplicably, still read reviews but don't want to know anything that happens in the artwork in question. But the twenty-six (!) media outlets that yawped about this book in 2021 already did that. (They did not tell you, however, about being assaulted in the sensibilities by twelve {12} w-bombs. It was an invasion of the eye-disease-having winkers. Ick.)

So, let me tell you a little something that is a spoiler, but is also something you really need to know: This is also a book about loving more than you fear being hurt. This is a book about processing loss, making its deforming agonies fit into a shape that will carry you through the rest of a life; this is a book about the unique, unusual pain of losing your mate as a gay man.

Regular readers know that I've had my share of losses, incalculably awful ones, and met them without a lot of inner strength due to my own beginnings among women who judged, and felt comfortable expressing their contempt for, me. I'm not going to rehash the stories, they're spread all over this place, but the fact is I understand Patrick well. He found his Joe...who chose him to be his family...and he had his RG bestie Sara, who also chose him to be her family to the point she married his little brother. His family, then, was born, found, made. He felt it was his...and gawd laughed her evil laugh.

Joe, gone in an instant, his life taken before his body stopped working; Sara, withered and wizened by illness, slowly slowly vanishing, and Patrick losing again...this time with higher stakes, loss built on loss. And Sara? Well. That's the loveliest thing about this book. Sara, whom we meet briefly in flashbacks of her loving bestieship with Patrick, is honestly like Nut the sky goddess and the goddess of Mothers as she was The Mother. Her role is pervasive, her life is not over...never truly will be...but she is, for all that, a space not an object. And that is so exactly like motherhood that it's really a little terrifying....

The word "Guncle" is a portmanteau of "gay" and "uncle" which I trust won't surprise readers of my words. It's a way of refining a relationship that is largely, in the twenty-first century, fungible. I called men "Uncle" who were neither married to my aunts nor related to my parents. It's a standard feature of life now, we claim relationships and make of them things that we're interested in having or being. The family Patrick has built is so deeply rooted that Guncle Patrick is GUP, the Guncle, anything you want because he's still building his identity. As we all should throughout our lives, after Joe's and Sara's deaths, Patrick is reinventing himself in this summer-long story of a clueless gay man taking on the role of grief counselor and rock of support to two kids and, finally, himself.

"Coming of age" is a phrase that, when applied to novels, shows, films, and other cultural detritus, causes my stomach to churn with acid produced by the "flight" part of the famous response. I hated being a teenager and I don't much want to experience that horrible time again in art. Any art. But the simple fact is, we come of middle-age, we come of old-age...we aren't ever Finished Products. That's for characters created to show us their intended side, their best profile. This book's biggest and best gift to the reader of middle or older years is that: Patrick comes of age, again, as he processes his intense and life-altering grief with humor and wit, with stakes far beyond his own self, with clumsy but real love and, finally, respect for the role of loss and sadness, for grief's immense and unending weight.

Lift weights for strength. Do yoga for flexibility. Nourish your body with the tenderest care and attention to its needs. Because it is the vessel that will support your huge burden of grief and sadness, your light and love, your voice as you speak your truth.

Gym bunny GUP did. And Author Steven Rowley led us there without making it a trudge, or selling it short; I didn't just think up that stuff and say it here, I found it all in this light, easy-to-read novel about a man asked to do the impossible. Again: Heal.

>33 karenmarie: Astonishing number of diamonds! That spinel is the most spectacular stone of the lot, to me.

Busy, busy! *snore*

>32 jessibud2: Thanks, Shelley!

>31 ArlieS: Thank you, Arlie!

>30 drneutron: Thanks, Doc!

>29 EBT1002: Heh...thought you'd get a kick out of that. Have a lovely rest-of-weekend!

>34 richardderus: I’m so glad you liked The Guncle. I reviewed it on January 2nd, just re-read my review, and realize that it is eminently re-readable. Rowley’s Lily and the Octopus is devastatingly good, too, if you haven't already read it.

>36 karenmarie: I did indeed like The Guncle, and yes indeedy do ma'am I can see this being very re-readable. It's got a lot of heart-warming stuff that would wrap you up like a good sweater.

I'm not up for animal-end-of-life stories. Hard no. But I'm sure he did it well, because he's got a deft touch with the sentimentalism brush.

Wordle 349 4/6

🟨🟨⬜⬜🟨
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
It was a good, solid entertainment today. No "guess which one we want!" time at all. AEONS, MIRTH, SHADE, PHASE

I'm between books. Everything I look at I toss immediately off of my kindle. le sigh

>38 richardderus: Wordle 349 3/6

⬛🟨🟩🟩🟨
🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

>39 mckait: Try The Guncle. Get the free sample and see if it's going to work for you, it can't hurt. And I'm ***sure*** your library has it if it does.

Three! Madam!! You dare to show your face around here with a Wordle-score like that!

*smooch*

>34 richardderus: I suspect I will like, RD. On the list into the cart it goes.

>41 Caroline_McElwee: Hi Caro! I think you'll really enjoy the story...I look forward to hearing your thoughts when you're done.

>34 richardderus: Oooh, sounds like something I need to read.

Happy new thread, even though it starts out with a sad, sad tale.

Glad to see The Guncle was one you liked, despite all the w-bombs. There were enough that even I noticed, though usually my eyeroll is for the over-used phrase "I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding."

Happy weekend! *Smooch*

Edited to get the touchstone to work

>44 bell7: Oh, I never knew that phrase got under your fingernails. I admit that I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding when I realized I've never used that particular locution.

*smooch*

>43 Storeetllr: Goodness, Mary, I had no idea that you hadn't or I'd've been slamming your doors to get you to look at it! It's *perfect* for your hot-summer-day reading!

Humans are, I'm sad to acknowledge, vile, irredeemable scum.

>45 richardderus: Hahahaha nicely done. It does irk me, though I'll allow it once in a YA book. Twice is just pure laziness.

I've been hearing good things about The Guncle. Glad to hear you enjoyed it too.



Happy Pride, RDear. *smooch*

Thought you might enjoy this article, my octopus-loving friend!

https://bigthink.com/life/octopus-intelligence/#Echobox=1652873037

>44 bell7: I do the second part of your eye roll phrase, I just tend not to notice. When I was learning to drive I used to approach a roundabout and hold my breath on the approach. I'd get round it fine and as I drove away, the instructor would say "and breathe". I had no idea I'd been holding my breath until that point. I assume it self corrected, as I don't turn blue when driving on my own...

Hi Richard, Happy New Thread dear friend.

>40 richardderus: I might look at Guncle..we'll see. I picked up a book from KU that was written by someone I know, but he is using a pen name due to... things.

>51 mckait: Ooo, "things" sound most intriguing...and since it's free, why not give it a whirl.

>50 johnsimpson: Thank you, John!

>49 Helenliz: Heh!

>48 ronincats: Oh, thanks Roni! Lisa Poncet got in a plug for my other dotes, the cuttlefish. Fascinating animals indeed.

>47 MickyFine: Thank you, Micky! I really love the meme. *smooch*

>46 bell7: :-P~~~

>34 richardderus: BB for me. Sounds like a book with lots of funny moments.

Happy weekend

Happy New(ish) thread Richard. Stories like that about the American Chestnut Tree are so sad.

Hiya, RDear! Happy Saturday.

>37 richardderus: I’m not into animal stories in general, much less animal-end-of-life-stories. I bought the book for the title, then read it because it was just so damned good. I personally have to be the strong one here at home with animal-end-of-life-stories, having eased Magic, Merlin, KW, and Coco Chanel into ...animal... for your tender sensibilities... heaven with the help of the vet. Bill, bless his heart, has gone with me, but I’m the one who has always made the decision and been holding a paw at the end.

>44 bell7: The phrase my high school friend Lori and I used to look for in books by Barbara Cartland was something like “He drew her soul from between her lips”.

>45 richardderus: or, his lips, in your case.

*smooch*

>49 Helenliz: That's very interesting to me, as it's something I'm not sure I've ever done completely unconsciously - like, sure, take in a breath and hold it when under stress, but I realize I'm doing it before I let the breath out? I'm probably overthinking this hahaha.

>55 karenmarie: Hahahahaha that's too funny.
When I read a Diana Wynne Jones book, I look for "higgeldy-piggeldy" to be in there somewhere, but I enjoy finding that word.

Happy weekend, Richard! Hope it's full of excellent reads and relaxation. *smooch*

092 Yes, Daddy by Jonathan Parks-Ramage

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive, scorching modern gothic, Yes, Daddy follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn.

Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair.

When summer arrives, Richard invites his young lover for a spell at his sprawling estate in the Hamptons. A tall iron fence surrounds the idyllic compound where Richard and a few of his close artist friends entertain, have lavish dinners, and—Jonah can’t help but notice—employ a waitstaff of young, attractive gay men, many of whom sport ugly bruises. Soon, Jonah is cast out of Richard’s good graces and a sinister underlay begins to emerge. As a series of transgressions lead inexorably to a violent climax, Jonah hurtles toward a decisive revenge that will shape the rest of his life.

Riveting, unpredictable, and compulsively readable, Yes, Daddy is an exploration of class, power dynamics, and the nuances of victimhood and complicity. It burns with weight and clarity—and offers hope that stories may hold the key to our healing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Gay people are, for better or worse, people. With the usual people-faults like greed and selfishness, the usual weaknesses like hunger for validation and sexual power. With the flaws hidden or simply not discussed, we're reduced to side characters in other people's stores; with them celebrated, we're back in the bad old days of Cruising or The Boys in the Band or...well, pick your poisonous fear-mongering. This is one of the reasons I liked Bath Haus despite my reservations about some of its elements.

This story? Those elements are dialed up to eleven, and then blown (!) up by even viler perpetrators! So...why is this a full-four-star review, given the (admittedly partial) CW list and the main character's self-destructive greed? I gave Bath Haus a little less than four full stars, after all.

The reason is simple, really. Because I want to and because it's my judgment.

What makes this reading experience so much more agreeable to me is the way I'm introduced to Jonah. From the very first pages of the book, there's nothing, not one thing, that happens in which you, the reader, can place simple trust. You know what's gone down, and you see it from a simple first-person point of view, narrated in second person to make the stakes inescapably clear. It's more effective in eliciting my sympathy than was the igniting event of Bath Haus so I was much more ready to put my crash helmet on and tighten up the buckles.

As we zig-zag through the darkening, increasingly menacing landscape of the story's world, no matter how high the gloss or hard the glitter, one can't forget the first pages and their stark warning not to accept anything at face value...given how many religious people there are in here, that's another clue. The simplest acts, the calmest words, all freighted with suspicion because you (narrator, reader) simply don't know which ones are lies and which ones are just...air. And there's an ending which, under almost any other regime, I'd be rattling my tin cup against my cage's bars to protest...but remember when I told you about the way Jonah is introduced to us? It's my thinking that the next act's curtain will rise soon.

When the story really reaches for darkness, really digs into the terrible truths of our society's seriously screwed-up power dynamics, it becomes a little less glib and surface-oriented, which serves the story well. It's not like we're going to be subjected to Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis lecturing us on the inherent abusiveness of capitalism. It *is* very much a carefully thought-out tale of what happens to people who, for a large variety of societally mandated reasons, simply don't matter and aren't protected. We're even granted a glimpse into the genesis of the imbalance in this particular pairing of men, Jonah and Richard, though it's not the main thrust (!) of the piece.

Bad sex puns aside, this is a very, very sexual story. It will not be for most straight readers. If #MeToo made you mad, this will make you even more mad because I can almost promise you this is more fact-based than you might think. It's really interesting that certain famous entertainment-industry older men are...silent...these days...and one wonders what's happening with the announced Amazon Studios streaming film in the past couple years.

The paperback version dropped this past Tuesday, so permaybehaps we'll get to see the darkness of Daddy on our screens before long. I'm not all the way sure I will be one of the early audience members. I will need to build up my courage to go back into this seriously scary, very well-crafted story universe.

Wordle 350 3/6

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Wardle be praised! I Wordled in 3! AEONS, MIRTH, FROTH

>58 richardderus: Congratulations on the Wordle-in-3! That’s especially cool because I saw that there is quite a potential for the “guessing game” with this word. You and I sidestepped that today.

I’m still really enjoying the game. It’s such a small time commitment, and it feels like a daily brain fine-tuning. Yay for Wordle!

Karen O

>59 klobrien2: You, too! Yay for brain tuning indeed. I'm sure there's some more morally improving use for those 5 minutes. I do not care to look into the matter.

>56 bell7: Honestly, that Cartland locution is...disturbing...how vampiric.

Thanks, Sugarcube, and the same back at'cha *smooch*

>55 karenmarie: "lids" permaybehaps.

I just do not want to know from that side of it. I can't. People dying? Whatever. Kids or animals? Nope. I'm impressed at your fortitude. *shudder*

>54 SandDune: Hi Rhian, thanks! I'm saddened by them, but the stories themselves can do some good. It doesn't occur to people to conceptualize how much has already gone, and forever, until the stories of (eg) the Gros Michel banana or the American chestnut are made front and center.

>53 figsfromthistle: Hi Anita! Thank you for the weekend wishes, and enjoy The Guncle when his turn at the top of the stack arrives.

>58 richardderus: Nice! I barely squeaked by in 6. Some days it just doesn't pay to try and do Wordle before your first full cup of coffee. ADIEU, STORY, TROOP, WRONG (yes, I forgot about the stupid T), BROTH, FROTH. Sheesh.

Took me 5. I worked through food then divine anger before getting to the right answer. Not sure what that says about me...

>64 Helenliz: That you're erudite. No worries, Helen.

>63 Storeetllr: I can attest to that from my own experience, Mary. I don't plan on doing that again. Too humiliating.

Happy weekend, y'all!

I fell way behind on threads while at the conference. Trying to catch up.

'Morning, RDear. Happy Sunday to you.

>57 richardderus: It may or may not surprise you, but I've added this to my wish list.

*smooch*

093 The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity—Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.

Wordle 351 3/6

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It wasn't *obvious* but the letters being in position made it inescapably one word. AEONS, MIRTH, DEPTH

>67 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible, happy Sunday to you, too.

I'm a little surprised. I don't think you'll get a lot out of the sex scenes, but I *do* think the overarching plot will appeal to you. There's a lot to be said for challenging one's squickinesses in reading.

*smooch*

>66 thornton37814: Hi Lori! I can certainly see the many distractions of a conference making the threads pile up unread. It's enough of a challenge to keep it under double-digit posts to read without that.

Afternoon, Big Daddy! I have missed reading through your reviews - I love your turn of phrase, and every one speaks to me even when I don't want to read the book. *smooch* Adding The Guncle to The List.

>71 Crazymamie: Hi Mamie! Happy you're here. I'm sure The Guncle will get some good smiles from you. I'm so pleased you're enjoying my reviews, too, since it's always nice to know someone's getting something good from one's labors.

*smooch*

Speaking of: "...I prefer Wayne Booth’s formulation: criticism is “more a way of living with variety than subduing it.” Which is another way of saying that criticism shouldn’t really be about discovering the “truth” of anything. It can instead be about making arguments that can convince other people and, more importantly, give them a chance to make their own arguments. Meaning that being right as a critic is less about what you say and more about what you make possible for your reader to say. Less an art of verity, really, than an art of variety."
From LARB. A very trenchant response to this whiny, "oh you just don't have the brains to understand" n+1 piece from last year. It has a point to make (I won't quite say "axe to grind") and it is thus:

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

Reader, behold your gatekeeper, standing by a broken fence in the middle of an open plain.

