I remember this book being on display at my local public library during the summer I was 14. I remember being too scared to check it or even pick it up off the table where it was displayed. I don’t remember the other books or even the theme of the display itself. I grew up in a fairly conservative suburb; I don’t know which intrepid librarian put Boy Meets Boy on display in the YA section, and I don’t know how it managed to stay there for the full month of July without anyone complaining enough for it to be taken down. At school a few months later my friends and I furtively passed around a copy of Keeping You A Secret and felt very, very special. Reading a teen lesbian love story felt very revolutionary at a Catholic all-girls’ school. 

As a teenager, I stared at the cover of Boy Meets Boy and wondered if it was worth it, to snag a copy and curl up in a corner of the library (or even, heaven forbid, take a copy home with me) and let anyone who passed me by know that I was reading a book about gay people; that I was by implication One Of Them. It felt safer a few months later; the cover ofKeeping You A Secret was ambiguous enough and enough of my friends were also reading the book that it felt to me like this shared secret, something we carried together as opposed to an undefinable, terrifying burden that I was unsure of how to take for myself. 

My point is that I don’t have the ability to write an objective review of a book like Boy Meets Boy. It’s not Great Literature, and the central thesis of the book reads as more than mildly preposterous to me — that there’s this random suburb where PFLAG is just as important as the PTA, and sometimes the overwhelming tweeness of the town (including local institutions like the I Scream ice cream parlor, where horror movies are served along with ice cream and a record shop sharply divided by the two owners’ distinct tastes) tips the book into self-parodic territory — but, you know what? All fiction is basically a fantasy, and as far as fantasies go, I can’t find too much to say against Boy Meets Boy. It’s a story without a real villain, only confused people who are sometimes baffled about how to show love. It’s sweet. It made me forget, while I was reading it, that I’m often not a person but instead a controversial topic.

I should have known better.

Katy bought this one for herself and read it first, and her review was not kind. Still, I thought, Whatever, it’s still worth reading, right?

Wrong. 

What’s astonishing to me is how thoroughly The Annotated Sandman fails at each of its possible goals. It’s not a particularly good literary analysis of a work that happens to be in a medium that rarely inspires respected literary analysis — Klinger doesn’t do a good job of explaining the convoluted backstory of the various DC characters who pop up early in the narrative, and he never references the artwork except to point out details that Gaiman included in his original scripts. It’s not a particularly good “behind-the-scenes” look with interesting notes about the way the finished product evolved, as Klinger provides very little insight into the process of creating Sandman. It’s particularly frustrating to see Klinger write as though Sandman was solely Gaiman’s creation, given Gaiman’s reputation for working closely with the series’ artists. It’s not even a serviceable analysis of Sandman as a work. Klinger only rarely points out the thematic connections between characters and events, and when he does, it’s the shallow stuff he seems interested in, like the connection between Gilbert telling Rose an especially gruesome version of “Little Red Riding Hood” shortly before a serial child rapist and murderer wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a wolf attacks her. 

Given that Klinger and Gaiman both reference the voluminous annotations and notes about the original comics made by Usenet-dwelling fans, the thin and airless commentary is especially grating. The backstories for various minor DC characters read like hastily-summarized Wikipedia entries. The few theories that are proposed (“Are the dream vortices the price that Morpheus must pay for Nada’s love?”) aren’t investigated or supported, and Gaiman’s own commentary about what he was trying to do with various themes and plot arcs is rarely interacted with, just quoted as though that adds anything.

Klinger also does a poor job of differentiating between fictional history and real history, especially in the first several issues; he then later makes a point of nitpicking a minor interaction between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, pointing out that there’s no historical evidence the two ever met. Which: accurate, but entirely missing the point. It’s been overwhelmingly accepted by pop culture and academia that Shakespeare and Marlowe knew each other at least in passing. 

Overall, Klinger’s attitudes towards the queer characters and themes inSandman is sorely lacking. He conflates transgender people with crossdressers and drag queens, argues about the historical accuracy of Marlowe’s homosexuality, completely ignores the thematic relevance of Desire’s androgynous presentation and identity, and doesn’t bother to discuss the way Sandman impacted queer representation or even the difference between queer representation at the time of the comic’s writing and the annotations’. I have a low tolerance for that crap to begin with, but if you’re going to be anxious around the issue of women and queers, maybe don’t work on annotating fucking Sandman, which is: full of women and queers being taken seriously. 

