richardderus's thirteenth 2022 thread

The Northern Catalpa tree, Catalpa speciosa, is beginning to bloom like mad across the northern tier of the US. Beautiful to look at, useful to have in wet locations, much favored by birds because its huge, heart-shaped leaves:

...are excellent rain, sun, and predator protection. It also grows the weirdest beanpod-lookin' fruits:

...that, apart from looking cool, are just botanically useful propagation aids as far as I can tell. Not edible, not usable in any other way I can find easily...which, to be frank, pleases me. A tree this beautiful and useful needs one thing it can claim is just for itself. The flowers:

...are very beautiful, though I'm verschmeckeled to learn that the leaves of the tree produce nectar! The flowers should be doing that, no?

The wood is great for carving, and for fenceposts (if you don't mind them a little crooked, and you shouldn't), and boat-building because it doesn't rot easily or quickly. It's been moved around from its native lands along the Ohio/Mississippi River floodplains by savvy humans for hundreds of years; it's ornamental, disease-resistant, and its most pestiferous pest is a moth whose caterpillar is a delicacy to catfish and thus prized by fishermen. Interestingly, once the tree is established, the caterpillars can defoliate it without causing it harm! Co-evolution in action.

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.

Ninety-one through one hundred ten? Try that link, it'll sort you out.

THIS THREAD'S REVIEW LINKS

111 An Excess Male chilled, post 38.

112 Moldy Strawberries pleased, post 60.

113 Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love amused, post 86.

114 Manywhere: Stories satisfied, post 104.

115 The Tragedy of Heterosexuality wasn't kidding, post 132.

116 Bi : Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Genderqueer Youth disappointed, post 133.

117 Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality rocked!, post 134.

118 The 16th Second functioned, post 146.

119 A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney delighted, post 153.

120 The Visitors bumfuzzled, post 155.

121 My Volcano demanded, post 159.

122 The Geography of Pluto pleased, post 165.

123 Diary of a Film intrigued, post 169.

124 This Cleaving and This Burning delighted, post 176.

125 Disoriental ensorcelled, post 181.

126 The Wasteland beguiled, post 192.

127 Arcadia discomfited, post 195.

128 Fire on the Island: A Romantic Thriller worked fine, post 268.

129 The Fourth Courier underdelivered, post 270.

130 The Bride of Almond Tree entertained, post 289.

131 Iphigenia in Aulis: The Age of Bronze Edition worked, post 291.

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!




JULY 2022's BURGOINES

#43, Arabella, post 221.

JUNE 2022's BURGOINES

#42, Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot, post 97.

#41, Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, post 96.

#40, Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son, post 52.

#39, My Perfect Cousin, post 51.

#38, Who Killed Tom Thomson?: The Truth about the Murder of One of the 20th Century's Most Famous Artists, is in post 48.

#37, Fake It Till You Bake It, is in post 42.

#36 is in thread twelve, post 279.

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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 linked here.

***
JANUARY 2022's BURGOINES are linked 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

It doesn't look like there will be a Pearl-Ruled book...it's the 20th and one hasn't shown up yet, which is *weird* but also quite lovely.

***

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!

The main work is done, so you are safe from falling factoids now.

Happy new one! We have three large catalpa trees in our back yard. They are beautiful trees.

Happy new one, RD!

Happy new thread!

>9 drneutron: Hiya Jim! Aren't they somethin'?

Here's your crown as the first-past-the-posts:

It's from Midsommar, which (if you haven't seen it) is an excellent film.

>11 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita! Welcome to the new digs.

>10 katiekrug: Hiya Katies! I'm glad you could get here before. *smooch*

Wordle 366 4/6

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Hm. Well, I certainly had mine. AEONS, MIRTH, INLET, INPUT

‘Morning, RDear, and happy new thread to you. Thirteenth, my, my.

>1 richardderus: Beautiful tree, and I like saying the name out loud.

>14 richardderus: I got it in 4 today, too.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>15 karenmarie: Thanks, Horrible! I'm glad you came to the new party. I think these trees are wonderful and, for some stupid reason, are treated like "trash trees" in a lot of the country!

4 was clearly The Best Result. *smooch*

Happy new thread, Richard.

There used to be a gorgeous huge catalpa tree directly across the street from me. I would collect the pretty flowers (they fell like snow) and put them in a bowl of water on the table. The tree also produced lovely long brown pods, several of which I still have in a vase of dry flowers. I did not know that about the leaves and nectar, though those leaves can be very large!

They had to take it down a few years ago because the trunk rotted and had a huge gaping hole you could put your arm through and they were worried it would fall in a storm and damage the house or cars it was very close to. I was sad to see it go and am happy to have the pods and a few of the leaves pressed in books.

>17 jessibud2: Welcome Shelley! Glad to see you. Thanks for the good wishes.

I'm surprised it rotted! Was it in a shady spot? Most catalpas are super tough...maybe it's so far north? I feel your pain, though, because I'd hate to lose a neighborhood ornament like that.

Happy new thread RD!

>19 humouress: Thanks, Nina! I'm glad you're not jetlagged to the point of inertness...my usual state after a trip like the one you;ve just been on.

Happy New Thread, Richard!

>21 SandDune: Thank you, Rhian, and welcome!

Happy new thread.
A tree I'm not familiar with, love the flowers on that. And yes, them pods are just weird.

>23 Helenliz: Hiya Helen...ain't they just!

Happy new one, dear fellow.

Checking in on the new thread, RD. I hope you have a wonderful week!

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today

Happy new thread!

>12 richardderus: Oh, I've definitely seen it. And loved it. 😀

>28 drneutron: I am unsurprised at the receipt of this intelligence. It's a truly outstanding folk-horror film.

>27 ArlieS: Thank you, Arlie!

>26 alcottacre: *SMOOCHIESMOOCHSMOOCH*

Good week-ahead's reads, Stasia!

>25 PaulCranswick: Thanks, PC!

Hijacking your thread for a sec, Richard.

The Pride Month LibraryThing Treasure Hunt is on! Hints to clues and further links can be found in the LT Treasure Hunts group.

That's it. Carry on.

Happy new thread, Richard!

We had a catalpa tree in the backyard of the house we lived in while I was in elementary school. I LOVED the flowers (is it true that they change color after they're pollinated? That's what my mom told me) but my parents were not fans of the dropping pods 😂

Glad to see you have been thread knitting RD. Love that tree >1 richardderus:.

>32 Caroline_McElwee: "Thread-knitting"? I don't know what that term means, but if you're glad I'm doing it so am I.

Cheers Caro, see you soon.

>31 bell7: It is not true that they change colors; the petals, having served their purpose, wither up. But I like their version better and it explains the phenomenon in a less tediously realistic way.

I can see not enjoying the spears lying in your lawn too awfully much, TBH, but since I've never mowed a lawn in my life and don't plan to start now I don't really pay that factor any mind.

>1 richardderus: Happy new thread!

>34 ocgreg34: Thanks, Greg! Welcome, I hope to see you again soon.

We had three huge catalpas on our small farm in Kansas when I was growing up, to I took a seedling to San Diego and planted it by my deck, where it turned into a nuisance tree. Do you know the trees drip sap, and my deck was a mess, and when we cut it down, it wouldn't go! But I loved the blooms and we had many a sword fight with the seed pods growing up.

Happy New Thread, Richard dear.

Early morning salutations, RDear. I do not know why I can't get back to sleep, but it will be fun to watch the morning light filter from the east over to the western side of the house where the Sunroom/Karen's home office is.