So...only a *paid*professional*critic* has the nous to publish a real review. Ugh. Talk about toxic gatekeeping!

But what does a mere book blogger like me know.

>69 richardderus: Wordle 351 3/6

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Currently reading a book by an author I know. His first fiction. Sci/fi

As I read I wonder what you would think...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WVYH844/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title#customerRevie...

>74 mckait: Ooh, three too! I'll give Author Call a whirl. *smooch*

>73 richardderus: Maybe in his world there are no other critics, than those who are paid and want more pay?
We know better!

>1 richardderus: We (well, I) have a couple of chestnut trees, planted in October 2014. My wife was enthralled by the huge chestnuts on the campus of the school our three oldest granddaughters attended (Gracie still has a year to go). So we asked a local arborist/landscaper to find a couple of such trees, and he did. Seven plus years later, they are still saplings, but the blooms (just past for 2022) are wondrous.

         

  

>75 richardderus: yay! let me know if you do.. He has written a lot of non fic under another name, this is different

>78 mckait: I will!

>77 weird_O: Wow! I have never seen flowers like that on any chestnut! What variety are they?

Nice images of Lady and Tree.

>76 FAMeulstee: I kind of want to know where that world is....

>79 richardderus: I don't think you really would want that, Richard dear. I ment a rather narrow world that only turns around money.
Look what he said: The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay.
He can't even imagine someone would write a review for free!

'Morning, RDear. Happiest of Mondays to you.

I'm coffee-ing up and going to enjoy a quiet day here at the house.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

I find the arguments for and against paid/professional reviews fascinating, and I'm not sure I come down strongly on either side. On the one hand, as a librarian I depend on professional reviews to give me an idea of whether or not to buy a book for our patrons (though of course I'll always buy the new James Patterson no matter what the critics say). But as a reader, I tend to prefer another reader's perspective, and when it's a bunch of smart book folks like the 75ers, I get so I know if, say, you and Roni recommend a book I'm almost guaranteed to like it too. I may or may not like a romance that Katie or Micky recommends, but I'll almost definitely like the fantasy that Micky reads. And that tells me more than Kirkus. I think they both have their place, and if anything I think the multiple voices, whether professional writers/critics or bloggers, just means a good thing for getting a lot of books out there and noticed. My two cents plus, anyway.

Happy Monday! *smooch*

094 No Sanctuary:Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses by Stephen Lane

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: School can be a special sort of nightmare for LGBTQ youth, who are sometimes targets of verbal or physical harassment with nowhere to turn for support. No Sanctuary tells the inspiring story of a mostly unseen rescue attempt by a small group of teachers who led the push to make schools safer for these at-risk students. Their efforts became the blueprint for Massachusetts’s education policy and a nationwide movement, resulting in one of the most successful and far-reaching school reform efforts in recent times. Stephen Lane sheds light on this largely overlooked but critical series of reforms, placing the Safe Schools movement within the context of the larger gay rights movement and highlighting its key role in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals throughout society.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This academic study of an important piece of Pride Month's celebrations...the history of how we, as Queer or QUILTBAG or Gay people came to have safe spaces and allies in Massachusetts's schools...starts its journey with a solid overview of the struggles to get going against conservative outrage and loudly performed "fear" of what they saw and see as sick, perverted people having open and honest contact with the youth of Massachusetts. This hideous risk to their children's physical, psychic, and moral safety was intolerable, and they made no bones about shouting it. The problem was that there was, and remains, no scintilla of evidence to support their fear-mongering. What the evidence showed, and still shows, is that QUILTBAG students face physical threats and psychic battering from their intimates, and need the schools the law says they must attend as safe spaces, as refuges against the ignorant fearful powers that control their very lives.

A group of teachers, whose front line positions place them in the path of evidence of physical harm and threats to mental health disproportionately meted out to these minority-among-minorities students, and allied administrators worked together to create some safety for the abused from their abusers while they were at school. But that story isn't the beginning of The Story. Education in the US is a fraught subject. We're arguing, in 2022, about what students should be allowed to see that might affirm and support ideologies like anti-racist thinking and identities like Queerness. Many conservative...misnomer; I believe these people are radicals, determined to remake Others into invisible or absent non-persons...parents are deeply threatened by their children learning that white is not Right. (See my review of Jason Stanley's HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them for more about why this fear is expressed now.)

In the more-openly racist times of 1970s Massachusetts, teachers were aware of the horrors their Black queer students were suffering. And that, bless their born-in-the-1940s hearts, moved them to action and got them nagging their administrators to assist in designing ways and means that school could be turned into the Safe Schools program, created to provide guidance and professional development for administrators and teachers about this at-risk population. It was, and remains, a startling resource to someone whose contact with the schools was indifferent at best and malevolent at worst.

What results from this program is remarkable both as educational and social policy. It affirms its allyship and it defends its vulnerable client-students. What the author does to make this come alive for us, however, is not always as energetic or as riveting as these results might suggest. If your first respsonse to this story is, "I don't know anything about the gay-rights struggle so I won't *get it*," allow me to assure you that you will know quite a bit more about the gay-rights struggles, the civil rights struggles, and the reactionary resistance to them by the time you get to the Safe Schools story.

The fact that we're given a whirlwind tour of forty years' activity before we get to The Story isn't necessarily a bad thing. It pays for you, the potential reader, to know what you're in for before starting the journey. I was passingly familiar with the history presented here on a national level but the specifics dealing with Massachusetts are new, or at least new in this kind of detail, to me. I do not think the subtitle, "Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses," overstates the delivered story or oversells the impact of the program Author Lane profiles.

Again quoting Author Jason Stanley's book referred to above, "For the fascist, schools and universities are there to indoctrinate national or racial pride, conveying for example (where nationalism is racialized) the glorious achievements of the dominant race." The gender and sexual minorities are very much included in this exclusion, if you'll forgive the ugly phrase that still says what I mean better than anything else I came up with. Safe Schools is an enemy enclave, a Mariupol that the reactionary right needs to take control of. It flies in the face of the fascist agenda of normalization for only the identities and people that the fascists deem desirable and worthy for schools to act as places of succor and freedom for those Othered.

In the four years since this book first appeared, its chronicle of good people seeking to give weak, vulnerable people safety and affirmation has become more elegiac in the reading. There are so few places left in the US where this kind of active, protective stance is being taken on this level and with goals as ambitious as these goals are. I'm sure the future holds more challenges to the Safe Schools program, and the need for it will only increase on a daily basis.

Read this deeply tendentious tale of the right thing getting done. Let its factual basis inspire you to take action of your own.

Good review - I've added it to the list.

>84 drneutron: Thank you, Jim. It's a subject I think we, as an aggregate, are underconcerned about.

>82 bell7: ...and it's exactly that view that LARB's most recent post on the ongoing debate makes, Mary! It's not either/or, but both/and. Paid review gigs are thin on the ground, which is one reason I've stopped asking after I realized that Lambda Literary and The Coil and several late, lamented sites paid me whatever and it came at the expense of someone who's trying to make a living at this.

Not fair of me, and not practical given the vagueness of the rules on what constitutes a chuck-me-out offense regarding money.

>81 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! I'm insufficiently caffeinated to attack Wordle, but I expect I'll be ready soon...the last dregs of the pot have collided with the remaining
milk.

>80 FAMeulstee: I suspect the author lives hand-to-mouth. Like many creatives in this bleak end-stage capitalism world, what they DO is what is important in allocating them resources and that, I fear, is a poor prognosis for cultural activity.

Wordle 352 5/6

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Ugh...the guessing game again. AEONS, MIRTH, MOODY, BLOOM, GLOOM

>79 richardderus: I have no idea what variety we got, Richard. We just asked for trees as close to American chestnuts as the arborist could find. He may have told us what they are, but whatever he said drifted away without leaving a mark.

>87 weird_O: It's the red-flowering horse-chestnut tree. It's completely blight resistant, and so can't act as a reservoir for the awful disease. It's also used in Chinese traditional medicine. Apparently its quercetin content is high, and that is supposed to be effective against some sort of disease process.

No idea if it's true, but it's quite pretty.

Whuh whuh whuh...How do you know? Image search? You were just toying with me, weren't you. You knew all along. :-) heh.

>89 weird_O: Nope...the Miracle of Image Search! I'm pretty interested in botany, as a pomologist manqué with poor org-chem grades. (Fiendish things, protein folds.)

As of the current time there is no variety of American Chestnut that is blight resistant. If you want more information on American Chestnuts you can go to the American Chestnut Foundation web page. Here is the url. https://www.acf.org/

What is interesting is that the Chestnut blight can't kill the root system of the American Chestnut tree, unlike what happened to the American Elm with the Dutch Elm Disease. Here is quote about this from the American Chestnut Foundation. "Despite its demise as a lumber and nut crop species, the American chestnut is not extinct. The blight cannot kill the underground root system as the pathogen is unable to compete with soil microorganisms. Stump sprouts grow vigorously in cutover or disturbed sites where there is plenty of sunlight, but inevitably succumb to the blight. This cycle of death and rebirth has kept the species alive, though considered functionally extinct."

The American Chestnut Foundation advises that people continue to plant the American Chestnut tree - just to keep the species alive.

Many years ago I was surprised to find an American Elm growing along the bank of the Republican River in Kansas. My father was with me. He explained to me that the American Elm is not extinct, but eventually will be. Isolated trees stay alive longer than trees that were planted in proximity to each other. These trees can grow to maturity and produce seeds. These seeds sprout and grow, but all of them currently, eventually succumb to the Dutch Elm Disease. However, he said that we should help the American Elm to continue to grow by planting them. I will never forget his next words. "Sometime, somewhere, somehow an American Elm will eventually grow that will be resistant to the disease. That is how nature works. ... (there was a pause here) Most of the time. We just need to help her instead of hindering her."

The people planting American Chestnuts have the same hope.

>91 benitastrnad: Absent gene-spicing or other kinds of modification, climate change will land on these remnant populations with a 500lb wrecking ball.

They are, sad to say, doomed.

095 The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In every person's story, there is something to hide...

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Hannah Tigone, successful Sydney author, is writing a new book. She's set it in Boston, Massachusetts, and that being an almost literal antipode to Sydney, she needs some help with the local color. Traveling there is out; this is the time of COVID. Google Street View is something you're not quite going to get the "feel" of a place from; the look, yes. Maybe if it were a refresher for a previously visited place...but no. Enter Leo Johnson, Boston-based novelist and strangely excited research/local-color assistant to Hannah. His take, which becomes an intake, on the story is a framing device for a strange (and not entirely successful) hybrid epistolary/story-within-story tale of murders, criminality, race, and reconciliation.

The manner of the story's introduction:
I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

It's all there from the get-go...the beautiful, elegant phrase-making, the sheer bravado of owning up to feeling confused and not being quite up to the task in hand...well! Okay, I know where my money's going on the craps table. We're heading for Misdirection City by way of The Long and Winding Road.

What follows is largely that, only it's split into segments by the nature of its authors-collaborating (increasingly Leo inserts his personal take on the story Hannah sends him, and he doesn't hold back from the get-go). My best example of this is very early in the book, when the dreaded "separated by a common language" issue rears its confusing head.

Australian/Commonwealth-usage note: The word "jumper" does not exist in the US. It appears to mean "sweater" or "sweatshirt" more often than not as used in this book. But believe your local-colorist...it is not extant in US contexts. At all. If you say it to a street-American they will stare at you...a few might ask, in mild bewilderment, if you mean "jumpsuit" which you most emphatically do not:

NOT a normal, unobtrusive street-wear item like a sweater or sweatshirt. Like our Hannah means it to be. It's at this point that I began to trust the framing device, about which review-readers have heard, to deliver on its often overlooked promise: Can authors working together be translated into a satisfying reading experience?

It can. It does. It's going to require a little bit more effort from you, I will be honest; you'll need to use your own little grey cells to make the connections you need to make. I won't go into why that is, because it's not just a spoiler but because it's a feature of the story. If anyone reading this hasn't read The Fan, it's a great next stop on the epistolary-novel-as-suspense trip. There are some very interesting similarities in the framing device...epistolary novels aren't all that often the choice authors make for suspense stories, and that accounts for a lot of it.

What keeps me from running down my street shoving the book into the hands of strangers (I live on the boardwalk in a beach town, so that's not as counterproductive as it first sounds) is the fact that the framing device keeps the pace of the action down. It's a feature of thrillers, which is what this is, to move quickly from scene to scene. In this case that does not happen. It's not a *fatal* flaw, but it's a real one.

It's all the rest of the features of Winifred/Freddie the Aussie in Boston as stand-in for Hannah the Sydney author creating her that kept me going when the pace flagged. It's the intricacies of the story-world (and the sneaky, weird ending!) that caused the most scalp-scratching moments and the most grin-producing realizations.

I'd say that four stars should shine on your path to the bookery of your choice to procure your own copy.

>93 richardderus: - Hmm, intriguing. But I get impatient with thrillers that are not thrill-y, so your comments on the framing device slowing the pace down concern me.

I'll have a look at the library for it. That way, no harm, no foul if it doesn't work.

Morning, BigDaddy! I can't decide if that one (The Woman in the Library) is one for The List or not - what do you think? Interesting about the use of the word jumper. I wore jumpers when I was little - they were dresses with no sleeves or collars that you wore over another top. So definitely not sweaters, but jumpers were a common item of clothing back in the 70s in Indiana. As an adult, when I read about someone wearing a jumper it was confusing to me until I realized they were referring to what we call a sweater. I just love language stuff like that.

>95 Crazymamie: Morning, Mamie me lurve! I'm glad you're as amused as I am by the by-ways of our mutual language. Which, let's be honest, should be called "American" at this point. We're not like our motherin' tongue, we don't Frenchify stuff to look evah-so and so let's just let 'em go. (Anyone who calls a "zee" a "zed" is simply too, too for moi.)

See below for The Woman in the Library: A Novel. Deffo recommend, though.

>94 katiekrug: It's out today, Katie. If they don't have it this weekend, it's a reserve item...and honestly, I think I oversold the slowing of the pace. It's more a sense of creeping dread than a thriller-y chill, but it's very real and uneasy.

>96 richardderus: - Ah, ok. My library has it on Kindle, but there's a wait. I'll have to be patient :)

096 Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Rating: 4.5* of five

Now an Oprah's Book Club selection!

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES WRITER TO WATCH - A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--the debut of a blazingly original voice that "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, best-selling author of There There)

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.

One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nineteen! NINETEEN!! Author Mottley is all of nineteen, twenty minus one. And she's written this amazing, full-throated roar of defiance in the face of the overwhelming, outrageously powerful white hegemony that controls Oakland and California as a whole. I am revolted that this story flowed as naturally as a river does to the sea out of Leila Mottley, but it did and readers should bear witness with her as Kiara, at a revoltingly early age, learns that men will pay her to use her body for their pleasure.

It's a painful awakening. It's a godsend of money. It's a trap, it's baited with the exact things Kiara needs to walk into the trap, and it's painfully obvious that her world is over. It's a new world entirely, now that she's the one paying the rent.

I will say that, to the sensitive fleurs among us, this story will not go down well. It's honest, it's angry, it takes nothing from you and gives everything to you, and it's a gift so bitter that it makes you wish you hadn't opened it because now you know and can't pretend you don't.