Aside from all that, there are several mistakes in the notes themselves; repeated footnotes, notes referencing incorrect panels or pages. Even more frustrating for me, the pages themselves aren’t numbered, making it sometimes difficult to figure out exactly which page Klinger was referencing, much less which panel. 

It’s always nice when something ends up being sort of perfectly tailored to your personal philosophy. 

The She is about a teenager named Evan, whose parents died almost a decade ago at sea. Evan overheard their mayday call, and can’t help but think they were gobbled up by The She, a mythical creature that is purported to live in deep waters and occasionally gobble up unlucky sailors. Emmett, Evan’s older brother, thinks otherwise: he’s a atheist socialist working on his philosophy dissertation who believes utterly in cold, hard facts and refuses to accept the idea that there’s a sea-witch who eats people hiding out in the water.

I like any story that confronts the nature of truth and myth. I sort of expected similar themes given the other Plum-Ucci book I read, What Happened To Lani Garver, but overall I think it works a bit better in The She. Characters in The She have long, drawn-out philosophical conversations that don’t feel like an infodump or like the author having an argument with herself. 

Certain elements of the story feel unnecessary, particularly the specifics of another character’s dysfunctional family and abusive father as well as a twist about Evan’s mother, but Plum-Ucci manages to keep it all from getting too sordid. Thankfully.

Off to a slow start this year. About ten days ago I was like, “Fuck, I need to start reading so I don’t go a whole month without an entry!” 

That worked out well. 

Queer Cowboys was a gift. Clearly from someone who knows me super well! I ended up liking the book itself, though really it functions more as a few essays on specific topics. I don’t know, dude, any book that starts off with questioning whether Jim and Huck had sex on their raft — that’s gonna be a good book. 

It’s not super deep — a lot of the homoeroticism that Packard references really comes about as a side effect of treating women as second-class citizens, and there’s very little inquiry into this reality, which would have been nice, given what a common trend it is for single-sex spaces to have undercurrents of homoeroticism. 

Still, generally recommended.

Total number of books read: 84
Average books per month: 7
Nonfiction books: 11 (~%13)
Comic books: 36 (%43)
Kindle books: 22 (%26)
Abandoned books: 2; The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Jesus and the Eucharist by Tad W. Guzie (had to give up on this one when mono ate my brain in the early part of the year — I plan to start over on this one.)
Books in Limbo (begun in 2011 but will finish in 2012): The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (technically started in 2010 but I do still pick it up periodically), Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography by Marion Meade

A little bit different from last year — mainly in that I did a hell of a lot more reading on the Kindle and comic books. I’d hoped to work my way through books I already owned and to read more nonfiction, and it was basically a bust on both fronts. Whoops. 

The first two months of the year, I was sick as hell with mono and basically had no energy for anything more demanding than the average comic book, which is probably why I read so fucking many comics this year. Well, that and I’m still feeling out what and who I like in comics. 

2011 was an off year for me in a lot of ways. Looking forward to 2012. Happy New Year. Be safe. 

Blessedly, The Lives of Christopher Chant is just as charming as Charmed Life. Christopher Chant, who grows up to be the Chrestomanci seen in Charmed Life, was a hilariously cranky little boy, it seems, and his adventures through various worlds were hilarious and fascinating. Jones’ willingness to go gruesome in her details (mermaid meat! Disgusting.) without crossing some weird line is one of my favourite quirks of hers. 

I’d love to talk at more length about the Chrestomanci books I’ve read so far, but they’re just so singularly entertaining that to share too many details feels like spoiling something. And I’m generally very unconcerned about spoilers. 

Got a strong stomach? Weird sense of humour? Then Chew is worth checking out. If you’re easily grossed out, then I’d give this one a skip.

Our hero is Tony Chu, a detective with a peculiar ability: he gets psychic impressions from whatever he ingests. (Except beets. I have deleted six dumb puns from this parenthetical aside.) This includes human flesh, which leads to the FDA recruiting him as a special agent — in the world of Chew, avian flu has caused chicken meat to be outlawed and the FDA has become the most powerful government agency. Run with it.

It’s weird. Delightfully so. There’s a black market for chicken meat! A food writer who ends a standoff between Chu and a radical anti-government group by reciting her experience of eating a rancid meal with such otherworldly detail, they puke themselves to incapacitation! I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Leah loaned the first volume of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci to me ages ago, I think at the same time that I returned Howl’s Moving Castle to her. It took me this long to sit down and actually read it, and I’m glad I finally did.