>33 richardderus: Bill and Jenna mow the lawns for us. The only time I got on the riding lawn mower was to mow the back field, the one past the creek. I scared a copperhead. I tried chasing it down with the mower, but I'll swear it was hydroplaning over the grass to get away. It succeeded, darn it.

*smooch*

111 An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in a near-future China the One Child Policy has resulted in 40 million men unable to find wives. This book is one such leftover man’s quest for love and family under a State that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.

Wei-guo holds fast to the belief that as long as he continues to improve himself, his small business, and in turn, his country, his chance at love will come. He finally saves up the dowry required to enter matchmaking talks at the lowest rung as a third husband—the maximum allowed by law. Only a single family—one harboring an illegal spouse—shows interest, yet with May-ling and her two husbands, Wei-guo feels seen, heard, and connected to like never before. But everyone and everything—walls, streetlights, garbage cans—are listening, and men, excess or not, are dispensable to the State. Wei-guo must reach a new understanding of patriotism and test the limits of his love and his resolve in order to save himself and this family he has come to hold dear.

THIS WAS A GIFT FROM MY OLD FRIEND CARO. THANK YOU, DEAR LADY. SUPERB CHOICE!

My Review: You'll notice that this book's review is coming out in Pride Month's Cavalcade of Queerness. You'd likely assume that, given the extreme shortage of women in the China that Author Maggie Shen King posits, there'd be quite open homosexuality everywhere because men gonna do the wild thing however, whenever, wherever they possibly can.

I speak from experience. And I am here to tell you: You do not know China, Chinese culture, or the nature of authorial sneakiness if you bought that. No, women being scarce does not give them power: It gives their fathers power. No, women being scarce does not mean gayness is tolerated by the authoritarian state: It results in social deformities and closetedness and all the horrors you see in China today.

Okay, so now that I've told you what you'll learn in the first 30-ish pages of the book. Why read it? Because it is a well-designed labyrinth that will disorient you and prevent you from trusting your own judgment of who can or should be trusted. Wei-guo is a man adrift, a man without anything to anchor himself to, and is glad to find a home with his secret-driven marriage partners.

"Are you Willfully Sterile?" Big Dad says.
...
Hann frowns with disbelief. "I'm a married man. With a child," he roars. He pops to his feet but is boxed in...

"The Lee family has heard rumors," {the matchmaker} says. "And of course, they must ask you this question. It is better they ask you directly, don't you think?" He coaxes Hann to sit.

Hann buttons up his suit coat. "You can destroy my family with accusations like that."

It is so awkward that I stand too to keep {Hann} company. Big Dad glares at us both.

"We are honorable, good-hearted people. Get to know us, and you can make up your own mind as to who we are." Hann turns to address {Wei-guo}, and for a instant his eyes soften. "If you decide that we are right for you, then know that we are a very tightly-knit, a very close and private family. Cherish us, and we will cherish you. Marrying us is not a decision you will regret."

I like what I hear, but Big Dad stands to put on his jacket, no doubt offended that Hann dares to bypass his authority and address me directly. I'm sick of him trying to sink my chances. Dad scrambles to his feet and follows Big Dad's lead. Despite my dads' brusqueness, Hann is gracious in his farewell.

This is a pivotal scene...this is Big Dad, the first husband and father/ruler of Wei-guo's future. He smells a rat. He's right. But Wei-guo doesn't care about rodentia, he cares about being in his own family, being able to make a life that isn't in his dads' control. He is, after all, forty-four years old at this point.

I don't guess most need to be told that "Wilfully Sterile" means gay, do I? Why that should be a bad thing in a society as lopsidedly male-dominated as this fictitious Chinese one is, I can't fathom. Still, there it is, with its hideous threats of "family dissolution and forced sterilization" to be enacted on the guilty.

What ensues is a heart-stopping, heart-wrenching tale of the way that authoritarian regimes run peoples' lives for the benefit of the State that makes the rules. It's not like we haven't seen this trend in action...it's the genesis of the One-Child Policy that got China into the mess this book posits. And, seeing a chance to make its control tighter over the very nature of the family, the state reverts to its bad, hamfisted ways. Prescribing and legislating and brutally enforcing "morality" is a very popular trope among authoritarians. Look at the "pro-family" drivel the red-meat right throws around in the US. And, crucially, look at whom it's directed, and from whom rights, freedoms, the very right to define and live an identity is withheld...and tell me this book should not be on the bestseller lists right now, in 2022, as midterms of HUGE importance are ramping up.

I strongly urge you to get and read a copy as soon as possible.

Happy New Thread, Richard. Love the Catalpa tree! I see them from time to time. Pushing a 100F here today. Ugh. And of course, I have my Rehab stint today. Send cool vibes.

>39 msf59: Oh that's VILE, Mark, 100° is insupportable. It'll be 75° here so I'll go outside and whoosh stuff south-southwestward.

I love the tree, but I don't have to cope with its sticky ways, so it's more like romance than marriage.

>37 karenmarie: You're VERY early today, Horrible, so it's going to be a nap day...? I just think there's a huge run of people who like yard work and I shouldn't take their joy away from them. If they'd like a little honorarium to make their attentions to my unwillingly possessed yard more, shall we say, joyful still, well then!

>36 ronincats: Hi Roni! Happy to see you here! *smooch*

That's the plant's nectar, I learned, not its sap. Sticky stuff no matter what, but how weird that it rewards its primary pest, that caterpillar, by spreading nectar on its leaves! Definitely a tree I wouldn't plant in suburbia.

Wordle 367 4/6

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And I did. AEONS, MIRTH, FLOAT, GLOAT

Burgoine #37

Fake It Till You Bake It by Jamie Wesley

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A reality star and a cupcake-baking football player pretend to be a couple in order to save his bakery in this sweet and sexy romance from Jamie Wesley, Fake It Till You Bake It.

Jada Townsend-Matthews is the most reviled woman in America after turning down a proposal on a reality dating show. When she comes home to lick her wounds, Jada finds herself working at San Diego's newest cupcake bakery, Sugar Blitz, alongside the uptight owner and professional football player Donovan Dell.

When a reporter mistakenly believes Jada and Donovan are an item, they realize they can use the misunderstanding to their advantage to help the struggling bakery and rehabilitate Jada's image. Faking a relationship should be simple, but sometimes love is the most unexpected ingredient.

Fake it Till You Bake It is a sweet confection of a novel, the perfect story to curl up with and enjoy with a cupcake on the side.

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

My Review: I started out this read sure as sure could be that I'd be giving it at least four stars, and that Donovan was in line to be my next cinnamon roll hero. (Never mind he's a pro athlete! They got troubles too!) Things...did not pan out that way.

I'm a wary old campaigner in matters of the heart. Donovan's assumption of control over Jada, no matter that it imposed structure on the tornado that her life has been for all around her, rang loud alarm bells for me. No, nothing untoward happens...yet. Control is addictive, as is power in general. It doesn't need to be a bad thing IF it's part of the relationship by mutual consent and this was not the case here.

Normally this would've led me to Pearl-Rule the book, and this June...#PrideMonth!...especially I'm aware of relationship role models needing to be on balance positive to earn my accolade of a review. What happened that made me reassess my initial discomfort was seeing how Author Wesley used every chance to lead Jada into growth and greater maturity. Jada went from rudderless, spoiled girl to a focused, other-directed partner. That was a pure pleasure to read.

>38 richardderus: "I don't guess most need to be told that "Wilfully Sterile" means gay, do I?"