We're always trying to own men we don't got no control of. I'm tired of it. Tired of having to be out here thinking about all these people, all these things to keep me alive, keep them alive. I don't got no air left for none of it. Maybe {her frenemy} is right, it's time to let go, to let one of them take over, take care of me. But I can't stop thinking about {the} call, if {her brother} is alright, if maybe he's got enough money to help us out.

In the middle of a dreary afternoon spent doing something horribly hard, watching her mother as she dies, avoiding a gang of teens who could easily have decided she was a target, riding a bus on a hot afternoon and getting into her rent-due apartment...she wonders how she can help her older brother. Because now, next to making the rent, she's got a much, much bigger problem: How to keep that brother alive. Literally not-room-temperature alive.

That {bad moment from childhood}'s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn't know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I'm looking back and there's a fork on the ground, another way.

That ought to ring a bell in us all. If you're an adult, you most likely found yourself nodding along and recognizing those emotions. You'll likely recognize the others about regrets and about consequences and about prices you can't pay to avoid. This is that kind of a story, it's that kind of a world that Kiara and her wide found family live in. And those who make it out? They change addresses. They can't really change when so much around doesn't. This life is what you make of it, true, but is your inward being as malleable as all that?

What makes me so happy is that Author Mottley is here, is the one telling the story to my white-person eyes. I'm so happy that someone in publishing saw this manuscript, heard this rage-filled, sorrow-drenched scream of pain and said, "there's a proud, fine writer being born here, let me put the privilege and prestige of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., behind it and make people listen." So, listen: If you're wondering if this isn't more misery porn, or worse, disaster tourism, then I'm going to bring it to you fresh, this ain't that. (My Texas bleeds through when I want to make sure y'all're listening.)

When I was in the agenting business many long yars ago, an ancestor of this story came across my desk. I loved it. I loved its vernacular honesty and I loved its visceral reality. I wanted to make people read it...stop them in the halls of our building and say "just this bit right here! you'll love it!" and I was talked out of it. See, I'm white, and male, and even then that meant my privilege wasn't going to sail that beautifully loud sound-cloud out onto the lakes of white-people culture. Publishing might be doing better, but it's still the world where I was told to my face by an editor about a non-fiction book by and about African-Americans (as the polite term was then) I wanted her to buy, "who will buy it? Black people don't read."

Thirty years on I'm still appalled by that memory.

And thus it's extra delightful to me that I'm reading this auspicious debut from a young Black creator with the colophon of a very, very distinguished house that made its cultural capital a century ago by taking just these sorts of chances. (Joseph Hergesheimer won't mean much to most of y'all, but he was quite a noise on the 1917 Knopf list....) I couldn't do it; someone could, though, and that it's taken this long to make the waves it's already making (LitHub loves it, forevermore! That's Establishment imprimatur enough right there!) is, well, for me personally both validating and frustrating. I wish I'd done it; I'm thrilled it's been done.

Don't deny yourself this treat. I can't say I liked Look Homeward, Angel a whole lot, but it was a clarion call, a loud voice in full cry, saying, "there's a new way to do this!" That's what Nightcrawling is, that loud voice. Spend some extra time with her and learn what will make you sad to know.

>97 katiekrug: It will be worth the wait, or so I predict.

Wordle 353 4/6

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The second word made me so pissed off the third one came gushing out. And with it the answer! AEONS, MIRTH, BLOOD, FLOOD

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Tuesday to you.

>83 richardderus: I should read this but probably won’t. Sigh.

>93 richardderus: Excellent review, as per usual. I just put it on my wish list, although right now I’m not particularly interested in books about libraries or book stores. I like your warning about ‘jumper’, and with my extensive reading of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers would have not blinked for a second as to what it means. I realize you’re reading this on your device, but I’ve been slowly acquiring the Poisoned Pen Press/Library of Congress collaboration that brings ‘great American mysteries’ back. Yay for Poisoned Pen Press.

>98 richardderus: Impressive that the author is only 19. Brava.

edited to add:

>100 richardderus: I got it in 3, but I admit to using the list of 2,309 words.

*smooch*

>101 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! I don't know that you'd derive a lot from >83 richardderus:, TBH. It's something you might want to tell Jenna about, but it's pretty history-of-queer-spaces oriented.

Actually, the "jumper" story's less a warning than an enticement. I wanted that facet of the storytelling to shine, that Author Gentill included the clash-of-cultures moment between (wrong, bad) colonial usage and (veracious, meritorious) American usage. Looks like I fumbled that ball.

I hope you'll give Author Mottley a try, too.

Hey, however you get there you got there so it's all good. *smooch*

>93 richardderus: Looks like we had kinda similar reactions to The Woman in the Library. The framing device had more tension for me than the mystery, but it was a good read.

>98 richardderus: Adding that to the wishlist.

>93 richardderus: In U.K. vocabulary the words jumper and sweater are completely interchangeable. I would use both to describe a knitted top made of wool or something similar. I’d probably be more likely to refer to my jumper than my sweater though. A jumper is the same shape as a sweatshirt but a sweatshirt is definitely different. But a jumper is most definitely not any sort of dress in the U.K.

>104 SandDune: I'm actually not sure "jumper" is a dress in the US anymore. I certainly saw none on my photo research pages. It's been many decades since I've had a girl-child but it was a *ubiquitous* garment in my own youth. (My girl wore trousers or shorts.) I don't much notice what kids are wearing, plus I live at the beach, so it isn't likely I'd've run across a kid in Good Clothes.

Is a sweatshirt a thing in England? I saw pages of what I'd call sweatshirts listed as jumpers on UK clothing sites when I was trying to find that hideous jumpsuit.

>103 bell7: Hi Mary! Yes indeed, the framing device did more for me than I expected it to do. I wasn't convinced this was a successful experiment for Author Gentill, but it was reasonably well executed so points for that.

This is what I am talking about. I have no idea if they call them that anymore, but they were very popular back when I was in elementary school. I hated them and can still remember working up the courage to tell my mom that I didn't want to wear them anymore. It was a whole BIG THING, but I did finally win that battle.

>106 Crazymamie: Kristin wasn't a skirts kind of girl, so I remember those more as part of uniforms for Scouts or Brownies or the Cat'lick school.

>107 richardderus: Me, either, but my mom kept putting me in them anyway.

>95 Crazymamie: Yes, I remember jumpers in Canada in the 1960s and 70s, and they were the kind of dresses you describe above. I didn't know for sure whether this was local usage, or came from our British-born grandparents.

>96 richardderus: I can never remember which of "zee" and "zed" is proper American, and whether the other is in fact proper British. I recognize both as having the same meaning, and usually only care about it when doing crosword puzzles.

>109 ArlieS: American = "zee"

I suspect the dress iteration of jumper is US in origin. The 1970s had the 40+ set wearing corduroy ones in earth tones. They're supremely practical (given pockets of some description). Kinda unflattering, but if that's not the point then what the hell.

>108 Crazymamie: Not that kind of parent.

I am familiar with jumper being the sleeveless dress with pockets variety. Haven't seen one in years!! LOL

Happy Tuesday, Ricardo.

>111 Berly: I haven't either, Berly-boo. It was ~2005 when I last saw my late friend Doreen, as a matter of fact, and she was really old-fashioned about fashion.

Tuesday orisons, sweetness.

>105 richardderus: When I was in Wales, Janette referred to my sweatshirts and sweaters as jumpers..

Mamie's jumper is what I had to wear during my few but scarring years in catholic school, also a jumper

¯\(º_o)/¯

PS

did not get wordle today... bummer.

edit/ typo

>113 mckait: Oh, I'm sorry about the Wordle streak, Kath. It's just inevitable, but that doesn't make it less ick-ptui.

I remain verschmeckeled by the many and various ways we get ourselves into pretzel-shaped knots about names, naming, words and their various shades and grades and nuances. Why is it important to me that UKees admit their terrible misguided foolishness in using "s" when "zee" makes it all make sense? Yet there I am.

*smooch*

>106 Crazymamie: that's what I'd call a pinafore dress. In winter you'd wear that over a jumper, just to confuse the issue further.

>114 richardderus: *blows raspberry*. zed, and we still don't like using it.

Hiya, RD! Early morning greetings.

>102 richardderus: I'm a very literal person, so I'm pretty sure everybody BUT me got that cultural clash bit.
I went for my knowledge of UK word usages, not looking at the bigger picture.

>106 Crazymamie: Yup, Mamie, a jumper. Mom made one for me 6th grade. I liked it and the blouse she made to go with it although I hated the colors. For a rare moment, I was trendy.

>115 Helenliz: Heh. A pinafore dress over a jumper. Here it is, of course, a jumper over a blouse. And in winter you’d wear a sweater or light jacket over the jumper/blouse combo, never put anything thick under the jumper. *smile*

*smooch*

097 Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: A Memoir by Séamas O'Reilly

Real Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven siblings raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles.

After the untimely death of his mother, five-year old Seamas and his ten (TEN!) siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow Seamas and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together.

Along the way, we see Seamas through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time Seamas worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the President of Ireland.

Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired Seamas regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Thankfully, he laughs heartily throughout, and his main objections are less of taste or decency and more points of fact he felt I needed hearing. Besides telling me, several more times, to slow down, most of his input cleaves close to the pedantic. Such is the case with my description of the priest who came to bless our 26-foot-long caravan before the 3,200 mile round trip we took to Spain, the year after my mother died. I describe the oddness of the scene, the priest swinging incense around our giant caravan, in full vestments, conducting himself with the stately grace of an altogether more solemn occasion. “He wasn’t in full vestments” Daddy interjects, a hint of mocking laughter in his voice. “He was wearing a sotan” he says, with an incredulity that suggests I’d committed a faux pas equivalent to forgetting my own name.

The fact that I’d misidentified this sotan—an only marginally less formal, long cassock type affair—is sufficient for my father to consider me very badly caught out. He denies outright that he ever killed a mouse with a tiny plastic bottle of holy water in the shape of the virgin Mary, and seems particularly aggrieved that I keep saying he knows every priest in Ireland. This he decries as emblematic of my addiction to overstatement—“Séamas, there should be a disclaimer on every page”—before suggesting a figure like 70-80% would be more realistic.

That's from the LitHub piece about Author Séamas reading parts of his memoir to his blinded-by-diabetes Daddy. Because, in the end, you're not going to thank me for ruining the fun of this read by quoting some parts I highlighted to you. I think you're best going into this read, and I really, really hope you *will* go into this read, without too much explicit information.

You already know the bones, the author's one of eleven children...I need a lie-down every time I think about that...raised by a man alone. Modern sensibilities have it that men can't raise children, and that there's such a thing as overpopulation, and dear goddesses below us why the hell didn't she just kick him out of bed?! But to the devil with all that, dive into the absolutely astonishing O'Reilly family's beautifully bizarre world as remembered by the ninth of the eleven souls born to two people whose love was, I am shocked to say, well attested by all and sundry. Especially their children.

The author being gainfully employed, and even a success at his career, and none of his siblings having gone to prison, well I'd say they did very well, those delightfully out-of-step parents. I'd also say, given Séamas's astonishing capacity for reading, that the whole ecosystem of family was a healthy, if really weird, one. Who else had a Daddy whose response to an IRA bombing that shattered some of their remote house's windows was to be, in a word, unconcerned? Larger implications, political ideas, the safety of his family, all came down to "if I panic and go to pieces there is no hope of ever making all of them feel safe again." And he chose their sense of serenity, of faith that the world would be right, over his probable fears and sleeplessness...but he held no brief with hate, or with unkindness of any sort.

What stands out for me, reading this memoir of a man so much younger than myself and from such a widely divergent background, is how included I felt as I read the anecdotes. I was a guest being given the lay of the land. I was the stranger who, accidentally wandering into the ambit of the family, was welcomed with the greatest possible camaraderie and bonhomie. My drink glass was never empty and the snacks were endless, so my new friends were set to make me one of the neighbors and friends whose bemused orbits are noted and needed without breaking the harmony within.

I am so happy I read this memoir of a five-year-old "half-orphan" and his trip through this one wild and precious life (bless you, Mary Oliver, for that perfect locution) among a family he clearly loves and likes. If I were just slightly more evil, I'd be so jealous of him I'd spoiler all his jokes and tread on his every punchline. But I know when I've been offered a beautiful gift. This is one.

So, Joe O'Reilly...I know you're not going to read my words about your lad Séamas...but you should know that your work, the hard slogging work of being alive when your mate is dead...is the reason we all have a very fine gift in your son. In his gifts, so many that owe their existence and their potency to you.

A glass of cheer to you, sir.

Morning, BigDaddy! I love the review directly above - nicely done, you! Adding it to The List. Here's hoping Wednesday is kind to you. *Smooch*

>118 Crazymamie: Happy Humpday, sweetness! Glad to see you here.

I'm sure you'll love that one, Mamie, so embiggening to the spirit.

>116 karenmarie: Morning, Horrible, how's your Humpday?

I remember the jumper craze came in all the earthtones there were plus denim.

I thought a pinafore was a kind of useless, decorative apron...? Well, I can't say I'm that fascinated by women's clothes so *shrug*

Have a lovely-jubbly day. *smooch*

>115 Helenliz: This is blowing a raspberry:

THIS is blowing a raZZberry, or "giving the Bronx Salute":

Note double ZEEs.

>114 richardderus: eh. It doesn't bother me. Not the wordle nor the words. I had some great conversations about it when I was in Wales and on my own.

The one thing that stops me in my tracks is the Australian pronunciation of zebra. They use a short e sound.

Wordle 354 5/6

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today's was a PIA

098 Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling epic of betrayal, love, and fate that spans five generations of an Indigenous Chicano family in the American West, from the author of the National Book Award Finalist Sabrina & Corina

“There is one every generation—a seer who keeps the stories.”

Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930’s Denver on her own, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory. Luz recollects her ancestors’ origins, how her family flourished and how they were threatened. She bears witness to the sinister forces that have devastated her people and their homelands for generations. In the end, it is up to Luz to save her family stories from disappearing into oblivion.

Written in Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s singular voice, the wildly entertaining and complex lives of the Lopez family fill the pages of this multigenerational western saga. Woman of Light is a transfixing novel about survival, family secrets, and love, filled with an unforgettable cast of characters, all of whom are just as special, memorable, and complicated as our beloved heroine, Luz.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What happens when a determined woman meets a wall of silence? When we're very lucky, and she's very lucky, a writer comes on the scene and becomes An Author. That's the trajectory of Author Fajardo-Anstine. Sabrina & Corina, her literary debut, was a collection of stories and...it went nowhere. It wasn't a flop. It was invisible.

Bemoaning her fate being beneath the bearer of such stories to the world, she got up and made a book tour for herself...got the grassroots interested in the book...and got nominated for a National Book Award. For a debut collection of stories! Grassroots support is crucial, but let's be honest: You gotta have the chops to get anywhere after that.

And here we are, talking about Author Fajardo-Anstine's debut novel, a real gift of a tale about people whose American history goes much deeper than the majority of those reading this blog's history goes. It's not a linear, "in 1868 this unusual thing happened, in 1879 the next unusual thing happened..." narrative strategy. Luz, our literal Woman of Light, is also our PoV character. Everything that happens to her is grounded, contextualized, in her family's...her people's...history. It's a scary thing to think of taking on this much underknown history, and Author Fajardo-Anstine is up to the task. You, the reader, won't get it spoon-fed to you. I won't make it sound like work, or an assignment, but it is not effortless storytime fiction.