Charmed Life, fittingly, is a charming story about a little boy named Eric Chant, dubbed Cat by his older sister Gwendolen. Gwendolen is a witch in the sort of world wherein magic and witchcraft are perfectly normal. Near the beginning of the story, Cat and Gwendolen are orphaned and then sent to live in a strange castle full of strange people, most of whom seem to have some kind of magic or another. This leaves poor Cat even more alone, as he’s about the only person living in the castle who doesn’t have any magic.

Chrestomanci Castle is the property of Chrestomanci — which is a title, not a name — and Chrestomanci himself is even stranger than his castle. He’s not particularly impressed by Gwendolen’s repeated magical of temper-tantrums. All Gwendolen wants is for her power to be recognized so she can go on learning strong enough magic to take over the world and rule it forever. (That’s really my only disappointment with the book. I have a profound love for difficult women, which is probably pretty narcissistic, as I’m a fairly diffcult woman myself. I really wanted to love Gwendolen. Diana really wanted her to be a villian. Diana won, for she is Author.)

As always, the mechanics of how Diana Wynne-Jones writes magic is supremely entertaining. To specify would be to spoil rather a lot, and while I saw the first part of the big twist coming, the best part about Wynne-Jones’ writing is exactly how twisty it all is.

This is probably the coolest idea for a poetry collection I’ve ever come across. I don’t own much poetry, but what I do own is almost entirely a single author’s works.

I’ve seen a lot of poetry collections that I’ve enjoyed flipping through, but collections in general are weird beasts. Conversation Pieces’ thesis is that the intensely personal nature of poetry can be even better appreciated once the greater cultural context and continuum are taken into account.

The collection starts with Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and a series of responses directed at it. Some of the pairings and groupings are very specifically directed at each other, like the responses to Marlowe’s. My favourite of these is Suzanne Frischkorn’s cool retort to Pablo Neruda’s “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” — there are few things I love more than a demonstration that the truth of any situation most often lies somewhere in the middle.

Some of the pairings are only variations on a theme, crossing language, gender, sexuality, race, and era to join in a conversation. There’s a real feel of give-and-take to Conversation Pieces that’s absolutely lovely. This is probably my favourite Everyman’s Library collection. Highly, highly recommended.

The Magicians is, to put it bluntly, a fucking boring slog of a read. Lev Grossman knows precisely how pulpy and dumb a lot of high fantasy is (I say this as a cheerful and enthusiastic reader of pulpy dumb high fantasy) and seems to be consciously trying to write a dumb pulpy high fantasy book that’s sexy and smart and, like, deep. Rather than reveling in the joy of casting magic or in the fiendishly difficult mechanics thereof, he focuses on the dreary grad student nature of it all while having Our Friend And Humble Narrator Quentin remark about the various ways in which going to a magical academy doesn’t really measure up to the YA books about going to a magical academy.

Purportedly, later on, Quentin and company actually find the literary magical academy they all grew up reading about. I didn’t get to that point — there was another point in the narrative that I was told was a good “well, if you’re not in by now, you’ll never be in,” and I wasn’t really anything other than bored and irritated at that point (it was the arctic fox romping, for those who’ve read The Magicians). So I gave up.

The frustrating thing about The Magicians is that there’s plenty of good, inventive, complex stuff in it. Our Friend And Humble Narrator Quentin’s girlfriend Alice is a good deal more entertaining than Quentin himself, as is the girl he lusted after before being accepted to magician school, Julia — she likewise tested for magician school, but didn’t make the cut and is going slowly mad as she refuses to come to grips with this. I’d frankly read an unlimited number of books about poor Julia. Some details of the school itself (like how it’s several months behind The Real World, and the gap just keeps increasing, due to some sloppy spellwork) and the entrance exams are hilarious and fascinating, and make me wish that Grossman had at the very least written a less irritating Friend And Humble Narrator. Admittedly I’m predisposed to hate Quentin, as he’s an entitled dude who’s impressed with his own brilliance and pissed off that his best friend’s girlfriend isn’t fucking him, but I’ve seen others identify him as the weak link in what they call a decidedly impressive work.

Probably last year I would’ve grit my teeth and forced my way through The Magicians at least, if not also its sequel The Magician King. At this point, that’s too much time to spend with Quentin’s manpain. Shut up, dude.

I had a post all written up for this one, and then when it came time to actually, you know, post it, I decided I didn’t like the post at all. (Also, this is the post that sort of stopped me in my tracks blogging. I was having a hard time articulating my complex feelings, and then I just sort of set it aside, and then…I didn’t come back to it.)

So: take two.