Well, you needed to tell me because I thought that it meant that the guy had gone and got himself a vasectomy. Sometimes I feel completely out of touch.

I was going to add the book to the BlackHole only to discover it was already there.

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD.

Thanks for reposting the three sentence book review thingie - It's useful

>44 magicians_nephew: Quite welcome, Jim.

I've found the technique very helpful, and quite flexible.

>43 alcottacre: I'm glad I did, then, Stasia. *smooch*

Happy New Thread Richard, dear friend.

>46 johnsimpson: Hi John, thank you for the kind wishes!

Burgoine #38

Who Killed Tom Thomson?: The Truth about the Murder of One of the 20th Century's Most Famous Artists by John Little

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tom Thomson was Canada's Vincent van Gogh. He painted for a period of five years before meeting his untimely death in a remote wilderness lake in July 1917. He was buried in an unofficial grave close to the lake where his body was found. About eight hours after he was buried, the coroner arrived but never examined the body and ruled his death accidental due to drowning. A day and a half later, Thomson's family hired an undertaker to exhume the body and move it to the family plot about 100 miles away. This undertaker refused all help, and only worked at night.

In 1956, John Little's father and three other men, influenced by the story of an old park ranger who never believed Thomson's body was moved by the undertaker, dug up what was supposed to be the original, empty grave. To their surprise, the grave still contained a body, and the skull revealed a head wound that matched the same location noted by the men who pulled his corpse from the water in 1917. The finding sent shockwaves across the nation and began a mystery that continues to this day.

In Who Killed Tom Thomson? John Little continues the sixty-year relationship his family has had with Tom Thomson and his fate by teaming up with two high-ranking Ontario provincial police homicide detectives. For the first time, they provide a forensic scientific opinion as to how Thomson met his death, and where his body is buried. Little draws upon his father's research, plus recently released archival material, as well as his own thirty-year investigation. He and his colleagues prove that Thomson was murdered, and set forth two persons of interest who may have killed Tom Thomson.

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

My Review: Wondering who Tom Thomson was?

The Jack Pine, Winter 1916-1917

He was a founding member, if a posthumous one, of The Group of Seven Canadian artists. It is not too much to say that Thomson's untimely, and long mysterious, death was a major catalyst in the Group of Seven (then called "the Algonquin School") emerging from obscurity to claim a place in the world artistic establishment.

That does rather make solving the mystery surrounding Thomson's death problematic. Especially for the family, who (via eldest sibling George Thomson) visited the area where Tom's body was discovered and spoke to his contacts there; as well as the letters Tom had sent home, we can feel sure that George felt clear in his mind about what Tom's death involved. And he forcefully, from the day he got there to the day he died, shut down speculation about "what really happened." The Official Story, however, made not one whit of sense. The author, son of a man whose involvement in the case began accidentally almost forty years after Thomson's death, tells a thoroughly researched and forensically vetted story about the death that, had the family not refused to cooperate with a routine exhumation and DNA test, would've made the world's headline machine whir into life.

I think, having read this tendentious tome, that the author and his trained detectives and forensic experts are correct about the outlines of the case, and probably have the final solution covered in their several options as detailed in the book. So it seems like a safe bet that someone in Thomson's remaining family already knows what the truth is and doesn't want it told, OR doesn't want the mysterious cachet that adheres to Tom Thomson's name and thus his work (and their patrimony) to be even slightly dispelled.

>43 alcottacre: Yeah, I had no idea what it would turn out to mean, and didn't even attempt to guess.

>49 ArlieS: All the more pleased that I explained, then.

Burgoine #39

My Perfect Cousin by Colin O'Sullivan

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rural Ireland in the late 1980s and, stuck in a rut in a small unnamed village, are sixteen-year-old cousins Laura and Kevin. The close cousins and constant companions ache to abscond to somewhere bigger, better, more exciting, where they are free to do what they want to do, free to become who they really are.

But things are holding them back. As well as having to cope with family tragedies, the troubled, music-obsessed teens must also negotiate the tricky terrain of burgeoning sexuality, the pitfalls of adolescence, and issues of homosexuality that seem, confusingly, to impinge upon them.

And then there is Laura’s own serious affliction, epilepsy, which comes and goes when she least expects it. Only cousin Kevin knows how to handle this tricky situation, or handle her: with gentleness, with sympathy, and with maybe just a little too much in the way of love and affection.

The months and the spiraling family crises serve only to bring them closer together: but how close is too close?

And then there is the strange matter of the nearby pond: this small body of water keeps drawing them near. Laura is convinced that something lurks down there, but Kevin eschews, putting it all down to the psychological trauma she is going through. Are they prepared for whatever secrets might come bubbling to the surface, monsters real or imagined that could come rising from the depths?

Colin O’Sullivan returns to a familiar (and formative) Irish setting with this punchy novel that grows in pace page by page. 1980s references abound, not only with music giants of the time, Boy George, Madonna et al, but also the politics of Gorbachev and Reagan, literal and figurative walls that are about to be torn down and imminent societal changes. Although rooted in the past, this fraught and frantic work is startlingly relevant and makes us consider today’s current affairs.

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

My Review: CW: Homophobia, homophobic violence, family secrets
I don't think I've spent more than a few minutes since finishing this book, for the second time, wondering why Author O'Sullivan chose the vocabulary he did in telling the tale (several have mentioned the archness or preciousness of it). I've spent *hours* wondering why Kevin and his, um, personality flaws occurred to him....

But second time it is, this read was deeply offensive to me when its main character was revealed as such a homophobe. I came to understand the reasons, but there will never be an excuse. Why, then, read it twice? I had squads of cousins. I never once, in my entire life, considered fucking one of them...not even trying! Here are Kevin and Laura doing the wild thing and they dare to be homophobic?! So I wanted to make sure I read the book for the first time, again. Several years on, my outrage dimmed and my interest warmed up in this bitter, angry boy and this cagey, clever girl inside their deeply Verboten cocoon. I can definitely see that the vocabulary is a stylistic choice to enhance a mood, disseminate an atmosphere, and it works very well at that. I ended up liking the idea of the book while being really angered and not a little repulsed by several of its facets. Still...Art. Art gets to do what it must to make its point, and nothing that is not Art could evoke such visceral emotional responses in my tired old-man's soul.

Burgoine #40

Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son by Richie Jackson

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In this poignant and timely love letter to his son, producer Richie Jackson reflects on his experiences as a gay man in America and the progress and setbacks of LGBTQ citizens over the past fifty years.

"My son is kind, responsible, and hardworking. He is ready for college. He is not ready to be a gay man living in America."

When Richie Jackson's eighteen-year-old son born through surrogacy came out to him, the successful theater, television, and film producer, now in his fifties, was compelled to reflect on his experiences and share his wisdom on life for LGBTQ Americans over the past half-century.

Gay Like Me is a celebration of gay identity and a sorrowful warning. Jackson looks back at his own progress and growth as a gay man coming of age through decades of political and cultural change. We've come a long way since Stonewall, he marvels: discrimination is now outlawed in most states, gay men and women can marry, and drugs can protect against AIDS and mitigate its effects.