That said, the stories are wonderfully deeply told, limned against a background not unfamiliar today. It's not like the USA is racism-free. It's not like it was in earlier times, in that it's still regarded as a more fringe belief than it was in, for example, Luz's 1933 Denver. But the KKK is recrudescing under new names, the old hate gets poured into new bottles and different labels get slapped on them. Make no mistake, it is still less pervasive than the world Luz, her cousin Lizette, her brother the hapless Diego, and company all face every time they open the door.

It's Diego, and David, and frankly all the men in the book, that brought an inevitable fifth star off the rating. I wanted to feel immersed in a time and a place, and was; but the caddish men, not a decent soul among them, made me think "oh, twenty-first century feminism goggles are on, so I (sadly a Y-chromosome bearing person) am in for a drubbing." There are white people who will feel left out, too, but that comes with the story and is, frankly, the point...white folks don't need to be centered, or even there on the periphery, if the author telling the story of a time and place doesn't want them to be. Men, though? She's got those. And does she unload on them. Spineless and useless; abusive and cruel; just flat evil (as anyone who joins the KKK in fact was).

I don't think it was necessary, and it smacks of score-settling. So there went star #5.

Still think it's time to rev up your book club's drinks tray, y'all, and get this terrfic, well-told, challenging, and deeply satisfyingly immersive read on the coffee table.

>120 mckait: Hiya Kath...not caffeinated enough to Wordle yet. I'm still on the first glugs. Every time it devolves into a "guess-the-letter" game I'm irked.

Zehbra caught me up short as well when I first heard it. So...surprising.

>117 richardderus: - Sounds great! Thanks for the tip.

>123 katiekrug: I hope it thrills and delights you!

NYPL has it on audio - I'm #23 in line for 3 copies.

Wordle 354 4/6

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It wasn't as awful as everyone's grumbling led me to fear it was! AEONS, MIRTH, TRAIIL, TRAIT

>125 katiekrug: *confetti toss*

>117 richardderus: “Did Ye Hear” sounds great! I’ve got it requested, both the paper version and the electronic. Now the race to see which is available first. I think the paper version will win. Thanks for the review!

Karen O

>128 klobrien2: Oh goody good good! I think you'll get a kick out of Author Séamas's humor. It's so very simple to let humor get...obstructive...in this kind of story, and he very much does not do that.

>121 richardderus: W0W......interesting...

>117 richardderus: adding that to the list

>131 bell7: Yay!!

>130 mckait: Omigawd, Kath, you *gotta* read that book! GOTTA.READ.IT. I can't think that you wouldn't be *riveted* by it. I can't Kindlelend DRCs or you'd have it already.

>132 richardderus: ha! riveted eh?

I requested it from the library

:)

>133 mckait: *confetti toss* again

Y'all! >98 richardderus: is now an Oprah's Book Club selection!

099 Greenland by David Santos Donaldson

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story—and then Mohammed himself—begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our priviliege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to fuck". One of them, dear Kip, is "to fuck over" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting fucked is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of Greenland, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings.

>106 Crazymamie: >109 ArlieS: The item pictured is definitely what I would call a pinafore dress. Traditionally worn by school girls but I actually own two items of clothing that I describe as pinafore dresses, and I’m thinking of buying a third! Whereas a pinafore is a kind of apron and not used to describe any modern item of clothing.

>105 richardderus: We do have sweatshirts in the U.K. I am very clear in my own mind what constitutes a jumper (or sweater) and what constitutes a sweatshirt, but I find it is difficult to describe, so will post some pictures when I get back home.

HAppy Thursday, Richard!

Lots of excellent reads here lately. Tried to dodge BB's but ended up with one that stuck.

Good luck with wordle today. It took me four tries ( again)

Morning, Richard. Sweet Thursday. Thanks for keeping my thread warm and cozy, while I was away, gallivanting in the rugged hills of TN. We decided not to do much touristy stuff on this trip and we were quite happy hanging out with family.

Excellent review of Greenland. Landed a BB there.

100 Just by Looking at Him by Ryan O'Connell

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.

After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done.

Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: No one, looking from the outside in, will ever know what others are enduring, surviving, overcoming...or hiding. The author's got a track record of blowing the doors off handy hiding places...go watch his first show, Special, if you're in any doubt...and he's brought his unsparing honesty to bear on fiction about the supremely ableist gay-male world. Being a gay male, that's what he knows, so that's perfectly fair. It's a solid, explanatory fact that the author, writer for and star in the Peacock revival of Queer as Folk as well as the creator of the Netflix series Special based on his differently-abled-gay-guy memoir I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, is also the partner of Jonathan Parks-Ramage of Yes, Daddy fame.

This, then, is a Personage within QUILTBAG creativeland. I expected that I would be treated to outstanding stories told in superbly structured chapters.

I didn't get that.

I did get the expected honest and unflinching, no-bullshit presentation of Elliott's struggles with what I'd call impostor syndrome, fear of rejection, and a huge self-confidence deficit stemming from being gay and having cerebral palsy. I got hefty doses of snark and sarcasm; I got unblinking acknowledgment of the harm divergent career paths and the temptations of sudden financial freedom present in a couple's life. I got the eternal, and unwinnable, struggle of people to be monogamous when there is a vast smorgasbord of yummy side dishes available in any number of technologically assisted ways.

It was a lot of fun to read the author's one-liners, eg: "Lately I’d been feeling more and more that monogamy, like capitalism or keto, wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t be sure Gus was on the same page." It was not quite as much fun to have the funny one-liners be the book. It's like reading a really hilarious Twitter thread. (Seriously...seventy-four chapters is way, way too many for three hundred-ish pages.) After a while, enough with this...I'm working harder than I think I should have to to get the laffs. It's the comedy set that goes on too long, the Saturday Night Live skit that refuses to end.

It's also the man's first novel, these are common problems with comedic first novels, and there's not one thing in here that I didn't think belonged; it's just that it belonged in a slightly different structure. There's a great deal of sexual material and a great deal of discussion, in what I found slightly cringe-worthy (ie, dismissively dealt with via humor) terms, of substance abuse. It really highlights a very significant issue I felt as I got deeper and deeper into Elliott's story: He's really blind to his white cismale privilege. He's disabled, and an addict; but he deals with those problems from a very, very high platform that puts him in reach of all kinds of support and help.

Lamenting the innocence of 2012 wasn't a great idea, either, Author O'Connell. Things were easier? For men like us, maybe, but things are only getting better too slowly for others not white, not male, and not well off. We're still MILES ahead in this miserable race called "being American." Using self-deprecating humor to deflect negative awareness of one's privilege isn't a viable strategy in this day and age. (Maybe that's what the author meant about 2012 being easier?)

On balance, then, while I laughed and even found a lot of the self-reflection (primarily done at the end of the book) moving, I was too aware of some problems with the way this book was conceived and executed that, quite honestly, I didn't expect to see in 2022's publishing environment.

Happy Thursday, Richard dear, and congratulations on 100 reviews!

>141 FAMeulstee: Thanks, Anita, and Happy Thursday back!

>139 msf59: Hi Mark! Glad to keep things ticking over. I'm pleased that Greenland intrigued you!

>138 figsfromthistle: *chuckle* This might be a friendly-fire zone, but it's still a book-bulleting range. I hope you'll end up enjoying whichever one I gotcha with. *smooch*

>137 SandDune: "When you know, you know" is often the case with culturally-based definitions. I've never heard the locution "pinafore dress" before.

Sweatshirts qua sweatshirts are ubiquitous. What I didn't know was that they seem to be marketed chez vous as "jumpers" and that threw me.

Hiya, RDear. Happy Thursday.

>119 richardderus: Clothes have been a major irritant and stress creator ever since I hit puberty and started worrying about my weight. There were rare times when I was sylph-like, but was and am usually more zoftig.

>117 richardderus: And she avoids a BB.

>121 richardderus: No gracias, amable señor.

>136 richardderus: You almost got me, squicked out bits and all. I hesitate because of Chekhov’s gun rule. I’m not willing to spend $13.99 on it for Kindle right now, but have added it to my wish list.

*smooch*

Wordle 355 3/6

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What a weird coincidence! I had to clear my browser cookies and my streak...53 and counting...was lost, but this is pretty good compensation! AEONS, MIRTH, GIRTH

>143 karenmarie: Hey Horrible! *smooch*

I think you'd like >117 richardderus: but not enough to shove it at you. He's really funny. The others, well...not really what I'd think of as "you" reads. All the way with ya on the not-for-that-price subject. Frankly I feel that way about all Kindlebooks. REGULAR price should be $8.99 or so...like a mass-market paperback...and sales should never be over $4.99 for big bestsellers.

I hate clothes. I don't care what's on me as long as the law won't come rollin' up with frowns and cuffs.

>140 richardderus: Read this interview with Author O'Connell on LitHub!

So in U.K. clothing nomenclature:

This is a jumper, can also be lighter weight and made of cotton or something similar. I also sometimes refer to a heavier weight jumper as a sweater. The term pullover also exists, perhaps more for male garments and a bit old-fashioned now.



This is a sweatshirt (very plain weave cotton top usually with printed logo or design)



And this is a hoodie (usually slightly thicker than sweatshirt, obviously with hood).



And this is a pinafore dress, any sort of dress with is designed for something like a t-shirt or blouse or jumper to be worn underneath it.

101 Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America by Gregory D. Smithers

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations.

Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them.

Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person.

Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Start here, from the author's Prologue:

Why was this new terminology needed?...Answering this question requires us to dig deeper; it is therefore one of the main focal points of this book. It requires a reexamination of colonialism's ongoing destructiveness and its different forms of violence—disease, physical acts of war and genocide, the cultural destructiveness caused by boarding scools, and the corrosive impact of corporations and capitalism on Indigenous communities. In spite of five centuries of colonialism, it is still possible for Two-Spirit people to reclaim their traditions, identities, roles and their sacred status. For other Native people the term "Two-Spirit" is a starting point for telling new stories.

Many, if not most, languages in the world do not use gendered pronouns. The existence of them, their mere presence, requires duality: like "she" can't exist without "he". Or so we are told in our language classes. The mere notion, like the current drive to accept and use broadly the singular "they", is causing such a huge amount of angst in those whose world is dualistic, almost Manichean, in its foundations. I tremble (with repressed laughter) contemplating these poor souls (yes, I mean "poor" as in "impoverished") even conceptualizing a world like that inhabited by Diné people with its five human genders! Something we in the so-called Western world can learn from Two-Spirit people is that the male-female gender (not biological sex, in other words) binary is not a natural but a historical invention. And even the biological sex binary isn't anything like as absolute as we're taught in US schools.

Which is something I want to mention to my majority-white readership of all sexual natures: This is a book about Native/Indigenous/First Nations sexual and gender natures and it does not center (in any positive way) our settler/Euro/Judeo-Christian/Muslim world view. It is not meant to. It was not designed to. And that needs to be okay with you before you consider whether you're the audience for this richly textured, information-dense read. Do not go into the book thinking you're going to get spoon-fed some lightly seasoned apologia or even apology for "our" (in quotes because I, too, feel alienated from that culture in its broader outlines) actions towards the first inhabitants of this continent. The identity "Two Spirit," very much centered in this study, is not without contested and resisted facets. There are elders (people my exact chronological age!) who regard this new, "pan-Indigene" term with some caution. Many are the pitfalls on any newly blazed trail. The language of Two-Spiritedness is, like identities always will be, evolving. That being said, I trust you to decide what you want to do next.

I encourage you to read this book because it doesn't center you, or your concerns. It isn't fiction so it isn't here to amuse; it's serious and scholarly, and while it's not obscurantist in writing style, it's not novelistic either.

In a certain way, that's a shame. It's a wide-netted story that begs for a whole corpus of films, books, plays. The story of the American Indian AIDS Institute would serve as a kind of corrective to the damaging myth of "Patient Zero" that gay journalist Randy Shilts blew up into a cultural touchstone with his And the Band Played On bestseller-cum-film; something that muddles facts with homophobic stereotypes and racist myths. We need the stories of Barbara Cameron and Randy Burns, correctives to the anthropological Arabic-language-based and offensive term "berdache" for Two-Spirit people; we need them to reach a wide audience, and it's usually fiction that does that best. I think Catawba Nation queer activist and artist DeLesslin George-Warren, quoted by Smithers, said it best: "History is not a listing of facts, it's a mythology with citations." No matter that I call history "factual" it is, and of necessity must be, his-story, a story for all its pretensions to scientific rigor.

The fact is I can holler at you all day long and even beg real fancy for you to pay attention to people unlike you, doubly unlike you straight readers. I wish I had the powers of persuasion to make the read sound as fascinating as I found it. It wasn't written by a Native American/Indigenous person. Instead, Author Smithers is Australian, straight, and a scholar; he has, with those Othered-from-Two-Spirit foundations, built a book about Otherness that is culturally sensitive, pluralistic in its aims and outlook, and a finely crafted pleasure to read.

Good morning, RD, and happy Friday to you.

>148 richardderus: Not only a BB, but a purchased-and-due-tomorrow-from-Amazon book. Would I have bought if I didn’t have Amazon credit? Not necessarily, but it is my birthday month, so there’s that.

*smooch*

Just a quick look. Morning to you, RD. Have a good Friday and beyond.

>150 weird_O: Hiya Bill! Come back soon.

>149 karenmarie: Oh, wonderful! I am so glad you got interested. It's the kind of richly textured non-fiction reading that I expect you'll enjoy digging into. Plus the subject's fascinating.

*smooch*

Wordle 356 3/6

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That is a weird word. AEONS, MIRTH, PIETY

Is this soon enough?

>153 weird_O: Sure, fine, whenever.

>147 SandDune: I didn't see you up there, Rhian! Your post lays it out without ambiguity or waffle.

>152 richardderus: Mine was almost the same, I have adopted your second word, my first word is now peony.

>148 richardderus: Got me.

>156 swynn: *nail-buff* My aim is true!

>155 FAMeulstee: Oh, interesting first word! And the two work well together.

Have a lovely weekend-ahead's reads, Anita.

Morning, BigDaddy! We made it to Friday!

>148 richardderus: Excellent review and a direct hit. Unto The List it goes.

Hiya.

*smooch*

>159 katiekrug: Hey! *smooch*

>158 Crazymamie: Hi Mamie, is it Friday already? Seems like it was Friday just a few minutes ago. ...wait...

I'm glad you're intrigued by Smithers's book. It's a fascinating topic. I wish more folks would pick it up and get sunk into it! Maybe your warbles with mine and Horrible's will get the darn thing more readers.

Happy Friday *smooches*! Wordle was a weird word. Took me five to finally figure out where the letters went and finally it fell into place.

At the risk of sounding like I've just woken up and want to contribute to a conversation that ended hours ago (this has happened to me, btw), here are my two cents on the jumper issue. When I was growing up (in Canada), I wore a jumper which was a dress like the one Mamie posted a pic of.

I have heard the British refer to what we call sweaters, as jumpers.

But just to throw a monkey wrench into the pot, if I am remembering correctly, I had friends from South Africa and what they call a jumper was what I would refer to as an undershirt. Or wait, maybe they called an undershirt a vest. The memory is foggy here...anyhow, to me, a vest is a sweater with no sleeves, or even a sleeveless sweater that buttons like a cardigan.