When I bought Cunt several months ago, I described it as “a mixed bag, ideologically speaking” despite not having read it — the impression was formed by what a couple friends had told me about the book. After having read it: Yep, it’s a mixed bag, ideologically speaking.

I disagree with a whole hell of a lot of what Muscio has to say. Her particular brand of feminism is very Earth Mama, let’s feel and celebrate our Moon Time, very college activism. I think not a whole hell of a lot is accomplished by going to see movies with rape scene(s) and then hollering at the screen during the aforementioned scene(s). I think that bleeding freely on the floor and/or your clothes is gross, whether you’re bleeding from your vag or from a fresh cut. I think that inducing an abortion by drinking tea made from a bunch of weird herbs is just a step above visiting coathanger city. I think that trying to only buy things from corporations run by women conveniently overlooks the fact that “woman” doesn’t automatically equal “feminist” and that not every self-identified member of either group is actively invested in helping women on the whole.

That said, I still think Cunt is an important work. It’s important to listen to people you disagree with, in part because often they’ve thought of or experienced things you haven’t or in a way you haven’t, and in part because it’s really difficult to have a conversation with someone (whether you’re actively trying to change their mind or not) if you don’t understand where they’re coming from.

Especially after reading Cunt, I agree with a lot of where Muscio’s coming from. I agree that engaging critically with media is important, especially media that you love or that touched you emotionally. I agree that there’s too damned much stigma surrounding menstruation; it’s a normal bodily function. I agree that abortion as a reality needs to be destigmatized and improved. I agree that voting with your dollar is incredibly important.

I haven’t read the first edition of Cunt, but Muscio acknowledges that it completely erased trans women from her narration of femaleness. I’ve got some mixed feelings. Obviously the erasure and exclusion of trans women sucks, but so much of femaleness is inescapably tied to the realities of a vagina. Trans women will never menstruate, have pregnancy scares, have an abortion, or plan out their labor and childbirth. On the one hand, I agree that it’s problematic to essentialize one’s gender by focusing on one’s genetalia to the exclusion of all else. On the other hand, there’s just not enough frank, open talk about vaginas as something other than a sheath for a penis, and I do think that this message is somewhat diluted by broadening the scope to include trans women’s bodies. On the third hand, Cunt is about so much more than the realities of a woman’s physical, biologically female genetalia. Our sisters are being killed for being. Setting that reality aside is unconscionable.

Ultimately, I find myself wishing that Muscio had edited more of the original text of Cunt to more fully include trans women, despite my lingering mixed feelings. (Breaking: cisgender privilege exists! The L, G, and B are really good at rationalizing exclusion of the T! Other news at eleven.) Feminism has a long, ugly history of excluding trans women, which Muscio mentions but doesn’t really delve into. Feminists have to get better about including, supporting, and fighting for trans rights, it’s just that simple.

Well, I got a little off-course, but it’s better than the first shot.

My father’s got a theory about child-rearing: as a parent, your choices determine %5-15 of what your child(ren) end up being. The catch is, you don’t get to pick which choices, which parts, or which percent. There are a great many things about which my father and I will probably never, ever see eye-to-eye, but protective affection for the Klingon language and the people who are devoted to it is not one of them.

In a way, it’s a lot like our shared affection for space exploration: why is it important for humans to send people into space, onto moons and asteroids and planets? Because those things are there. Why is it important for a bunch of nerds to translate Shakespeare’s masterpiece into an invented language that perhaps twenty people can speak spontaneously and fluently? Because it’s language, and it’s humanity, and these things are important because they are.  

Arika Okrent’s book is pretty delightful. It’s clear, cheerful, interesting, and often very funny. Some of the languages she researches are so patently insane it’s difficult to imagine that a human being not only thought them up and devoted literally years to them but also honestly thought that their languages would change the world and become universally adopted. 

In the Land of Invented Languages covers a broad swath of linguistics and history, and it’s not always particularly comprehensive. For example, at one point, Okrent goes on at length discussing the difficulty in the past regarding math and physics, owing to the fact that no universal system for math existed — you wrote out math problems like “to determine the hypotenuse of a triangle first take the blah blah trigonometry” you get my point. Instead of following up on the development of +, -, /, or even 0 (thanks, Aztecs! or was it Mayans?) she breezes along to symbol-based constructed languages.

Okrent also spends a lot of time focusing on the wacky personalities — and personal histories — of the people who developed prominent or historically significant conlangs (we owe the concept of the thesaurus to one such nutterbutter, which lends some kind of philosophical heft to my claim that Hamlet in the original Klingon isn’t a totally worthless endeavour) and the cultures that form around them as she dances around what makes each language particularly weird or interesting or relevant. You could write a soap opera about the Loglan/Lojban divide alone, judging by Okrent’s research.