Jackson's son lives in a newly liberated America. Yet nothing can be taken for granted. Bigotry and hatred still exist, nurtured by a president whose divisive, manipulative language exacerbates fear of "The Other," drawing support and votes for excluding minorities and anyone who can be labelled "an outsider." A newly constituted Supreme Court with a conservative tilt could revoke laws and turn the clock back years. Gay identity can be worn with pride, but gay citizens cannot be complacent Jackson warns; they must always be vigilant that their gains are fragile.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates did in Between the World and Me, Jackson offers a response to our anxious and uncertain times. An intimate, personal exploration of our most troubling questions and profound concerns—about issues such as human rights, equality, justice—Gay Like Me is a book for all who care about tolerance, diversity, and social progress. Angry, proud, fierce, tender, it is powerful letter of love from a father to a son that holds lasting insight for us all.

I GOT THIS BOOK AS AN AMAZON KINDLE PROMOTION.

My Review: I'm afraid this isn't my kindest review.

Your cotton is down, Miss Richie. A wealthy white man using WEB DuBois quotes to bring up points in the QUILTBAG struggle needs to cross a high bar of interrogating his privilege, acknowledging his appropriation and justifying it, and not speaking to the son he conceived through surrogacy and raised in the world where that simply *is* as though that is the world his son will inherit. Much has changed since Stonewall. But much that has changed seems not to have made a mark on the author...or the publisher. Between the World and Me does not inhabit the same ZIP code as this book, any more than the authors do.

Now for the parts I can relate to, and acknowledge as positive: This is a good and solid rumination on the trajectory of the movement for 2SLGBTQIA+ to be fully included in the politics and culture of this country. I'm glad this gay dad is writing to his gay son about his life, and his work to make the world more inclusive. I simply wish that he had been more aware of what did not get dome and who was not included, and asked his son to advance the work already done. Sadly it was left as "this is your dad" and that, in the 2020s, is just not enough.

>48 richardderus: Well, that one got me!

>53 drneutron: Thank goodness someone got that one, Jim, it's all too Canadian for most US folk it seems. I fixed the image, too.

>48 richardderus: Canada's Vincent Van Gogh? I'm all ears!

Good morning, RDear. Happy Wednesday to you.

>42 richardderus: Ah. Same premise as Love, Hate & Clickbait. I’m going to pass, though. I’m still spending way too much money on bodice rippers.

>48 richardderus: You reeled me in – it’s now on the wish list.

>51 richardderus: Ah. Tempting. But. I don’t know why I have such a visceral lack of interest in anything Irish. Lots of my ancestors are Irish. Excellent review, though, and your second reading is admirable, as is your acceptance of it as Art.

>52 richardderus: Well, at least I now know what 2SLGBTQIA+ is. Gads, I’m old. My awareness began with LGB.

No Federalist today - no. 15 is 9+ pages of dense Hamilton prose on the "insufficiency of the present confederation to the preservation of the Union." I'm too restless to focus, what with Jenna coming home for 5-6 days later this week.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

>56 karenmarie: Hi Horrible, a jaunty Humpday welcome to you. I'm not sure you'd've really enjoyed >52 richardderus: so no harm, no foul. I'll trust that your curiosity about the artist behind the art will give you the impetus to overlook the editing issues.

I shall possess my soul in patience, regarding The Federalist and am most appreciative that you let me know.

*smooch*

>55 PaulCranswick: Heh...it's all the more fascinating for being about a troubled artist, PC. But at heart it's a true-crime book about one murder and a series of other crimes, none ever punished, because of the victim's complex and intersecting identity(s).

>48 richardderus: Hmm too bad that was only a 3.5 star read. My parents have some limited edition prints by Thomson acquired at an auction years ago. I know very little about his life and was not aware that he was killed. I will put this on my maybe list as it does sound interesting.

Happy hump day!

>58 figsfromthistle: Hi Anita, thanks for the Humpday wishes...and if it's any inducement to you, ALL the stars are for the fascinating light the author's investigation into the record of the time and the many parts not officially included.

Spend today splendidly.

112 Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato)

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In eighteen exhilarating stories, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the ’80s. Suspended between fear and longing, Abreu’s characters grasp for connection. A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body. A budding office friendship between two young men grows into a “strange and secret harmony.” One man desires another but fears that their complot might crumble with one clumsy word or gesture. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and resilient, they heal. For Abreu there is beauty on the horizon, mingled with the light of memory and decay.

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

My Review: The author of this collection, dead from AIDS this quarter century past, was a Bright Young Thing when the stories collected here appeared forty years ago. He was thirty-four at the time...hardly a stripling, but still in the early stages of Becoming A Writer. The world of 1982 didn't have a lot of openly gay Brazilians, and the specter of AIDS was sending most who might've come out back in to the closet. Not Abreu. Reading this collection, I understand why he started something with these stories, he ignited a kind of votary's flame that burns to light the path for those to come.

But believe you me, there are stories in here that he would've either suppressed or revised heavily were he around to consult on the publication. Things that rang the bell of the 1982 queer world (ask yourself if you even know what "Strawberry Fields" is, still less what it means to the people in 1982) are flat, or worse flat-out bad in the harsher glare of 2022's light. To be expected, of course, since Time is the arbiter of taste in all arts. Not an infallible one either. Structurally there are rules that survive and ones that are flouted so often that the flouting becomes a rule of its own. More often than not, Orthodoxy reasserts itself; the rebels who become pooh-bahs in the New Order resist the next big thing. How many Gertrude Stein imitators are there, versus how many Virginia Woolf wannabes? Time has ruled, Stein is the oddity and Woolf the innovator, both lesbian, neither conventionally inclined. Only one is Canon, though.

So this collection strikes me, at forty years' remove from its birth, as more a Steinian moment than a Woolfesque one.

I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole over at my blog. There are eighteen stories! Way too much space to take up here.

>48 richardderus: I've heard of Tom Thompson and seen some of his work never knew there was a story about his (too early) death.

Thanks for telling us about this one

>61 magicians_nephew: Most welcome indeed, Jim. The story is fascinating and very important for the entire field of Canadian art.

Wordle 368 3/6

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...I just told it like it was...and look! AEONS, MIRTH, AWFUL

>63 richardderus: Your Wordle is a true success story…you started with basically nothing, and achieved Wordle-in-three! Great job!

Karen O

>64 klobrien2: It's happened a couple of times, Karen O, that I've just plonked a word describing how I feel and presto! it's the answer! but I don't think it's a long-term strategy to win myownself.

>65 richardderus: I laughed aloud at your comment. I’ve caught myself making up little stories from the list of words in my solved Wordles and they can be pretty funny.

Karen o

>38 richardderus: That one came on my radar when it appeared in the 2018 list of Lammy finalists. Been sitting in the Swamp awhile now ...

>67 swynn: Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp, rescue it, and give it a read!

>49 ArlieS: Glad to know it was not just me, Arlie!

Have a whacky Wednesday, RD!

((Hugs)) and smooches for today.

>69 alcottacre: *smooch*
***
My Goodreads friend Mwana posted this list, and I liked it so I'm adopting it.

Mid-Year Book tag 2022

1. HOW MUCH HAVE YOU READ?

I think this means "how many books" so I'm going with 172.

2. WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN READING?

Hmm. 66 of the 172, or 38.4%, are QUILTBAG titles. Let's say QUILTBAG.

3. Best book you’ve read so far in 2022.

Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir was even better than Young Mungo

4. Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2022

The second and third entries in KJ Charles' 1920s espionage trilogy. The Sugared Game and Subtle Blood

5. New release you haven’t read yet, but want to.

Lincoln's Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation. An anthology of writings about our...mixed...record in living up to our political ideals. Gawd I'm such a nerd.

6. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year.