Ain't English fun? :-) Trying to teach English as a second language to non-English speakers gave me an appreciation for the nuances of this crazy language like nothing else could. It's why I am constantly in awe of people like Anita and Ella, who have mastered it so well!

>162 jessibud2: I've heard the vest-vs-undershirt one from more Britannical speakers of American, too. I'm never more grateful that I'm a native speaker of it than when I realize how extremely large English's vocabulary is!

>161 bell7: Hi Mary! I'm glad it wasn't just me thinking how odd a choice it was.

>162 jessibud2: >163 richardderus: To me a vest is most definitely an undergarment. Never worn on top.

>164 SandDune: Rhian, as usual, I find myself concurring with you.

Have a great weekend, RD

>165 PaulCranswick: Hi PC, thanks!

>165 PaulCranswick:, >164 SandDune: Yes, it's there in the name. When they move up to outerwear, they're called "t-shirts."

102 Love, Hate & Clickbait by Liz Bowery

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Shake some hands. Kiss some coworkers.

Cutthroat political consultant Thom Morgan is thriving, working on the governor of California’s presidential campaign. If only he didn’t have to deal with Clay Parker, the infuriatingly smug data analyst who gets under Thom’s skin like it’s his job. In the midst of one of their heated and very public arguments, a journalist snaps a photo, but the image makes it look like they’re kissing. As if that weren’t already worst-nightmare territory, the photo goes viral—and in a bid to secure the liberal vote, the governor asks them to lean into it. Hard.

Thom knows all about damage control—he practically invented it. Ever the professional, he’ll grin and bear this challenge as he does all others. But as the loyal staffers push the boundaries of “giving the people what they want,” the animosity between them blooms into something deeper and far more dangerous: desire. Soon their fake relationship is hurtling toward something very real, which could derail the campaign and cost them both their jobs…and their hearts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sarcastic psychopath meets delusional dork (probably on the dyspraxic spectrum), picks on him mercilessly until they fall in love after becoming a cute internet meme that helps their tin-eared sociopathic boss in her presidential campaign. Except hijinks ensue and the boys get together. Oh...the psychopathic one? He starts out using/abusing women, this is his first sexual anything with a man. So there's that, too.

It's mean-spirited a lot of the time, which I honestly count in its favor. Author Bowery obviously knows real people like this, she's way too good at both guys' pathologies not to. And the campaign staffers are just *perfect* in their utter and complete soulless indifference to things like others' feelings. It isn't like I have to spend time with them in real life so I can enjoy the terribleness of their callous uncaring ways.

Clay, the delusional dork on the dyspraxic spectrum, is the butt of many jokes and always has been, as we're made aware. I'm not advocating the treatment Clay receives as a come-on or a stay-away quality. I think a lot of socially awkward people would cringe in recognition but I don't know exactly if it would be cathartic or traumatic. It's that much of a toss-up in my mind whether the author's also laughing or making the laughing clods look even worse by not shoving her own reaction at us readers. I actually give points for that. You are left to make up your own mind. I approve of this.

Thom the psychopath, though, isn't played for ambiguity. He has this complex of symptoms, acts out, and is held up as an awful person...until he isn't. Because he's falling ever so slowly in love with a certain tall, dark, and dorky dude. Who seems to be leaning in to their fake wedding (don't ask, just go with it) and the way Thom can make his archenemies freeze to the floor with some truly sick, volcanically hot burns.

Mostly, the beginning of the story is there to set the stakes in romantic fiction. There are enough stakes to go around as these two unappealing people peel off their mannerisms to get to the man inside the ever-baggier suits of fakery. There's a guitar-and-waffles moment when it's all coming together, and they're really connecting over the ordnary stuff of life. Of course Something Happens, and their little moment is lost. I got honestly invested at that point.

The leisurely path to the real relationship is, to my surprise, through the bedroom. There's no little authorial squickiness, either, just two eager, horny men. Sex between men who won't, can't, or don't identify as gay is (as I trust y'all who've been here more than once to know) no news whatever. Been goin' on forever. But these two, in this situation? It's hard for me to figure out why Author Bowery didn't pull the veil over the events but instead she chose the direct path. Did herself proud, too. Her characters don't shy away from the physical responses that real people have, like Thom having a moment's ickiness over the aftermath of sex. It was handled right. It didn't interrupt the story's flow but channeled it closer than ever to the goal of getting these guys past their initial misconceptions about themselves, and therefore each other.

Every step of the way, as Thom felt himself feel for someone else what he's never felt for himself, he fell a little lower in my estimation. He kept being horrible! Truly terrible! And, well...that fall from a height that pride goeth (and pride goeth) before? Pride wenteth. Thom and his belovèd Clay each lost illusions. Clay gained so much self-respect and honest power from losing them! Thom, sad little naked waif huddled in the rain, won much more when he finally realized that standing up means laying down the weapons that defended your badly designed walls.

It's a romance! There's HEA in the social contract of reading them! The wonderful part of *this* HEA is getting there. How it looks? Who knows if this could happen or not...but I'm willing to say it should happen.

>168 richardderus: - Wish-listed. Romance! Politics! Sarcasm! It checks all my boxes...

>169 katiekrug: Oh heck yeah, Katie, this book will get a good smile up on your face! The politics will be very familiar and fun to see.

'Morning, RD!

>168 richardderus: And onto the wish list it goes. **And, surprise, it turns out that our Library has a copy and I've just requested it. Georgian-period straight romance, make way for contemporary gay romance. I'm sure you could write a book about female authors NOT writing correctly about gay sex, but it seems like she's passed the test. I just looked her up - she's a lawyer in VA. Who'da thunk it?

*smooch*

Happy Saturday, Richard. I had a good day yesterday- a bike ride with Bree and family. My first ride with my Jackson and of course he loves it. We will be doing this again. Taking care of a few things here this morning and then the afternoon is reserved for the books.

>172 msf59: Happy Saturday, Birddude! I hope you're already done with the chores and on to the books. I'm wrestling with a review for Andrew Holleran's latest...possibly last, he's 77...novel and it's not going well.

>171 karenmarie: Oh, that's amazing...it's a Harlequin book, and those used never to be in library collections. I'm usually a little extra tolerant of people's sex writing, unless it's just egregiously wrong, since I'd never have the nerve to approach sex from a woman's PoV. Points for bravado! Unless you're just...ignorant, anyway.

Liz Bowery's been a fanfic writer for long enough that I'm sure she's been workshopped by some pretty harsh critics. I was unsurprised that she got some of the details right. I hope it's a good read for you when you get to it!

Saturday *smooch*

Wordle 357 4/6

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Guessing game day. My least favorite. AEONS, PROSE, THOSE, GOOSE

>174 richardderus: Wordle 357 4/6

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I'm always just guessing

I'm going to preorder that book I think...I like her writing. It pains though. I will recommend it to the library first. One of them carries some of her books. I think Caren Werlinger should have another out soon, too

>175 mckait: LOL

I totally agree abt the library first! See who has deeper pockets and ask them to get it before clanging the buy button.

Again. *sigh*

Coming by to give you ((Hugs)) and **smooches** for the weekend, RD. I hope you have a great one!

>177 alcottacre: Thank you, Stasia! *smooch*

>178 richardderus: You are most welcome, kind sir :)

A NOVEL BOOKSTORE got my almost-5* #BookRecommendation here: https://tinyurl.com/28upfyen Plus it's NOW $2.99 ON KINDLE!
https://smile.amazon.com/Novel-Bookstore-Laurence-Coss%C3%A9-ebook/dp/B079MH2M57...

Laurence COSSÉ created the perfect #ParisGetaway for broke, bookish people. As Alison Anderson translates one of my favorite passages from it:

Culture contains everything. there would be no peaks without valleys, gentle slopes, and meadows, at lower altitudes. The genius of democracy is a love for everything, to offer everything, value everything, and let individual freedom express its preferences here as elsewhere...and the key word, where culture and art are concerned, is pleasure!

103 Solo Dance by Kotomi Li

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An important queer voice from East Asia’s millennial generation

Chō Norie, twenty-seven and originally from Taiwan, is working an office job in Tokyo. While her colleagues worry about the economy, life-insurance policies, marriage, and children, she is forced to keep her unconventional life hidden—including her sexuality and the violent attack that prompted her move to Japan. There is also her unusual fascination with death: she knows from personal experience how devastating death can be, but for her it is also creative fuel. Solo Dance depicts the painful coming of age of a gay person in Taiwan and corporate Japan. This striking debut is an intimate and powerful account of a search for hope after trauma.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Asian cultures don't, as a rule, deal well with modern QUILTBAG identities. The perception of queer folks isn't anything like as angry as the anti- crowd here in the West but it's close in emotional terms to our unenviable habit of emotional violence and rejection. Homophobia is something queer folks battle no matter where we are. Doesn't say great things about human beings, does it.

What Author Li does in Solo Dance is deeply personalize the costs of being out in the culture of Taiwan, which leads to violent assault, and in Japan's less physical homophobic world, where it's simply ignored. Slighted, denigrated, and rejected; but without ever saying the awful words "gay" or "lesbian". This ostracization is crueler even than physical beatings.

But that is what Chō Norie prefers to her native Taiwan's brutality. She came to Japan unable to speak Japanese, as a Taiwanese woman, with all the cultural frieght that carries. Her great-grandmother's generation was used as "comfort women" and her own is a kind of slighted immigrant worker-bee, needed but not valued in larger Japanese society...and that suits Chō down to the ground. Maybe, after all, if she *can't* speak the language, no one will demand she speak at all. Thus is denial and emotional cowardice perpetuated in Chō's new, self-selected life.

With the long-standing Japanese cultural celebration of suicide, the Ghost Forest and the Wind Phone joining the long-standing ritual suicide of seppuku; it seems utterly unsurprising, then, that Chō comes here to make a life while obsessing over, planning for, lovingly dwelling on, her own suicide to come, as well as the past. (It should be noted that Japanese society is being deliberately steered away from this cultural acceptance.)

She didn’t have a strong inclination towards death, but she had no attachment to living either. While she still had breath in her lungs, she would do her best in life, yet should it ever reach that point where it was no longer bearable, she would choose death without hesitation.

Since that is the very first page of the story, I think it acceptable to quote it here; if this is in the least triggering for you and you've read this far into the review, it's a poor fit for you.

The main point of my discussing this book, though, is to say that it is a gorgeous work of prose, in a quiet and mannered way. It is an honest and bleak account of Otherness in a culture that greatly values comformity. It is a deep dive into a woman's blocked relationship with her body, with the pleasures of sex and intimacy, stemming from sexual violence. Chō runs away from Taiwan because she does not want to confront her rape in every living moment. Japan does not, to no one's surprise, encourage healing in its culture of silence around matters sexual. Her own fearfulness about her emotional state, then, is never in any way the focus of any positive intervention.

It is not a hopeful story of a survivor.

She was twenty-seven and this real-world conversation shouldn’t feel so remote, but she couldn’t force herself to get interested. There was an insurmountable wall that prevented her from fully engaging with it. All this talk of a decade from now, two decades from now, seemed like the distant future—hundreds if not thousands of years away. A world in which her existence wouldn’t make any difference. That was the true representation of her feelings.

Chō Norie, as she has chosen to be known, is not Yingmei the child whose early life contains earthquakes (fascinating to read about how her family copes with those!) and the death of a classmate-cum-crush-object of Yingmei's which is met with emotional ceremonies and discussions that she is utterly unable to process or participate in. Chō is a woman born out of intent...a creation not the being created, an auto-Galatea. And as a result, Chō has few inner resources to meet the few concerned people she encounters in Japan, even fewer to meet the awful and brutal rejection of a character Chō is (somewhat bloodlessly) involved with.

What, then, is the source of my four-star rating? First, beautifully translated imagery-laden writing. I think Translator Arthur Reiji Morris did a beautiful job of putting flattering English clothes on this very Japanese body. Enough context is presented that I never felt lost or left out; I suspect those were crafted for the translation, and it was done with great facility. Second, the fact that Chō was a woman made up, and one composed of literary antecedents. There are many works of literature harkened back to and that always gets my upvote.

There's a last thing you should know before starting on this journey: The ending. It is, to be as succinct as I can be, fantastical. Whether real or fantasized or merely cooked up, it does not resolve the events of the book. It leaves room for you to do that and, in the context of a book of this kind of interiority (though not a récit, it comes close), that fel to me like a worthy choice. It was not satisfying, though, in that "...and that was a fascinating story! *closes cover*" way.

Like all unfinished business, it lingers.

Wordle 358 4/6

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Huh! Weird words are coming thick and fast. AEONS, MIRTH, BLOAT, FLOAT

>182 richardderus: Except for the first word (see >155 FAMeulstee:) my Wordle was all the same today.

Happy Sunday, Richard dear!

>183 FAMeulstee: Hiya Anita, happy you're using such a great first word...so evocative.

Thanks! *smooch*

‘Morning, RD, and happy Sunday to you.

>181 richardderus: As always, a gorgeous review, but I’m going to pass on this one.

>182 richardderus: I’m glad I didn’t think of bloat or gloat first, hence my 3. *preens*

Is it grey and dreary there? I'm hoping for some quality book time today, given the appropriate weather :)

*smooch*

>186 katiekrug: It is indeed, Katie. I'm cocooning with a little light reading: The Deviant's War alternating with Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. Perfect fluff for a grisly grey day.

*smooch*

>185 karenmarie: You got the best break on that for sure, Horrible. My alphabet fetish kicked in when I realized what the letters meant. And yes indeed, it's not a book I think you'd like at all...so evasive maneuvers are wise. I'm glad I got you to pay attention to something you'd otherwise never hear of, though.

Happy Sunday, smoochling!

light reading ??

>188 karenmarie: *chuckle*

>188 karenmarie: - My thoughts exactly.

My greatly adorèd role model Jo Walton mentionèd this here Sonnet #77 from ol' Willy-Shaker Speardude:

Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;
The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look what thy memory cannot contain,
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, deliver’d from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.

I've never read this one, nor have I ever seen it discussed by the usual suspects in the literary talking heads world. I even like it.
I read her reading list every single month and quite frequently get books from it: https://www.tor.com/2022/06/10/jo-waltons-reading-list-may-2022/

Happy Sunday, Richard!

I Wordled in two today but that was sheer luck. *Smooch*

>192 bell7: Lovely luck indeed, Mary! Hoping you have a happy Sunday.

Considering it might very well be your last. *rattle of cauldron*waft of voodoo-dolly wax*

What a morning it's been already. Irritating little things, none life-threatening, but unending in their flow. Well! Assuming the rest of the day has this in store for me, I'll be going back to bed soon.

Wordle 359 4/6

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Who thinks of a fancy word before a plain one? Me, of course. AEONS, MIRTH, RONDO, DONOR

I came up with HONOR first and then got it after some pondering.

>195 richardderus: I needed 5 today peony, mirth, nouns, roans, donor

And I was overly happy I recently changed my first word for the Dutch Woordle:

Woordle 359 1/6

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‘Morning, RDear.

>194 richardderus: Boo, hiss. I hope things improve.

>195 richardderus: The only way I know rondo is Brubeck’s Blue Rondo à la Turk. *smile*

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>198 karenmarie: Thanks, Horrible, I hope they do, too.