All in all, it’s an extremely fun read. Playing with language is fun; playing with invented languages even moreso. A lot of people are deadly serious about their conlangs. So serious that even Okrent’s protective and fascinated book can’t help but laugh good-naturedly at the delightful ridiculousness of it all. While attending her second annual Klingon conference.

Oh, Holly Lisle.

There’s a prominent theme in the Secret Texts books of characters either making huge sacrifices or crossing huge moral lines and then dying immediately thereafter; I’d be interested to see if it’s constant in all of Lisle’s writing or something specific she was trying to do with the world of Matrin. 

It is high fantasy, so it’s meant to be super dramatic and epic and all that jazz, but in Courage of Falcons, there’s a laundry list of characters whose development halts abruptly because now that they’ve made a big decision, Lisle’s use for them is severely diminished.

Lisle’s effort to tie off as many loose ends as she possibly can — without much of the plot utility I praised Charlaine Harris for a few posts ago — is likewise annoying. The book has something like three or four points that could count as endings, none of them particularly satisfying. There are a ton of things I’d love to nitpick, but ultimately the Secret Texts was pretty much what I was in the mood to read when I was a twelve-year-old impressed with my own maturity and ten years later as a twenty-two-year-old impressed with my ability to read and enjoy shitty, pulpy genre lit.

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin follows four prominent writers during the 20s: Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Marion Meade doesn’t make much of an effort to keep the focus solely on these women, and nor does she make much effort to explicitly connect them. They were creative women with good senses of humour in the 1920s. That’s about it. It’s ultimately light and frothy, even when talking about Parker’s suicide attempts, the stock market crash, and Fitzgerald’s breakdowns. 

It’s an enjoyable read, but more than a bit scattershot; it’s more a collection of anecdotes. Tellingly, each chapter is divided by year: the point of the divisions isn’t thematic or anything. It’s a precise recitation of events linking the loosely interconnected batch of writers. Periodically Meade checks in on other prominent personalities of the era, like Ernest Hemingway (I had no idea that Zelda Fitzgerald trolled his ass so hard; four for you, Zelda), Jane Grant, and Alexander Woollcott.

True Blood, the show based on the Southern Vampire mysteries, has suffered from relentless cast bloat since the middle of its second season. It’s one of the things that Charlaine Harris does better than Alan Ball, True Blood’s showrunner: she’s willing to let characters fade into the background when they’re not particularly relevant to the primary plot. 

Tara and Sam are two characters who have become increasingly despised by fans of the show. They don’t seem to be tied to the main action in any real way, and the desperate floundering to make them interesting serves only to make them seem less real. They’re also — notably — two characters that Harris allows to surface only when utility demands it. When Sookie needs fancy clothes, she hits up Tara’s store. When Sookie needs to overhear something, she goes to work at Merlotte’s and bumps into Sam for a bit. Otherwise, they tend to sort of float in the background. 

Now, obviously, Ball is working with limitations that Harris isn’t. Having actual people to deal with as opposed to words on a page complicates everything. It doesn’t change the fact that for all that the cast list in Harris’ world is possibly twice the size of Ball’s, it comes off as better managed because she’s perfectly willing to ignore characters for books at a time. 

Tara, never a major player in the books but especially absent for the last few arcs, resurfaces in Dead as a Doornail in a neat bit of plot utility. Eric doesn’t remember the time he spent while cursed, and Sookie doesn’t want to give him power over her by telling him that they’ve bumped uglies and he’s helped her hide a body. Having Tara’s sugar daddy vampire boyfriend pass her off as debt payment to a violent asshole vampire was smart in a number of ways: it reconnects Tara and Sookie on an emotional level, it reminds the audience that the sexy danger part of vampires is largely predicated on actual danger, it reminds the audience that Eric has an actual job (namely, policing the vampires in northern Louisiana), and finally — perhaps most importantly — it gives Sookie a valid reason to explain to Eric what went on between them, as payment for getting Mickey off Tara’s back. 

Part of what I like about expansive worlds are the moments when disparate plot elements and threads tie together with some semblance of neatness. This was a good example of that. 

Less good, in the same book, was an attempt on Sookie’s life by a bartender of Eric’s who ended up working at Merlotte’s because reasons tying back — tenuously — to the first book. I admire Harris’ committment to keeping things going, but a lot of the times it seems like she just throws a lot of shit at the wall.