A Minor Chorus: A Novel by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Husband Material by Alexis Hall

7. Out of Your Comfort Zone read

Gay Giant by Gabriel Ebensperger wore my resistance to graphic sequential-art storytelling down another millimeter.

8. Biggest surprise

City Parks: Public Places, Private Thoughts...awful book, SO disappointed.

9. New Favo(u)rite author (debut or new to you) {Mwana is Kenyan so uses UK misspellings. I try to Overlook the Solecism.}

Rajiv Mohabir whose memoir was so so so lyrical and perfectly pitched, like having someone you love sing to you.

10. Underrated gems you’ve discovered recently.

Who Will Comfort Toffle?, one of the Moomins Picture Books that's just gotten lost somehow, by Tove Jansson

11. Rereads this year.

*snort* Are you serious?

12. Book that made you cry.

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright. Gawd.

13. Book that made you happy.

The Guncle was just flat-out fun.

14. Most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received).

Picabia by Alain Jouffroy is just *gorgeous*

15. Your goals for the rest of the year.

Fail to die? I dunno. I gave up pressuring myself.

>63 richardderus: *snort* well that worked out well!

>70 richardderus: Oooh, this is a fun series of questions. I may steal it if I remember (I'm going to bed soon, and if I start it now...)

Belated happy new thread, Richard dear, and happy Thursday!
I haven't Wordled the last three days, as I completely forgot. We were in Rotterdam from Monday to Wednesday.

>1 richardderus: Yesterday we visited Arboretum Trompenburg in Rotterdam. The oldest trees there were planted in 1870. Not sure if I saw a Catalpa there, but I have seen before. In Dutch they are called trompet boom (trumpet tree).

'Morning, RDear!

>70 richardderus: Stolen with acknowledgement and posted on my thread AFTER The Federalist No 15. Wouldn't want to disappoint you too many days...

*smooch*

>73 karenmarie: Hiya Horrible! Thanks for feeding my learning addiction again today. And I'm glad you liked Mwana's listicle, too. *smooch*

>72 FAMeulstee: Hi Anita! I'm glad to see you today. I'm pretty sure trompet boom would grow there but probably not next to a sidewalk or something since they sploodge their nectar all over the place. I love their flowers, so pretty!

>71 bell7: I'm glad you like Mwana's listicle too, too, Mary. It got me thinking about the rest of the year (protests aside) and, well, some things might get rejiggered. Maybe I need to up my goals, since I'm about 25% ahead? I'm considering it. Not sure I will since having a cushion has some appeal. One never knows what the coming months will bring in the way of unanticipated obstacles to making even the goal I've got now.

Wordle 369 4/6

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Kind of a fun path to get there today! AEONS, MIRTH, GRIND, BRINK

>75 richardderus: Good job, Richard! I was lucky with three today.

Happy Thursdaying!

>48 richardderus:, >54 richardderus: - I read that one, too, Richard and was fascinated. I also have a fictionalized version of his story, by Roy MacGregor, called Canoe Lake. The person you want to talk to about Thomson, is Meg (familyhistorian). She has a familial connection and has read extensively on his life. When she visited me in Toronto a few years BC (before covid), we took a day trip to the McMichael Gallery, a museum dedicated to Canadian art, especially the Group of Seven. Tom Thomson's original cabin was brought to the site of the McMichael permanently.

>48 richardderus: The Tom Thomson book sounds really interesting, but was the writing just okay?

Sweet Thursday, Richard. I am having a good time with Arctic Dreams but I didn't get much reading in yesterday, due to all day birding but we did see several of these beauties:



Yellow-headed blackbird (NMP)

>78 msf59: It was indeed just...okay. It had a lot of editing errors, typos, etc, but that was a DRC so those might be all cleaned up in the real book. I'd say it's one to give a read to, Mark.

Beautiful blackbird, and the stunning contrast of his head...!

>77 jessibud2: I haven't read Canoe Lake, but it's here somewhere. I do want to. I remember Meg having a connection to Thomson but didn't recall what it was...anyway, it was a darned interesting (if infuriating) read.

I've always wanted to go to the McMichael! What a good way to spend some eyeblinks. I'd be likely to leave with $500 in merch from the store, though. Still, a chance to see his actual cabin....

>76 figsfromthistle: Thanks, Anita, I was right pleased. And three! Excellent Wordling. *smooch*

Anyone feeling a little light in the Kindle? There's 58 free Queer romances at this link today, 23 June, only.
https://www.romancebookworms.com/kindle/#lgbtq

Oh, and something like 500 straight ones if you're into that sorta stuff.

>70 richardderus: Nice!

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today!

>81 alcottacre: Thank you, Stasia, and a *smooch* back at'cha.

>48 richardderus: Your review of Who Killed Tom Thomson makes me wish I had my copy with me, Richard. I enjoy reading true crime books and this one combines that with family history for me. Not sure why I put down the book but now I need to pick it up again.

>83 Familyhistorian: It might have been a less-than-delightful reading experience, Meg. I think the writing is never better than serviceable.

But the story is well worth its effort in consumption.

We have many catalpa trees in the part of Kansas where I am from. The biggest problem with them was that they had fuzzy leaves. That meant that they were very very susceptible to the wonder chemical of the 1960's. 2-4D. Catalpa's would lose all their leaves and would look dead. However, they were just shedding the leaves. They could be completely dormant for several years and then they would come back. 2-4D would cause them pain and suffering but it never really killed them. They are sticky and icky messy trees but those leaves provide lots of shade and generally the canopy is nicely shaped.

113 Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love by Carlos Allende

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A campy dark comedy for the angry and the disenchanted.

Last November, I found a dead body inside the freezer that my roommate keeps inside the garage. My first thought was to call the police, but Jignesh hadn’t paid his share of the rent just yet. It wasn’t due until the thirtieth, and you know how difficult it is to find people who pay on time. Jignesh always does. Also, he had season tickets for the LA Opera, and well . . . Madame Butterfly. Tosca. The Flying Dutchman . . . at the Dorothy Chandler . . . you cannot say no to that, can you? Well, it’s been a few good months now—Madame Butterfly was just superb, thank you. However, last Friday, I found a second body inside that stupid freezer in the garage. This time I’m evicting Jignesh. My house isn’t a mortuary . . . alas, I need to come up with some money first. You’ll understand, therefore, that I desperately need to sell this novel. Just enough copies to help me survive until I find a job . . . what could I do that doesn’t demand too much effort? We have a real treasure here, anyhow. Some chapters are almost but not quite pornographic. You could safely lend this to nana afterward!

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

My Review: Okay, I admit it: I loathed Jignesh, I despised Charlie, and I detested the victims...all of them see themselves as victims, of course. I was shocked by the hateful, racist nastiness, the body dysmorphia, the sex and the violence was all very tame though...and I still, to my slightly horrified embarassment, laughed out loud.

I feel dirty and ashamed admitting that. Like Charlie does after, um, sealing the deal with Jignesh. (This happened under such murky circumstances I was shocked that Author Allende didn't go into gory detail, but thank goodness no.) The things that make the book fun to read are the ways that Author Allende harks back to The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts in all their embittered, Hollywood-materialism-hatin' glory. The things that aren't as evocative of the bitter, sarcastic West-world are the things that slow us down, like the switching PoV between Charlie's verbal fleuve and Jignesh's hugely overacted rages and the evil things he does in secret to express them. (No one can think of a reason to beat him up if they don't know it's him doing the nasty stuff to make their lives miserable. Except his mother, of course.)