Re: spoiler, I suspect there's a lot who just don't know what the hell I'm talking about a lot of the time, but that one's weird even for me.

*smooch*

>197 FAMeulstee: Anita! Got it in one! Woordle is going to be looking into you to see if you're really the Google AI that's got folks so stirred up. After all when a priest says your AI has a soul, it makes things click up a bit.

>196 bell7: With all five letters in some configuration, I didn't get that guessing-game going like I suspect I would've.

>199 richardderus: LOL, my initials are AI :-D

Wordle 359 3/6

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GONAD, RONDO (!), DONOR

#twinning

xx

>201 katiekrug: Fellow overthinker! *smooch*

>200 FAMeulstee: HA!! You for-realsies are AI! That's a priceless piece of information that I shall retain.

Hey, Richard. I hope you week is getting off to a smooth start. We have a mini-heat wave arriving tomorrow, for 3 days. Pushing a 100. Ugh!

>203 msf59: Thanks, Mark. I'm sorry for your Texas-like weather. I can barely think of those temps without anxiety!

>195 richardderus: This time I was able to get it in three tries. Which has not happened for a while.

Hope the rest of your Monday went better than the beginning!

Hi, Richard! Just stopping by to see what you've been up to. Hope your day got better after its rough start. Did you watch the hearings Thursday and this morning? I dragged myself out of bed early just so I could have a cup of coffee while I watched, only for it to be delayed almost an hour. Worth it, though. Pretty compelling (and horrifying) stuff.

Today's Wordle (adieu, story, droop, donor) was interesting, in that it reminded me of one of the points from the hearing, that The Big Lie was continued in order to fund raise ($250 MILLION ffs) even though they knew it was a lie; I wonder if those donors are feeling regret.

Interesting discussion about jumpers on your thread, Richard. I'm aware of both uses of the word. It did take me a while to remember the dress related use though as we wore what was called a tunic in school which really fits the US description of a jumper. Growing up vests were undershirts. (What can I say. I had an English accent before I went to school.)

'Morning, Rdear! Happy Tuesday to you.

I mentioned to Rita the Branch Librarian that a friend of mine (you, of course) were gobsmacked that the Library had Love, Hate & Clickbait. She said they acquired it as a Pride Month effort to expand the genre. Gotta love her.

Today will be a puttering day and a toodling-around day as I pick up Love, Hate & Clickbait at the Library, use the treadmill at the Senior Center (and when the h*** did I become a senior, eh?), and go grocery shopping. Plus reading, of course. Still reading bodice rippers, and on No. 8 of 85 of The Federalist. I like the 180-ness of it all.

*smooch*

104 Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth.

But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known—in the late 1940s, no less—to traipse around in full-length fur coats, clanking bracelets, and an Edwardian beard? An eccentric, a gregarious recluse, an enigmatic auteur of whimsically morbid masterpieces, yes but who was the real Edward Gorey behind the Oscar Wildean pose?

He published over a hundred books and illustrated works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Edward Lear, John Updike, Charles Dickens, Hilaire Belloc, Muriel Spark, Bram Stoker, Gilbert & Sullivan, and others. At the same time, he was a deeply complicated and conflicted individual, a man whose art reflected his obsessions with the disquieting and the darkly hilarious.

Based on newly uncovered correspondence and interviews with personalities as diverse as John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Anna Sui, Born to be Posthumous draws back the curtain on the eccentric genius and mysterious life of Edward Gorey.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SIX TIMES. ULTIMATELY A LIBRARIAN BOUGHT ME A SALE KINDLEBOOK. (True story!)

My Review: There are few things my elder sister and I agree on. One of them is that Edward Gorey's a bloody genius, and about as hilarious as it's possible to be. (We also both love Jo Walton, so it's not as though she's a waste of space. Entirely, anyway.)

That's what Edward Gorey's superpower is, though. He speaks to a certain inner weirdo in some people, a rebellious streak that demands the sheer nonsensical pointlessness of Life be acknowledged and celebrated. Poor Xerxes...a Gashlycrumb Tiny I truly felt for.

Now that Gorey's safely dead, what's the skinny on his narrow gay ass? Welllll...not that fascinating, if I'm honest. He was exactly as you'd expect someone who could think up a child called "Xerxes" would be. Strange, a misfit, completely and utterly himself because he *designed* himself with great care. His artwork was justly celebrated for its technical merit...by three or four people. Weirdness exacts costs from the weirdo. Gorey was famous...if you know who he is. I'm never sad or sorry that I know who he is, unlike many famous people. But Gorey's talent as an artist was never the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Snooty Stuff or the Obscene Wealth Collection.

Unlike most of the art you'll see in those cultural institutions, you've seen a Gorey image. (If you're reading this blog, you have.) The Mystery! series opening sequence? Gorey. The 1950s Anchor Books images? Gorey. Over 100 of his own books, popular culture objects. He was a niche force, but a force nonetheless.

However, Dery's exhaustively researched biography goes into some detail about the skinny on Gorey's sexual nature. I think, like Greta Garbo, he wanted to be left alone. He never, ever once said he was gay. He lived through Stonewall...long after it was entirely okay with most people to come out as gay, he didn't.

Because he wasn't.

He said, in an interview collected in Ascending Peculiarity, "I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something ... I've never said that I was gay and I've never said that I wasn't ... what I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else ... " That, mes amis, is a clear statement of being. He was what we, in 2022, call "asexual." That doesn't prevent him from presenting himself in a striking and deeply queer-coded manner. But if the twenty-first century has taught me anything, it's that people are who and what they say they are. Gorey? Asexual, and presenting himself as a strange misfit. And that is all there is to it.

I wasn't pleased by Author Dery's claiming of him for the gay men of the world solely because we have his own words on the subject and they are not, despite the fact they could easily and safely have been, "I am gay." So. He wasn't. Yes, let's claim him as an ikon of the QUILTBAG spectrum! Yes, let's celebrate his Otherness, his determined design of his Otherness, and the glorious art that came out of it..."There's so little heartless work around," said Gorey. "So I feel I am filling a small but necessary gap."

But let's not posthumously (!) reassign his stripe on the flag for our own need to possess him. Let's celebrate the way he said he was with the gratitude and laughter and little frisson of unnerved nerves that he designed it to evoke in his viewers.

>208 karenmarie: Happy Tuesday, Horrible. Hoping for a happy seniordom for you in general...what time's the bingo start? And the jam-making workshop? Did you find the patch of bilberries you remembered from when you skived off class from the one-room school?

*chuckle* It really shows that I've been a little brother all my life, doesn't it.

Rita needs a star on the sidewalk. She's the nuts, for sure. And tell her to poke around on my blog if she needs ideas.

>207 Familyhistorian: Jumpers elicited a degree of interest and involvement that mere books could but aspire to. I am always verschmeckeled by what takes off (in general, not just in the threads).

A vest (UK) is an undershirt (North America).

>206 Storeetllr: Hiya Mary, how's tricks? I found the hearings deeply, deeply chilling. The coup is still underway, and the side perpetrating it *genuinely*believes*it's*entitled*to*do*it. The degree of delusion that takes is unnerving. People with drivers' licenses and guns believe that their incompetent, stupid figurehead won (at all, ever) and is some kind of hero-cum-savior instead of a sociopathic grifter justly afraid of dying in prison.

Stunning.

>205 figsfromthistle: Hi Anita! *smooch*

I have 12 books by Edward Gorey and 2 books illustrated by Edward Gorey. Excellent, informative review of a book of a fascinating man that I probably don't really need to read, now that I have your perceptive take on him.

Wordle 360 2/6

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Bless you, Mary Bell, for showing me the way. *smooch*

>212 karenmarie: Actually Horrible, you should avoid even picking it up. It's tendentious and verges on casuistry about his sexuality. It's fun to read what others who knew and/or worked with him thought about Gorey but the man himself is, in my never-remotely humble opinion, treated with posthumous disrespect by this biographer.

I know next to nothing about Gorey, but enough indicators of his weirdness and his creative gifts are dropped in your report (and in the eight other reviews posted on the book page) to elbow this bio onto my WANT! List™. Is there an alternate source for biographical info about Gorey?

>215 weird_O: Read Ascending Peculiarity. He's as amusing being interviewed as he was writing and illustrating his very deeply bizarre world.

I'm delighted to've hit you at last!

Okay, time to visit my thread again, friend Richard. Federalist No. 8 has been read and your hit provided. Extra treat, another bit that got my attention.

*smooch*

>209 richardderus: +1 for "Edward Gorey's a bloody genius"

And though I knew little of his personal life, "strange misfit" seems perfectly appropriate.

>218 swynn: It was his public face, after all. He was not going to be dictated to, he dictated to you!

So often the reason people are weird is that very thing. I won't accept your idea of what I should be is the basis of many people's identity.

>217 karenmarie: Well. About time. hmmmf

Returning the ((hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD

105 ¡Hola Papi!: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer

Rating: 3.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY!

The Publisher Says: From popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer John Paul Brammer comes a hilarious, heartwarming memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America’s heartland to becoming the “Chicano Carrie Bradshaw” of his generation.

The first time someone called John Paul (JP) Brammer “Papi” was on the popular gay hookup app Grindr. At first, it was flattering; JP took this as white-guy speak for “hey, handsome.” Who doesn’t want to be called handsome? But then it happened again and again...and again, leaving JP wondering: Who the hell is Papi?

What started as a racialized moniker given to him on a hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column “¡Hola Papi!,” launching his career as the Cheryl Strayed for young queer people everywhere—and some straight people too. JP had his doubts at first—what advice could he really offer while he himself stumbled through his early 20s? Sometimes the best advice to dole outcomes from looking within, which is what JP has done in his column and book—and readers have flocked to him for honest, heartfelt wisdom, and of course, a few laughs.

In ¡Hola Papi!, JP shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet in America’s heartland, while attempting to answer some of life’s toughest questions: How do I let go of the past? How do I become the person I want to be? Is there such a thing as being too gay? Should I hook up with my grade school bully now that he’s out of the closet? Questions we’ve all asked ourselves, surely.

¡Hola Papi! is for anyone—gay, straight, and everything in between—who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are a lot of quotable quotes and pithy aperçus in this book:

We can't change the events of our lives. They happen, and there they are. But the lines we draw to connect those events, the shapes we make and the conclusions we reach, those come from us. They are our design.
–and–
But one thing I’ve learned, and I’ve learned it more solidly than maybe I’ve learned anything else, is that humans are incapable of looking at anything clearly. Even the facts of our own lives—we can only hold a few at any given time, and they shift, they slip through our fingers, they rearrange themselves into new shapes and conspire to tell a different story.
–and–
I thought of myself more as “a person with unique difficulty accessing heterosexuality.”

See? I defy you not to lard these into your next all-gay klatsch and smile becomingly modestly as everyone tells you how wise you are. (Don't front...you know that's exactly what you thought as you read them.)

But as a story of JP Brammer's life the structure is wanting, and I wanted. I didn't reject the advice-column bits. I didn't resent their presence or simply find their simplicity simplistic. There is virtue in simplicity! Matisse was certainly correct, quoted in the "How to Describe a Dick" chapter, "First you have to forget all the {advice/memoir tales} that have been {written} before." And that is a tall, skinny, mushroom-headed problem. (This was occasioned by a question lobbed at Brammer, "how can I go on when I'm so obviously a failure?") Again, to quote but this time Brammer himself, with a freeze-framed penis before him, "I stared at it blankly. It stared back." (Which reminds me, go watch Amazon's The Boys season 3, episode 1. Haw.) But that dick, the one JP Brammer needed to describe? He needed to describe it for work and where there's work there's deadlines and one of those was barrelling down on him. The dick in question, paused on his screen, needed to be described for the porn-ad website...one of those with glitzy photos and ads for things the guys doing the sex acts unquestionably do not need to concern themselves with...that needed clicks. That his words needed to elicit, because this isn't one of the dirty-boy blogs where the scenes are still-framed on, um, action shots shall we say.

This existential crisis..."what the hell is there to say about this tediously same-ol' same-ol' goverment issue genital organ?"...is resolved, of course, though honestly it's by no means certain that his inspired choice made it onto that site. It's really not an area in which I have a lot of interest or expertise, those teasy-squeezy parts of the porn world. "All or nothing" is more my motto but at sixty-plus I'm just not, erm, titillated by suchlike carryin' on as in days of yore.

(Okay, I think Rob's already bored reading this so I can safely add "it says here.")

The issue for me in this read isn't the framing device or the chatty tone or the unabashed goofiness. It's the way it doesn't make *a*book* but a collection of columns. While there is charm in that, it's not what I expected when I was told that it was a memoir. I got the message from the subtitle, which is perfect..."How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons"...but it doesn't make a memoir. The Lambda Literary folk didn't just make up the category it was nominated within...the marketing stresses memoir. Advice, yes; essay, certainly; gay, goodness me yes! Not memoir.

So readers are cautioned to adjust expectations going in to the fun, the roller-coaster of emotions, the single-mindedly survival focused, read. I'll say this for Author Brammer: He knows the structure of an anecdote, the precise emotional trajectory of a story, like the veins on...um...well, he knows what he's up to.

There is no way I can get off this horse (!) without sounding double-entendre-y as hell. Go on and buy it.

Wordle 361 4/6

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Are they even serious with this word. AEONS, MIRTH, CRIMP, PRIMO

>222 richardderus:. I don't know, but I'm also claiming a 4.

>223 Helenliz: It's a really craptastic choice, IMO, but there it is.

>220 alcottacre: *smooch* again

‘Morning, RD, and happy Wednesday to you.

>222 richardderus: Grrrr. I got skunked.

And no, no The Federalist yet. I was going to have read it by the time I first posted this morning, but my sister called and we’re still on the phone.

>225 karenmarie: Gross, rotten, terrible word. I'd've never got it except, well...look at that pattern!

I know it's coming. I'll possess my soul in patience. *smooch*

>222 richardderus: Wordle 361 6/6

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grrr

Edit. I was so angry about something else while doing it, I should have stepped away. I didn't I was rage wordling :P

>227 mckait: +1 on grrr but 6 > X!

>222 richardderus: even as I was putting it in I thought, "this can't really be it, can it?"

>229 bell7: Me too. I mean, look at that pattern...I was darn near led to the answer, and *still* had to fight the urge to see if they didn't really mean something else.

Morning, BigDaddy! I also got the Wordle in four, but it was just dumb luck.

Wordle 361 4/6

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>231 Crazymamie: It's a good result for a dumb-luck day, Mamie. We've all had 'em.

*smooch*

>222 richardderus: I couldn't think of other possible combinations and thought I would be wrong for sure and it turned out to be correct! So three tries for me.

Happy mid week, Richard!

((Hugs)) and **smooches**, RD. I hope you have a wonderful Thursday!

Happy Thursday! And I hope you have more fun on today's Wordle. ; )

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

Hiya, RD. Happy Thursday to you.

Coffee and reading, reading and coffee. Coffee and LT, LT and coffee. So far so good this morning.

*smooch*

Sweet Thursday, Richard. Our heat wave continues but it will be out of here later tonight. Just in time for our camping trip. I head out this afternoon and Sue will join me tomorrow afternoon. A big group of us are going.

106 Pancakes in Paris: Living the American Dream in France by Craig Carlson

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Paris was practically perfect...

