Reading Roundup: August 2023

The Witch King by Martha Wells. One thing I love about the Murderbot series is how breezy they are. There’s not a lot of time spent lovingly describing the spaceports and mining facilities and whatnot–the book just assumes you have a general idea of what a spaceport or mining facility looks like from watching and playing space operas, and moves along, because the point of the story is action, suspense, and a dose of social awkwardness. Some of those qualities linger in The Witch King, which is by the same author, but they hit different in a high fantasy novel beset by political intrigue. There’s lore and mythology specific to this world, and I found some of the supernatural distinctions as well as the warring factions a little hard to grasp. But also, I didn’t care; I was there for page-turning action sequences, narrow escapes, dramatic reveals, and the quirks of an idiosyncratic crew.

Sea Change by Gina Chung. I meant to just peruse the first few pages over lunch one day, but I ended up reading the whole thing over the next few days (which meant putting off my book club book, whoops!) The book opens and closes in the haunted setting of a mall aquarium that is home to an enormous, ancient Pacific octopus rescued from the dangerously polluted “Bering Vortex.” This made for a compelling opening, and a resonant recurring image throughout the book, but this is not ecofiction or spec fiction, as I assumed: it is a lovely, engaging novel about relationships–family, friends, romance–and transitioning into adulthood. The mysterious Vortex, the slightly mutated octopus, and a few other plot devices (like the dating app that matches user by algorithm rather than by profile) are what I would call speculative elements, but what drives the plot and draws in the reader is main character Ro and her relatable fears and griefs.

A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. My ecofiction book club selected this 1986 feminist sci fi classic. I had a little trouble getting into it at first–the writing style of the era is so different from what I’m used to–but we found it a really rich and interesting text to discuss. In this story, most of the planets and moons in the galaxy have been assimilated into a Space Empire (with a heavy dose of Space Capitalism, emphasis on metals and gems). Traders have only recently made contact with the ocean moon Shora, populated by the all-female, purple-tinged, web-fingered Sharers, but now the Space Empire is interested in mining this moon for its scientific knowledge more than its herbs and silks. Sharer language and culture is reflexive and cooperative: they carefully steward the sea resources they use for food and floating habitats, they have no leader, and every action implies its equal and opposite reaction (if you hit, you are hit; if you deceive, you are deceived; and so on). It’s not a perfect femtopia–there are disagreements, conflicts, and losses in the challenging ocean environment–but it was really interesting to read this shortly after seeing the Barbie movie, and considering how each woman-led society subverts what we take for granted in patriarchal capitalism. We also were really interested in the depiction of nonviolent resistance and disruption, even when confronting a Space Empire with so little regard for sentient life.

The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and what Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men by Manuel Betancourt. My college BFF and I have a term to describe how it felt listening to music and watching movies in our teens and college years: crumbs. It’s true that there were some bombastic pop cultural artifacts that smashed or at least queried heteronormativity–we loved Victor/Victoria, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Izzard’s Dressed to Kill for a few examples–but for the most part we didn’t see ourselves or meaningful pathways for gender and sexual expression in most of our media. We still became ourselves, though, snatching up crumbs where we could find them: a suggestive lyric here, a minor character there.
That’s one reason I enjoyed Betancourt’s Movies Made Gay series at Catapult: he looks back at some of the same media I was consuming and finds, through a combination of personal narrative, cinema history, and film theory, the trail of crumbs that helped us understand or question sex and desire in those films. This book takes a similar approach in exploring how masculinity and male bodies are represented in visual culture, from the design of Disney’s Hercules to the evolution of Ricky Martin’s public image to when and how the male body is permitted to be an erotic object in mainstream advertising and film.

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin. This book made me feel like a first-year grad student at a party. This book is the cool girl in your lit theory seminar whose favorite authors are all white men who died young; she is lewd, funny, sexy, and unpredictably mean. There were moments I laughed out loud and moments I really felt for the narrator–a true disaster bi, and a rare instance of a 45yo woman as protagonist, although I would not include her story in Books About Grown-Up People. Then there were moments I felt were a little too carefully designed to test my compassion, distastefully artful in the way Brief Interviews with Hideous Men can be: content notes for suicide, assault, and adultery. Did I like it? I’m still not sure. But I inhaled it in two days.

Some short poems and prose I loved:
After We Buried the Dog in the Dark by Jin Cordero (content note for pet death)
Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Pregnancy Game by Michelle Ross
The Art of Losing by Julie Cadman-Kim

Elsewhere

This newsletter offers a survey of how fatphobia manifests in a few different forms in contemporary novels. (I contributed a screenshot for the dismaying opening of Bandit Queens.)
The author also mentions Big Swiss, which led me to her essay on The “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” Novel, which I think is a solid assessment of Big Swiss even though my reading experience was not exactly the same.

On a more cheerful, fat-positive note: loved everything about this interview with artist Lindsey Guile, who creates beautiful, powerful charcoal drawings of (often tattooed) fat people.

Some more shenanigans with machine learning: What Algorithms Can’t Tell You about Art
And this: Publishing scammers are using AI to scale their grifts

I haven’t read that much about The Employees, a book I loved, so I appreciated a little context (including the artistic inspiration for the mysterious objects in the books) from this review.

I Regret to Announce That I Will Not Be Cancelling My Plans With You Tonight

I love black pepper, so I was interested to read about shenanigans and restructuring in the global black pepper trade!

I am sure I have already read On Pandering, a 2015 essay by Claire Vaye Watkins, but I recently reread it and I am still astonished by its devastating self-clarity.

Romance is not my ministry, but I enjoyed this reflection on the ur-Romance of Pride and Prejudice and how we still see echoes not only of its love story but of its class story.

Minutiae

August was a month to catch my breath and take better care of myself. I returned to ballet, which was difficult but exhilarating. I went swimming with friends and scheduled some watch parties so we could heckle from home. I let my Elder Scrolls subscription lapse and instead played games I’d downloaded for free or cheap. When the Past Was Around had its charms. Strange Horticulture scratches the same itch as my beloved Room series: puzzles both visual and tactile, arcane arts, the looming dread of some eldritch threat. What Remains of Edith Finch is a beautiful, weird, whimsical, and tragic world that you sort of move through like a railcar in an amusement park ride; I was astonished by the scenes built into the mysterious Finch house and wished I could do more within them.

I went on a bird walk one early morning, which kind of confirmed that I am not a bird person. The other early risers most certainly were, and to be fair they were clearly interested in helping a noob identify and get excited about birds. And I like birds! I saw a few that I hadn’t gotten to see up close before, like a king bird. But I also really like plants, and was possibly more interested in looking at trailside plant species than craning my neck skyward.

I taught a Blue Stoop workshop. I got my paperwork to TA a creative writing class again in the fall. I worked on a manuscript for an odd little project that I will share when it is out in the world.

I’ve been off Goodreads for literally 10 years, ever since Amazon took it over, but since the site is coming under criticism again, now seems like a good time to get on board with Storygraph. Here’s my profile. Let’s be friends.