So, with the two leads being such a pair of pricks in WeHo Princess drag, what's in it for the reader? A truly unvarnished look at what the hell we've done to our culture? A raunchy ride through the libido of a sad, little man who loves no one and nothing except what he's been told makes him look good? An immigrant whose family isn't made up of people who have any use for him, Family First culture back home be damned?

All that and more. The sheer volume of words coming out of Charlie does get numbing but goodness me, look at how much you learn about abuse and violence meted out on his short little self. Jignesh thinks all the trouble in the world is going to fall directly onto his head and, preemptively, gets angry enough to...avoid it, somehow. It's quite startling. He's definitely on the way down and...Ganesha gives him luck? The horrible racists he works with call his overweight self "Ganesha" behind his back, and I'd say "shame on you" to them via the author if Jignesh didn't get himself some brilliant, if cruel, revenge on each and every one of them.

By the end of the story, I was worn down. I'd been dipping near the Lake of Fire with Charlie prating and mewling to any- and everyone about things a slightly sentient person would've known not to say anything about. I'd seen Doom flying in on her broom, aiming right for the pair of 'em. And *snap* up comes the handle and the bristles of Doom's broom give a light dust-off to their plans as she flies away. By the end of the book...Deirdre and Jana and the mural for Jignesh's clients...the phone call from Mike, Jignesh's boss...I needed a lie-down.

So what's up with my rating not being a Full Five? It was headed for 3 early on because Charlie's narrative voice *really* got on my nerves. Jignesh's career as a Kindle Direct Publishing fantasy novelist (SALMONELLA IS A DISEASE, JIGNESH!) wasn't carried throughout the read, but used as a parsley garnish on a tiramisù. Charlie's sexual escapades were, while undetailed thank goodness, really not necessary to say anything new or more about his character (or lack thereof) and honestly weren't titillating to make up for their uselessness in plot or characterization terms. The crimes and follies that Jignesh and Charlie careen into and hurtle out of are fun, and highly kinetic; but they don't do anything the second, or third, times that they didn't do the first one.

That said, I am never going to forget either of these lousy human beings because they kept me rapt for several hours, bashing the Kindle screen a little harder than necessary each time I needed to move on to the next page. It was a good, fun ride, just one that went a *little* too often over the same curves to be exceptional.

>86 richardderus: Not for me, but glad it was a read that was generally fun for you.

I started Virgin River last night to complete the BookRiot "read a book you haven't read but you've seen the movie/show" and after getting about two chapters in I think I've decided no, I'll find another book or leave it blank.

‘Morning, Rdear! Happy Friday to you.

>80 richardderus: You’re a menace. *smile* I found some new authors to check out, and one naughty book to acquire.

>86 richardderus: Well, I laughed out loud at what just the publisher says, and of course, being from El-Lay, am a sucker for stuff taking place in SoCal in general and El-Lay in particular. However, so far I’ve only downloaded a sample. We’ll see if I want to spring $9.49+tax.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Have a fantastic Friday, RD. ((Hugs)) and **smooches**

Fun reads are essential reads

Wordle 370 3/6

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I have never had all 5 letters between my two starter words before! AEONS, MIRTH, SMITE

>90 mckait: I find them so, I confess. *smooch*

>89 alcottacre: Hiya Stasia, thanks for stopping by! *smooch*

>88 karenmarie: I *am* glad, Horrible...I think you'll enjoy the read. It's so mordantly amusing. Like gay Arsenic and Old Lace if Nathanael West had rewritten the script.

Moi? Un menace? Mais non, madame ma très chere amie! *smooch*

>87 bell7: I concur, and I thank you for the kind words. I tried a Robyn Carr book once, and for reasons I don't recall anymore, it fell flat with me. I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like it but I *really* didn't like it. I suspect you're susceptible to the same blight as I am.

Anyway, onward and upward...I'm reading Rainbow Rainbow: Stories and it's been a good read. I'm thinking that I'll try to add its review to tomorrow's Manywhere: Stories, another really good QUILTBAG author's collection of diverse delights.

>85 benitastrnad: Hi Benita! The fuzziness of the leaves is weird. I think the caterpillars are better able to cling to them that way. which seems to be the tree's primary focus in this our life, to feed that moth's babies. The stickiness is icky. But those flowers...!

The fact that the caterpillars can denude the tree, and it will come right back with more, is what makes the 2,4D story less disheartening than it would otherwise be.

>93 richardderus: By the way, those caterpillars spit acid. How do I know this? Was mowing on the ZTR under one of our trees and knocked a caterpillar between me and the back of the seat. Somehow it managed to work its way down the back of my pants and left a blistered spot across my lower back. Danger, Will Robinson!

>94 drneutron: Well, it's one way not to get eaten I suppose, but it doesn't make me want to give them a home near me!

Burgoine #41

Madder: A Memoir in Weeds by Marco Wilkinson

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Madder, matter, mater—a weed, a state of mind, a material, a meaning, a mother. Poet and horticulturist Marco Wilkinson searches for the roots of myths and memories among plant families and family trees.

"My life, these weeds." Marco Wilkinson's intimate vignettes of intergenerational migration, queer sexuality, and willful forgetting use the language of plants as both structure and metaphor—particularly weeds: invisible yet ubiquitous, unwanted yet abundant, out-of-place yet flourishing. Madder combines meditations on nature with memories of Wilkinson's Rhode Island childhood and glimpses of his maternal family's life in Uruguay. The son of a fierce immigrant mother who tried to erase his absent father from their lives, Wilkinson investigates his heritage with a mixture of anger and empathy as he wrestles with the ambiguity of the past. Using a verdant iconography rich with wordplay and symbolism, Wilkinson offers a mesmerizing portrait of finding belonging in an uprooted world.

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

My Review: It's one of the wonderful things about reading memoirs that, as we voyeuristically peer into the writer's personal life, we also learn, experience anew or for the first time, that special glory of Life that Author Wilkinson describes thus: "Finally the freedom of being, not being seen." It's a genuine pleasure that the genre has in greater abundance than most all the books I read in so many other genres. Marco has led a really surprising life, son of a single Uruguayan mother whose character clearly formed his observant, detail-oriented self as well as the art he can't help but produce.

This is a seriously poetic tale of being queer (as we now say) among people who aren't supportive of you. This is a sad tale of being sure there's something wrong with the way the world treats you, the way it talks about you, and not being in touch with any strand of culture that supports the sense you have of yourself. This is the reason the hate-filled rejecters of life's Others want to remove the books and censor the art that includes people they don't like. If you're not one of those people, and—importantly—if you like poetry and/or poetical prose, read this wonderful story of a man coming to accept and shape his sense of himself via the metaphorical garden with its weeds that he's built of and for himself. It's a lovely trip.

Burgoine #42

Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot by Jonathan Alexander

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An archive of personal trauma that addresses how a culture still toxic to queer people can reshape a body

In the summer of 2019, Jonathan Alexander had a minor stroke, what his doctors called an "eye stroke." A small bit of cholesterol came loose from a vein in his neck and instead of shooting into his brain and causing damage, it lodged itself in a branch artery of his retina, resulting in a permanent blindspot in his right eye. In Stroke Book, Alexander recounts both the immediate aftermath of his health crisis, which marked deeper health concerns, as well as his experiences as a queer person subject to medical intervention.