Craig Carlson was the last person anyone would expect to open an American diner in Paris. He came from humble beginnings in a working-class town in Connecticut, had never worked in a restaurant, and didn't know anything about starting a brand-new business. But from his first visit to Paris, Craig knew he had found the city of his dreams, although one thing was still missing—the good ol' American breakfast he loved so much.

Pancakes in Paris is the story of Craig tackling the impossible—from raising the money to fund his dream to tracking down international suppliers for "exotic" American ingredients... and even finding love along the way. His diner, Breakfast In America, is now a renowned tourist destination, and the story of how it came to be is just as delicious and satisfying as the classic breakfast that tops its menu.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Do not even think of eating...that is, reading...this book on an empty stomach.

This is a memoir. It's not a happy-families, aren't-people-grand memoir. It's a people will help you...if you make it so it's either help you or admit they're letting you fail because reasons story. The working-class background Author Carlson comes from doesn't lead him to pursue academic excellence or anything other than box-ticking adequacy. His emotional life is, it's plain, neglected completely. He doesn't exactly tell us this but the stories he tells are tendentious. Lucky for him, he inspired others to help by being too good to just abandon.

What matters to most of us, in reading memoirs, is seeing either ourselves in the other make good, or ourselves as we wish we could be. In Author Carlson's case, I saw an American man making his way in a world that doesn't love Americans very much...Paris. And making that way against many kinds of social, political, and cultural odds. After all, how many working-class cooks (NOT a chef!) still less plain ol' restaurateurs do you know about? He's the guy with the idea that no one thinks is great but him. He sells the idea to enough money people that he gets to open his dream: American breakfast food in, of all places, the capital of world-wide food snobbery, Paris, France.

It works. It really, really works. Go look at the website linked in the description! So perfectly American...so popular in Paris. Despite EuroDisney.

Author Carlson does a lot of describing in this book. And he lards in a lot of French. (Well, it stands to reason, but be aware!) It's clear as day to me why he tried to make it as a screenwriter: he has a visual imagination. There's a minuscule recipe section containing recipes I can vouch for from having made them several times apiece, in my own weird variations and under Rob's very attentive eyes, over the years. (This book is six years old now and this is my first review of it! How gauche of me.) But most of all, Author Carlson's love of his creation, Breakfast in America, and his love of France, French food, a French guy who becomes his husband, and the world of making people happy (I contend that's the only reason people go into the food business) made me happy.

Should you read it? You bet your sweet bippy. And on Kindle, all the photos and the miscellaneous stuff shows up very well, which makes the regular price a bargain. (The sale price is incitement to riot.) Go get one now. It's a summer beach trip spent in good, fun company learning about how someone with real, honest-to-gawd stick-to-it-iveness makes it in this world.

By doing everything that scares him witless.

Pancakes in Paris sounds like a fun one!

*smooch*

ETA: I see there is a sequel, too...

>240 katiekrug: Less a sequel than a do-over, I suspect. He's going to be allowed more than a few dropped hairpins about his queerness, is my guess, as that whole thing is handled in less than a complete chapter. Big difference between 2015 and 2020.

But it was a fun read, and it is now Officially Reviewed for NetGalley purposes. I was *shocked* at the number of books I have read but didn't love enough to review. This is their time to shine.

>238 msf59: As someone who regards sleeping on the dirt as a slap in the face to millennia of ancestors known and unknown who fought, struggled, invented, and innovated their way *off* the dirt, have fun camping! Blessedly it'll be cooler than it's been.

>237 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! I'm glad it's been a good Thursday. *smooch*

>236 FAMeulstee: Thank you, Anita!

>235 Berly: Good heavens, I've left Wordle open since I got up and never done it! Off to do that now. *smooch*

>234 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia, and a big ol' hug'n'*smooch* back!

>233 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita! I felt the same way when I looked at the darn thing before submitting it as my answer. But there it was. Just weird, when words I think of as ordinary aren't among The Selected 2309.

Wordle 362 3/6

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Very tidy looking pattern, no? AEONS, ADORN, APRON

Took me 4. I went via a noble gas before I became a domestic goddess

PS: happy Thursday.

Hey, old man, said an older man. I bet you are doing great. I'm satisfied for now.

>246 weird_O: Your bet pays off, fellow ancient-of-days. Rob was very complimentary about my Pancakes in Paris review, a thing he usually isn't. And he got a huge laugh out of my joke in the ¡Hola Papi! review. Was still chuckling when he called. (To be clear, he just usually doesn't say anything about how he feels about my reviews at all.)

So, yeah. All's well in meworld.

>245 Helenliz: I darn near inhaled as well, Helen, but something told me....

Happy Thursdayness, BigDaddy! You got me with Pancakes in Paris, but then you already knew it would be a direct hit, didn't you? *smooch*

You got me with Pancakes in Paris, Richard. It's one I wouldn't have ordinarily picked up because living the American dream anywhere isn't in my wheelhouse.

Edward Gorey sounded familiar - probably all those Masterpiece Mystery illustrations. In my searches for info, I found that there is actually an Edward Gorey House which is dedicated to his illustrations from the looks of things.

>249 Familyhistorian: I'm so pleased! And I'm relatively unsurprised because you'll note the American man had to go to France to be himself...a thing I think an historian/genealogist could really resonate with.

>248 Crazymamie: It was the $2.51 Kindle edition, wasn't it. I could simply have posted the price and said "book good. read book." couldn't I. How much effort I could've saved....

*smooch*

When I posted >239 richardderus: to my blog, it was my 1,100th post (not review...post)! I started blogging again (Geocities, *sob*) because I was unnerved by the Amazon data defilement in 2009 (snatching paid-for content off Kindles without warning or compensation) then their purchase of Goodreads in 2013 hard on the heels of losing dozens of my reviews to their bizarre "off-topic" review bullshit...go here and/or here if you want to know more about that!...made me think it was time to have *another* public-facing place to put my reviews.

In the nine and a quarter years since I started the practice, I've had 451,000 unique views and accrued a high of almost 3,000 email subscribers as well as 1,200 Feedly followers. It's not The New York Review of Books, but it's not too terrible and all I do is talk about books I've read. Once in a way an essay...that first link is to the essay that was my first post that got over 1,000 views. No affiliate links because 1) ew and b) I can't afford to make money lest some jackass run report me to the DSS for exceeding my allowed income for a disabled person. (Yes, it's happened more than once and it was indeed someone from here.) So it's really just me talking about books that, almost a half-million times, others have made the effort to find me or to go to my blog via a link and read what I've said.

I hope to post at least 1,100 more times and amuse and entertain and illuminate more books for all y'all.

>239 richardderus: Adding that one to the BlackHole. Thanks for the review and recommendation, RD.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** and wishes for a wonderful weekend!

‘Morning, RDear. Happiest of Fridays to you.

>239 richardderus: Yum. Pancakes. I keep forgetting to make them. Waffles, too, with real butter and real maple syrup. Perhaps this morning.

Almost tempted… onto the wish list… the Kindle price is $2.51 right now, as you note below, but I’ve already spent $106 in June so far on Kindle. It’s only half done and I’m still in my bodice ripper phase. I'm not going to count the Kindle books as birthday presents for myself this month, of course. I don't buy myself necessities as birthday presents, and books are, of course, necessities.

>241 richardderus: dropped hairpins abound in my bodice rippers!

>241 richardderus: As someone who regards sleeping on the dirt as a slap in the face to millennia of ancestors known and unknown who fought, struggled, invented, and innovated their way *off* the dirt

Me, too. I also felt it was my duty to use drugs when my daughter was born in 1993 for all of the millions of women over the millenia who didn’t have them.

>251 richardderus: Impressive, of course. Your perseverance in the face of income limitations and dangerous persons assaulting you online everywhere is admirable, too.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>251 richardderus: Congratulations on 1,100 posts on your blog, Richard dear, only few bloggers keep going that long.
Ew indeed on affilate links, the internet could be so much more pleasant without affilates, advertising etc. So glad LT doesn't need them, and that addblockers exist!

107 Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir by Rajiv Mohabir

Rating: 5* of five, or maybe even six....

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States.

Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family’s abandoned Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji’s eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place?

Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji’s music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father’s disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. But even in the South Asian paradise of Jackson Heights, Rajiv feels like an outsider: “Coolie” rather than Desi. And then the final hammer of estrangement falls when his cousin outs him as an “antiman”—a Caribbean slur for men who love men—and his father and aunts disown him.

But Aji has taught Rajiv resilience. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman—forging a new way of being entirely his own. Rapturous, inventive, and devastating in its critique of our own failures of inclusion, Antiman is a hybrid memoir that helps us see ourselves and relationships anew, and announces an exciting new talent in Rajiv Mohabir.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you read one sentence from this review, make it this one:

I'd never thought of writing as a gift, but a skill and a bravery that you have after refusing to burn up in flame. It was an act against death.

That's as perfect a description of the reason writers write, creators of anything create, as I can imagine there being.

Now. Remember who this is, talking to you: An avowed anti-poetry zealot. This is a person, the one writing this review, who reads poetry with a pained grimace (if required to in public) or not at all (if it can possibly be avoided).

You, my fellow Western people, need to read this poet's poetry of love and passion and the terror of not knowing what life is, what Life is we understand, but life? Why is there life? And what you will learn is that everyone fears death and hates loneliness and eagerly whores their body out for a brief look-in from connectedness to another.

It's all down to Ajiya, the author's grandmother, you see. Without her strength of will and flowering of soul, your author would not have come to be or learned to be. She powered his being, his existence in this Vale of Tears, with a dirty veil of Life cast aside at last so she could finally, finally! be where she belonged all along, with her grandson, her boy of the heart.

Inside, then, all of us. Everyone who reads this book. Everyone who has read the poems she gave to her grandson who turned them into words they weren't forged from and thus pounded a new meaning from the gold, the silver, the lead. We all have Rajiv Mohabir's Ajiya in us and we're lucky we do. It's a simple truth that our belovèd others are not always what we would've wished them to be. Immigrants are required to make themselves anew and Ajiya wasn't made of malleable stuff so she didn't. Instead she waited, quiet as she could make herself, until the ears she had got in exchange for the mouth she turned off showed up again.

So it is that her outsider Other grandson became the channel of her frequency and spoke its truth and its stories and its poems into our indifference-clouded intoxicated-with-vanity white/Western/privileged ears. His soul and hers...two for one...and you'll just have to pay for a single book. It's an amazing reading experience, with its Creole passages and its polyphonic choruses of lifestuff. Its ebullience carries you through the passages where cruel, small people following a character from a bad fantasy novel reject and belittle when they can be induced to notice anyone not like themselves.

That attitude is a specialist product, turned out by the megaton, of the US and its more revolting useless eaters.

There is absolutely a need for all y'all to come to this table, to sit down with all your long-lost spiritkin, and learn the songs and the poems of their walk through our world. Yours has shadows, but their light might help dispel those that frighten you the way night terrors and sleep paralysis...the states between states that humans do not want to inhabit...release you when they are rolled away.

I wait for years for reads like this to come along.

>254 FAMeulstee: Thank you Anita! I'm sure most bloggers, doing this as a side hustle, get tired of it. It's a lot of effort, but it pays me back in lots of ways. All of them, I note, non-monetary. I get to read books for free! Ones my library really can't add, or can't justify adding, just for me.

Adblockers are the blood-pressure drug's best adjutant.

>253 karenmarie: Thank you, Horrible! *smooch*

I'm astonished when anyone who reads of bodices ripped can come away from the experience intolerant of otherness. Normatively, the heroines are not...ordinary...gels. And your bodice-ripper spending doesn't seem to be all that out of line considering how many you've read.

Did the waffles happen?

>252 alcottacre: Yay, I got Stasia! *wheeee*

Spend a lovely slide-into-weekend time, Stasia. *smooch*

Wordle 363 4/6

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It pays to get irritated by a skunked guess! AEONS, MIRTH, CLOWN, BLOWN

Also...when did the answer-word become a noun? How did I miss that memo?

>257 richardderus: - I never heard that the answer had to be a noun...?

Hot weather *smooch*. At least it's not going to last long!

>258 katiekrug: Oh! Really...I thought that was the deal, I guess, because it's been one for, like, forever. Well, it's not like the language is runnin' outta answers to the question, "what has five letters and isn't specialist jargon?"

I'm very relieved it won't, I confess. But it's really, really humid today so I'll be here huddled in front of the a/c.

>255 richardderus: Onto my TBR goes Antiman! Thanks, Richard!

Karen O

>255 richardderus: I hope that one will be translated in time, Richard dear, sounds good to me.

>257 richardderus: Again, I had the same in Wordle today, except the first word :-)

*smooches*

Hi, Richard! I have *Pancakes* securely on my Kindle. I have no idea when I'll read it, but I've paid a lot more for books I suspected I'd like a lot less. Antiman is firmly on the wish list with my thanks.
Six Wordle guesses today. Oh well. I hope there's tomorrow.

*smooch* for the weekend and long may the blog and blogger flourish!

>262 LizzieD: Thanks Peggy! *smooch*

I am sure you'll be entertained by Craig Carlson's story. From a rough start he's made a great life! And aren't we all in need of the stories of success in place of failure/enmity/disaster once in a while.

>261 FAMeulstee: Oh I hope it will be! I'll suggest to the editor that they pursue Dutch translation rights. Do you think a particular publisher would be likely to publish something so very queer?

We seem to be treading the same Wordle-paths!

>260 klobrien2: Oh excellent, Karen O.! I hope it shows up on your stacks soon.

>263 richardderus: Do you think a particular publisher would be likely to publish something so very queer?
Sorry, I never pay much attention to the publishers of the books I read. The book sounds like it could have potential in translation.

>257 richardderus: I took a page out of your book today and got the exact same results.

>265 bell7: *chuckle* I'm glad to see we found the same ideas!

>264 FAMeulstee: Ah well. I'll toss the idea to them, see if they know the Dutch market already.

>257 richardderus: I'm sure the Wordle word has been a pronoun before, so not a noun.

Morning, BigDaddy! Happy Saturdayness!

>268 Crazymamie: Thanks, Mamie, same back at'cha!

>267 Familyhistorian: I can't recall that case, so it clearly isn't a trend. There's no rule, apart from it must've made it onto their List of 2,309, but I guess the preponderance of nouns in the language bumfuzzled me.

108 Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The gripping true story, told here for the first time, of the Last Call Killer and the gay community of New York City that he preyed upon.

The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable.

He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim.

Nor will he be his last.

The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten.

This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him. And at the same time, it paints a portrait of his victims and a vibrant community navigating threat and resilience.

SOMEONE SENT ME A SIGNED COPY! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

My Review: It's an awful feeling to realize that you're not a serial-killing statistic by sheer chance. I'm taller and a little younger than this serial killer's victims. But I was there, in the relevant places at the relevant times; absent a quirk of chance, I would be dead like any one of those poor closeted bastards.

And it took a straight man to shine a long-missing light on the case. One case, not several as it was treated for a long time. In fact, I was pretty much unaware of the case until Elon Green's book hit my shelves.
I’d found the story by accident, surfaced by an errant Web search. Most of these so-called true crime cases don’t stay with me, but this one I couldn’t let go. Once I got past the murders and the investigations, and my own disbelief that it had all been forgotten—a string of killings in New York City didn’t merit so much as a Wikipedia entry?—I became obsessed with the lives of the victims. I became obsessed with the lives they wanted but couldn’t have. Here was a generation of men, more or less, for whom it was difficult to be visibly gay. To be visibly whole.

Doesn't that just say it all. Yes, things are...or were...getting better for the QUILTBAG community. The world's scum, however, can't abide that and decided to start victimizing the most vulnerable among us, the trans folk and the kids just figuring themselves out. How long before this kind of targeted killing spree happens again? If it hasn't, that is, and we're just unaware of it because it suits the statistics collectors not to look for this particular pattern.

I'm not going to say the name of the perpetrator of these disgusting crimes. He's still alive. That would be unthinkable in capital-punishment obsessed Murruhkuh...except his victims are faggots, so, well...maybe he didn't oughta have done it but, you know....

This list is of the men whose lives, blighted by homophobia and the dishonesty it's forced on so many for so long, were taken by a man without a soul.

Peter Anderson
–and–
Tom Mulcahy
–and–
Anthony Marrero
–and–
Michael Sakara
–and–
Fred Spencer

You are not forgotten. Thanks to a straight man, whose intersecting interests and requirements...he didn't suddenly become a writer, he was alert to the story that wasn't told, and that is how good work gets done!...led him to come and tell us all about what we weren't really supposed to know, or to hear about even. It makes law enforcement look as thuggish and homophobic as, sad experience has taught me, most any gay man can tell you they actually, regrettably, but inexcusably are.

As to the overall journalistic establishment...look into a mirror, y'all. Say it aloud: "I am homophobic." Because, you know by now, you slept on a story that wasn't about you, or about people you love. (This most definitely includes gay journalists.)

Sleep tight.

Wordle 364 4/6

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I got irritated when my usual 2nd word did nothing again, said it's a CABAL against me! and got CACAO because it was the only fit!

‘Morning, RDear! Happy Saturday to you.

>256 richardderus: Otherness is, of course, nothing to be intolerant of. Period, flat. And I am proud that my daughter is color blind and other blind. Meanness, evil, anybody trying to control another person, and etc., are things to be intolerant of, but the vastness of the human experience is to be celebrated.

Alas, no, the waffles didn’t happen. I wasn’t willing to spend the time, so had sourdough toast with unsalted butter and two eggs, over easy in unsalted butter with black pepper. I keep two butter dishes on the counter - the small, Franciscan Apple Pattern one with salted butter and the Mikasa Garden Harvest one with unsalted butter.

>259 richardderus: There are adverbs, verbs, adjectives, nouns, prepositions, and probably other word types, too.

>266 richardderus: Be careful! *chuckle* is very close to … you know who.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>272 karenmarie: ...then how the heck did they get 2,309 words?! There's well over 10,000 five-letter words!

I swanee I just do not get how people think of stuff to make stuff more complicated than it ever should be.

Breakfast, OTOH, sounds divine even if it wasn't waffles.

Oh, I so so so want to, just to tweak your nose, but I Shall Refrain...*smooch*

Wordle's creator has/had an ESL boyfriend/lover/husband and it was his arbitrary list of words for his love. His game, his rules, obviously. I hope the NYT doesn't expand/change the list.

Thank you from refraining.

*second smooch*

All quiet on the Richard front... happy Sunday to you.

I've finished Love, Hate & Clickbait. There is not much I can say that's anything better/different than your review although I wonder how soon you spotted that Clay was gay? It took me to perhaps the middle of the book when it was still just mostly kissing, straight woman that I am. And was Clay so naive that he wanted to rent/buy a house with Thom for after the fake wedding? Are gay men as inclined, in the stereotyped way of lesbians, to rent a U-haul after the second date? Enquiring minds and all that. 😎

*smooch*

109 Revolutions of All Colors by Dewaine Farria

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York's fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him.

Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don't often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community's rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it.

At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: So, what does one do with a story that sets him reeling, causes hours-long meditation breaks, and ultimately makes him want to scream in outrage? How, on each and every page, something just...beats against the inside of his skull? No, not the racism.

I'm used to stories about how hard it is to be Black, but told in the SATANIC SECOND PERSON?! Okay, okay, not *all* of it's in the Satanic Second, but more than the occasional bit it...everything from Simon's PoV. (And why doesn't Michael have a voice? The bisexual and proud of nothing man could be a novel by himself!)

Oh my stars and garters, it took a lot out of me to finish this really well-structured, emotionally resonant as only the most complete and truthful ones are, novel of three brothers. Well, two brothers and a brother-friend who's essentially raised by their father. Quite, quite fraught, these relationships...and it shows in the way the narratives are created: Simon, the outsider, gets the Satanic Second Person narrative voice, which hurts me to see or say; Gabriel (every time I read his name I hear Blow Gabriel Blow, even before...events...transpire) the direct address of first person along with his beguiling love interest the Ukrainian arms dealer; Michael...a ghost, no direct narrative. It's a complicated schema (in the literary sense) that guides the reader's perceptions and responses to each character. It also reinforces the characters' own sense of themselves, with Simon being the perpetual outsider, only addressed never addressing, and Michael the unwanted Other, something he can never forgive the world for. He opts out...bullied bisexual different lad, it's the only way he can see to make himself the center of his own story. He has to vanish himself from the world he came from to present himself in his new milieu of the fashion and beauty industry. And how perfect is that, I ask you....

So the burden of this refrain is that fathering isn't parenting, and mothering can only get a boy so far. The people in your life, all of them, are part of your coming-to-be process for better or worse, and they're there because they could be, chose to be, and chose you. Again, for better or for worse. Simon, whose wildness is more a cosmic scream of agony, never stops, rarely slows, and always disappoints. Hey, it's an identity...and Michael, whose fade-away was so much less theatrical than Simon's, is the one who calls him to account. When their father, their shared father, dies, as we know our elders must, it's bog-standard typical of Simon that he doesn't show for the funeral of this man whose presence in his life was an anchor, a stability that he had to reject to bring into the open the rejection he feels he must deserve. "He was your father too. Closest thing you had. But fatherhood doesn’t mean shit to you, does it?" says Michael, invisible gone-away Michael, to him, hitting the one sore spot that only your real family can reach.

The blow lands; the wound is mortal; but to what, remains the question.

The read is part of the Syracuse University program called the "Veterans Writing Award sponsored by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Syracuse University Press." Longer-term readers will remember my review of Thomas Bardenwerper's Mona Passage, also a winner of this prize, and see the thread that connects them: I like reading about people not like me, and not like me in positive, interesting ways. Author Farria writes as a veteran (as I am not) and about bisexual Black men, absolute hen's teeth in the QUILTBAG representation algorithm. Bisexual when unmodified by "man/male/men" is now meant to be read as "woman." Or so it seems in the marketing done to the QUILTBAGgers. I am all for that changing to include the bisexual men of our various overlapping communities.

What made this novel such a good read for me was that acknowledgment that we, the QUILTBAG folk, exist in all families, take up space that we deserve and we are entitled to, and that goes for every family everywhere. It's telling that Michael's bullying drives him away; it's telling that he is the only one to have the standing to call out Simon, the man mired in a sense of himself as unworthy, because Michael has been sent that message as well. It's the way Author Farria makes all those pieces come together that gives me such a vivid and personal sense of this read's message of inclusiveness. It's a screwed up family that produced Simon, Michael, and Gabriel, but it's a family and it is a powerful one to make men whose monstrous sadness and pain didn't destroy them. Take a minute...think about your own life...what were the before-and-afters there? These three men, brothers, are bound by that before-and-after that came long before the showy, flashy one.

Definitely a talented writer's first novel. May many more follow it.

Wordle 365 3/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜🟨
🟨⬜🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
...for Father's Day...*tsk* FEELINGS brought me to AEONS, SWORE, LOSER and dare I say were magnified.

>275 karenmarie: Sunday orisons, Horrible dear. Hm...well...Clay is "coded queer" for the romance world, he's different and he's not obviously dangling after a woman, and none are checking him out. He's also presented as getting excited, though it is plausibly from fear, when Thom manhandles him...and never displays any of the aggressive responses a straight man would to Thom after that.

Plus, well, takes one to know one. *smooch*

BURGOINE #36

Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind) by Thomas Erikson

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Part of the bestselling Surrounded by Idiots series!

Internationally bestselling author Thomas Erikson shares the secrets of dealing with everyday narcissists.

Are the narcissists in your life making you miserable? Are you worn out by their constant demands for attention, their absolute conviction they are right (even when they’re clearly not), their determination to do whatever they want (regardless of the impact), and their baffling need to control everyone and everything around them?

In this thought-provoking, sanity-saving book, Thomas Erikson helps you understand what makes narcissists tick and, crucially, how to handle them without wearing yourself out in the process. With the help of the simple, four-color behavioral model made famous in Surrounded by Idiots, Erikson provides all the tools you need to manage not just the narcissists around you but everyday narcissistic behaviors as well–something that is becoming more widespread in the age of social media.

Engaging and practical, Surrounded by Narcissists will help you free yourself from the thrall of others' toxic agendas so you can pursue a happier, more fulfilling and successful life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: US society, it seems, is a narcissism-generating machine. Largely dealt with in silence, the harm narcissistic people cause in public and private spheres impacts all of us. In any relationship, a narcissist uses very specific strategies to control you, and the conversation about them, so they appear brilliant at all times. A recent scandal involving a specific Hollywood star's behavior towards another person is understandable more completely in this light. Doubtless you can see many traits in the stories the author uses to explain narcissism that adhere to lots of folks you know...but never knew why you had trouble warming up to them.

A word of caution: Don't think you're suddenly a mental-health professional and run around diagnosing others. They won't like it, and it will bite you hard. The author is careful, unsurprisingly since his brand is as a communicator, to state that he is synthesizing research and presenting conclusions based on data, not on his mental-health expertise.

I'll just leave this here:

>280 laytonwoman3rd: Oh, glory! What a stunning helmet that is. Thanks, Linda3rd!

>274 karenmarie: IIRC the NYT has already changed the list, removing whatever was too obscure (i.e. too British) for them, and perhaps some things they thought would be controversial in the US political environment.

Sunday *smooch*

HI Richard just thumbed your review of Young Mungo. I've just started it and know I'm going to love it as I did Shuggie Bain. What an amazing writer!

>284 mdoris: Thank you for the lovely compliment, Mary! And yes to Douglas Stuart's amazingness, I'm always eager to learn of new talents like his.

>283 bell7: *waves at Mary*

>282 ArlieS: They hadda pee on it to make it theirs, I guess.

Happy ... um ... new thread Richard!

I saw some Tentacled British in Port Isaac and thought of you.

Further to previous discussions waaay up-thread:


vest


T-shirt


waistcoat

From your favourite too, too for toi

>279 richardderus: Some of those narcissists freely admit their flaw. I know one such person who puts people off until they really get to know him. This person really is willing to share his wealth of knowledge and admit when he is wrong. I know not all narcissists are that way, but at least it makes this one tolerable for those who take the time to get to know him.

Morning, Richard. The camping trip went very well and the weather was beautiful. Some hiking, birding and lots of socializing. I got also got a surprisingly number of pages read. And you will be glad to learn that we never slept in the "dirt" once. 😁

I hope you had a good weekend, my friend.

Happy Monday, Richard!

110 Bright Future: An Anthology by various authors

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spaceships, space stations, and distant planets. Stampeding elephants, a talking dog, and a hungover captain without a ship. An ensign far from home, a stowaway, and a pair of runaways. This anthology features stories of a diverse and inclusive future by six up-and-coming indie authors.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM STORY ORIGIN. THANK YOU.

My Review: Teaser-taster collections are very risky reads for me. I am frequently left irked by them, especially when they have excerpts from longer works. A bullet dodged here, then, since these are all tales from established storyverses the authors are working within, with one exception; with another exception, they're the inciting incidents in the series. I'm entirely on board with most of the stories because the authors have high-quality craft chops.

I herewith employ the time-honored tradition of this blog, the Bryce Method, of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece. My blogged review has links to the authors' various website.

Case File #7: The One with All the Elephants by Jeannette Bedard strikes a delightful, amusing tone as it merges the SF and Fantasy strands of SFF in one quite engaging story. I was hugely amused, to the point of laughing out loud, when I read "She pulled out an old tablet—the kind once used in the elementary classrooms of my grandparents or maybe their grandparents." Exactly as I'd feel if someone pulled out a slate! But I think Detective Flo's partner, Ned, who eats spicy cricket tacos, made the whole story of mini-elephants on a space station come alive for me. If this is in a series, can't find it; if it isn't, please make it one. 4 stars

Jurassic Dark by SI CLARKE brings characters from monadnock-of-indie-SF Si Clarke's Starship Teapot series in a suspenseful, eerie tale in homage to Arthur C, Clarke's iconic, A Walk in the Dark, charmingly dramatized by The Black Dog Chronicles here. It really, truly is a delightful homage, too. Spock is a hilarious character, beak and all. Shake it, Spock! 4 stars

The Blood of the Forgotten by Dani Hoots is a novella set in a world I don't have any experience with, so I spent the whole read wondering what the heck led these two children...sixteen and eighteen, more or less...to be where they were, to what they decided to do, to the final decision in the story that, frankly, squicked me out. The Kausians, which our sister-and-brother narrators happen to be, were very interesting; because I haven't read the series, I had to be okay with gleanings of their essence. It was, sadly, a read I found unsatisfying. 3 stars all for potentials unrealized.

The Arno Manoeuvre by D.M. Pruden will, I'd bet, spawn follow-on tales...it feels like there's more than enough room for more stories in this setting, part of the author's Shattered Empire series. A main character in the series, Captain Pavlovich, is a mere Ensign on his first assignment in this novella. It takes place in a dark, dreadful time in the storyverse's history, and uses the always effective narrative technique of first-person cinematic viewpoint to follow Ens. Pavlovich as he comes by his ability to command and to control...himself, and his own narrative. Battle scenes aren't for everyone; be aware that they are detailed and contain triggering events for those with PTSD. 5 stars

Endigo: Trystero Origins by Dave Walsh is the set-up novella for his series, Trystero. The way the Trystero gets its name, and its captain, in the series to come is a terrific take on the old plot of the passing of the torch. It's a good tale, well told, and has all the action you'd want to see. 4.5 stars

Impounded by John Wilker, first story in that author's Space Rogues series. It felt like the almost-R-rated version of Star Trek: The Original Series, and I don't mean that in a good way. I disliked Wil Calder, the series' main character, almost as much as I disliked Kirk. Not to my taste; possibly to yours. 3 stars

>289 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita, and the same back at'cha!

>288 msf59: Happy homecoming, Mark! I'm amazed you got any reading done at all, what with the lack of walls and dodging woolly mammoths out on the tundra and all.

It's been bizarrely cold here after a hot snap. I'm definitely not complaining, though, I'll take this over any other outcome. Today should get to summer-normals of 78° - 80°.

>287 thornton37814: Like any psychiatric diagnosis, it's useful information, Lori. It's best to know what kind of person one is, and manage it; best to know what kind of person one can't tolerate, and avoid them. The issue is "DIAGNOSIS" and that's where fads in the culture, and us civilians glomming onto misunderstandings and misdiagnosing therefrom.

Still, better this than the old silences, in my never-humble opinion. (Such a narcissistic thing to say!)

>286 humouress: Vest = undershirt.

T-shirt ✓

Waistcoat (no matter how one pronounces it) = vest.

Here endeth the lesson. *smooch*

Come on over! New thread time.