A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously. Queer people often experience psychic and somatic pressures that not only decrease their overall quality of life but can also lead to shorter lifespans. Emerging out of a medical emergency and a need to think and feel that crisis through the author's sexuality, changing sense of dis/ability, and experience of time, Stroke Book invites readers on a personal journey of facing a health crisis while trying to understand how one's sexual identity affects and is affected by that crisis. Piecing and stitching together his experience in a queered diary form, Alexander's lyrical prose documents his ongoing, unfolding experience in the aftermath of the stroke. Through the fracturing of his text, which almost mirrors his fractured sight post-stroke, the author grapples with his shifted experience of time, weaving in and out, while he tracks the aftermath of what he comes to call his "incident" and meditates on how a history of homophobic encounters can manifest in embodied forms.

The book situates itself within a larger queer tradition of writing—first, about the body, then about the body unbecoming, and then, yet further, about the body ongoing, even in the shadow of death. Stroke Book also documents the complexities of critique and imagination while holding open a space for dreaming, pleasure, intimacy, and the unexpected.

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

My Review: Author Alexander does a lot of thinking. It is all in his prose.

I found myself thinking beyond {others}'s formal approach to the even more particularly queer nature of how I understood my stroke, of how I had been invited by a homophobic culture to think and feel about my body. A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously.

His world includes a husband, Mack, and a bunch of doctors who see him at need. So yes...he's white male privilege on legs. He's loved, employed, and creatively gifted (even works with my dote Michelle Latiolais!); he's able to get a publishing deal, so he's well connected.

None of that matters to cholesterol hanging onto the walls of this one artery, though, and when it takes off and lands in a new place that leaves him partially blind (and him with amblyopia already! PLUS it's his dominant eye that has the stroke!) He lands in that weird place called "chronic illness." And he'll never leave it. As a Queer man, that's a bad, grim journey...so many, many side-paths and so many losses and so much rage against the medical establishment that excuses its homophobia as "concern for patient privacy". But mostly, the fact is, this is a new resident in a community he's circled for decades, since AIDS through some "calculus of divine justice" has been seen as guilty without trial or concern for truth of Deserving It. Whatever bad thing "It" is, the gay men of the world Deserve It.

Not true; never was true; but there it is, like a rock in your panna cotta. Author Alexander asks, as he copes with his new situation as well as his mother's decline into old age, "is this what aging is like?" And answers himself, "Too soon. Always too soon." Amen, Soul Sibling. A-bloody-men!

It's Friday! Smooches.

>98 Berly: It certainly is...are we all the way sure it's not the double-thirteenth?

*smooch* back

Sure seems like it to me. >: (

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Saturday to you.

Jenna and I went to and enjoyed our little cousin Cassidy’s wedding yesterday. We got to see a lot of family we haven’t seen in years, got lots of hugs, and held court at table 26 at the reception. Highly satisfactory.

>96 richardderus: You can’t put so many BBs out there. I’m going to skip this one simply because too many books too little time, but …being queer (as we now say) among people who aren't supportive of you. is simply something I cannot understand or forgive.

>97 richardderus: And onto the wishlist it goes. My kairfa account is for wish list books since January of last year, and you, my dear friend, have contributed 41 of the 188.

*smooch*

Well the books keep rolling out, RD, usually interesting sounding and most often than not pretty unfamiliar to me.

>97 richardderus: Looks fascinating and just a little bit scary.

Have a wonderful weekend, dear fellow.

>102 PaulCranswick: Hi PC! They really do, don't they. This month's goal was to post 33 reviews on my blog...so far in June, I've posted 29 and tomorrow's gang of Burgoines will bring it to 37! Plus there are two-review posts already scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, bringing the total to 43. But Thursday, the 30th, I'll post four more to bring me to 47 for June. These are the ones I've already got roughed in. I might even finish another book.

Deciding what I want to accomplish early, and doing the work as I go along during the months leading up to June, has really worked for me this time. I hope your weekend's a lovely one, too.

>101 karenmarie: Hi Horrible, you're so very welcome for contributing a measly 21.9% of your concupiscence account's totality. *hmf*

But there's ten more to come! *sharpens aim*

You'd be appalled by the life Marco Wilkinson led. Appalled. His mother was a terrible guilt machine of a parent, and weird with it. Alexander's book OTOH I can see you appreciating for his frustrating interactions with the medical professionals after the stroke.

I'm so glad that y'all had a good time at the wedding. It's a lovely thing to spend that much time with family and end up not homicidal! *smooch*

114 Manywhere: Stories by Morgan Thomas

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morgan Thomas's Manywhere features lush and uncompromising stories about characters crossing geographical borders and gender binaries.

The nine stories in Morgan Thomas's shimmering debut collection witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, whatever the cost. As Thomas's subjects trace deceit and violence through Southern tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.

A trans woman finds her independence with the purchase of a pregnancy bump; a young Virginian flees their relationship, choosing instead to immerse themself in the life of an intersex person from Colonial-era Jamestown. A writer tries to evade the murky and violent legacy of an ancestor who supposedly disappeared into a midwifery bag, and in the uncanny title story, a young trans person brings home a replacement daughter for their elderly father.

Winding between reinvention and remembrance, transition and transcendence, these origin stories resound across centuries. With warm, meticulous emotional intelligence, Morgan Thomas uncovers how the stories we borrow to understand ourselves in turn shape the people we become. Ushering in a new form of queer mythmaking, Manywhere introduces a storyteller of uncommon range and talent.

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

My Review: Whenever I read new story collections, I try to think of the reason(s) the writer had for writing that story, for including those words in a selection of them intended to make a reader form an idea of their creator. When that test gets me into a swivet, a frustrated screaming match with that absent author, I know I'm onto something worth following to the end of the trail. I had that sensation reading Morgan Thomas's words from the beginning.

As an example, there's "Taylor Johnson's Lightning Man." This was one of those fantastical reads that grows as you recede from the words but get the feelings so much more powerfully as memories. Those high places got scaled again in the strange, futuristic "Transit," in which the story's liminal between-space left me slightly sadder that I'd been born. There's no way that much longing and unrequited need can not teach you the truth of samsara. And the less-than-desired results of reading other stories, eg "Alta's Place," bring that into ever-sharper focus. The balance of going with Author Thomas's peripatetic imagination to its manywheres comes down on the positive, occasionally excellent, end of the literary map's scale.

In the time-honored tradition of this blog, I shall use the Bryce Method to elucidate my opinion of each piece within the whole at the link. There are too many lines for it to fit well into the spaces provided.

Wordle 371 4/6

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I really thought #3 was gonna be it! AEONS, MIRTH, LEAFY, BEADY

Brag: I got it in 3 because of my always-used first word. Most times the consonant in it isn't one of the letters, but this time it was and set me on the right path.

>103 richardderus: Way to go, RD!

>107 PaulCranswick:

>106 karenmarie: I see they went negative again today. But what the heck, if you got it in 3, it's a good word! *smooch*

Happy Saturday, Richard. I got to spend a few hours with Jack yesterday, which is always a treat, even if he is a handful at times. I think today will be chores and book time. Enjoy your day.

>109 msf59: Hi Mark! Well, what baby isn't a handful at times? It's the nature of the beasts. But that's why Nature provided us with all those lovely parenting hormones. Rewards for not killing the little dears!

I shall indeed enjoy my day, thanks, and you do the same.
***
I'm amazed to report (as I did to PC in >103 richardderus:) that, unless I pull one of the rough reviews I've got posted on my blog waiting their day, I'll finish June with FORTY-SEVEN reviews posted on there. My goal was 33! The Cavalcade of Queerness benefited from my deciding what I wanted to do early and getting a lot of the rough reviews done ahead of time. I need to remember this, and make it more habitual, since the sense of accomplishment is divine.

>110 richardderus: Big congratulations, and a “Good job!” and a “Top notch!” or two for your reviewing stats!

Great Wordle today, too! I managed to eke one out (definitely, “whew!”)

Good day, sir!

Karen O

>111 klobrien2: Ha! I was just over at your place boasting about my Wordleing!

Thank you for your kind words...I'm really chuffed that, barring unforeseen eff-ups, I'm on track to get a smashed goal. It's a good reinforcement of the benefits of following through on a plan.

*smooch*

*smooch* right back at you!

Karen O

>110 richardderus: Congrats (again, but seemed fitting to congratulate you on your own thread!) on surpassing your June goal of reviews. I'm glad the prep you were able to do ahead of time allowed you to do so with aplomb and not get frustrated and stressed along the way.

>114 bell7: Thanks again, Mary, it's never too much when there's something really worth celebrating to get more congrats.

>113 klobrien2:

>93 richardderus: I read Rainbow Rainbow: Stories as "Reading Rainbow," and I knew that could not be right. Sometimes I wonder about myself.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, RD. ((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today

>116 alcottacre: Ha! No, not Reading Rainbow, though that would be entertaining...*smooch*

>117 richardderus: I always liked Levar Burton, so there is that anyway :)

Happy reading and reviewing weekend RD.

>119 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caro!

>118 alcottacre: Me too! :-)

Wow, Richard! Well - Wow and Congratulations on high quality and high quantity work! Keep it up!

>97 richardderus: Good review, Richard, and a book I think I want to read. Sometime. When I have more energy. Right now, with recent events, I'm sucked dry. BTW, I knew Michelle and had worked with her husband. He was best friends with one of my assigned attorneys, and his death struck hard. I didn't know she'd written a book; I'm definitely going to read Widow (what? no touchstone?). Again, when I'm feeling stronger.

>122 Storeetllr: Oh, I am so glad, Mary! I think you'll enjoy Author Alexander's vulgar, funny, self-deprecating manner.

Latiolais has written several books. I have two: the other is A Proper Knowledge, also enjoyable like Widow was, though quite different. In fact, the opening line made it into my commonplace book:

Stan engines into Luke's office, his legs pistoning, fanatical, fueled by something seemingly unstoppable and mechanical, and so frightening—and frightening anew each time, Luke must admit—because each time Luke is alarmed and he knows it registers in his eyes and body until the physician arrives on board and he remembers who he is in this equation called doctor and patient.

It's been a decade or so since I read it so I don't know if her presentation of autism spectrum people will pass 2020s muster, but I'm hopeful it will.

>121 LizzieD: Thank you most kindly, Peggy, I appreciate the lovely words! *smooch*

>96 richardderus: >101 karenmarie: So many of us are _something_ among people who aren't supportive of us. It might be queer. It might be immigrant, or female, or black. It might be introverted, or extroverted. It might be over- or under- intellectual. It might be too old, or it might be too young. Sometimes it might even be cis white het male.

And then people wonder why I tend towards misanthropy? I don't know which I hate worse, "passing" as worthy of support (of the wrong kind), when that's even possible, or dealing with the bastards on my own terms, whether or not by choice.

>124 ArlieS: It's an unsolvable issue. There's nothing that will ever be completely acceptable to everyone.

47 reviews? Astonishing, sir!

>126 drneutron: I'm pretty astonished...this is the most productive single month for review-writing I think I've ever had. Thanks, Jim!

'Morning, RichardDear, and happy Sunday to you.

Took me all 6 in Wordle today. I wish you better luck. *grumble*

And, *smooch* from your own Horrible

Happy Sunday, Richard.
It's turned out nice here. I've mown the lawn, weeded the vege patch and picked a tub of raspberries.
Wordled in 3.
If the world wasn't doing its best to go to hell in a handcart, it would be a good day. Hope it treats you well too.

>129 Helenliz: Morning, Helen! How lovely that you Wordled in 3! I'm quite sure you're enjoying your bucolic activities, as I am my boardwalk and sea breeze. It's going up to 26.5C today, hot by my standards but perfect summer weather. The world is its own problem today, I can not still focus on what I hate that's happening with horrible speed.

>128 karenmarie: I haven't Wordled yet, Horrible, so I'll go do that and post my results. Thanks for the warning, though, I'll be on the lookout for Wordlesneaks.

*smooch*

Wordle 372 4/6

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Guess #3 was really the one that told me everything. AEONS, MIRTH, TRUST, RUSTY

115 The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A troubling account of heterosexual desire in the era of #MeToo

Heterosexuality is in crisis. Reports of sexual harassment, misconduct, and rape saturate the news in the era of #MeToo. Straight men and women spend thousands of dollars every day on relationship coaches, seduction boot camps, and couple’s therapy in a search for happiness.

In The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, Jane Ward smartly explores what, exactly, is wrong with heterosexuality in the twenty-first century, and what straight people can do to fix it for good. She shows how straight women, and to a lesser extent straight men, have tried to mend a fraught patriarchal system in which intimacy, sexual fulfillment, and mutual respect are expected to coexist alongside enduring forms of inequality, alienation, and violence in straight relationships.

Ward also takes an intriguing look at the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, which markets goods and services to help heterosexual couples without addressing the root of their problems. Ultimately, she encourages straight men and women to take a page out of queer culture, reminding them “about the human capacity to desire, fuck, and show respect at the same time.”

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

My Review: I grew up in a wealthy white suburban area, with parents whose last child I was. They had long since ended the honeymoon phase of marriage; they had two daughters they each pretty thoroughly disliked at least one of; their feelings about each other were still in flux. Along I came; everything changed in their middle-aged world and my sisters' teens. Absolutely no one came out of that pressure cooker unmangled.

I am, in other words, very much in sympathy with the author's thesis that heterosexuals aren't happier than we are.

The author puts the blame for the unhappiness squarely on men and their misogyny. The institutions men have built are designed to reinforce straight white male supremacy. Gay men, too, if white, participate in the male-designed system of woman-degrading misogyny. To their detriment, of course; to all male beings' detriment.

As far as it goes, this is pretty inarguably like the world one sees outside one's doors and windows, so am I going to beef with that? Hm. I'm not sure it counts as a beef, but allow me to assure you, Author Ward, that women whether heterosexual, bisexual, or lesbian, or any combination thereof, are perfectly capable of being horribly racist, sexist, and abusive. Allow me to tell you about my mother's incestuous sexual abuse of my ephebe self; her phony "christian conversion" that enabled her to use a whole new vocabulary of hateful, denigrating, destructive invective aimed at making sure I was eternally off-balance and unsure of my male self's worth...the aforementioned sisters and their litany of belittling and insulting characterizations of me...so, yeah, about those awful and abusive men: they had mothers whose actions were, if examined carefully, pretty awful. Was that solely and entirely the mothers' response to patriarchy and heteronormativity? I beg to differ. Some people are just not very nice and should be not be encouraged to spread that by having children!

Yet now our QUILTBAG brethren and sistern are falling over themselves to get married and have kids! We're equal, we can do the same things straight people do! And here, Author Ward, you and I agree: Shouldn't we be liberating our straight family from this structure designed to control and contain women, not rushing into it for ourselves? Isn't that a better project all the way around? Allow people to design their own lives, and stay away from prescribed identities like "husband" or "wife" or "parent" if those aren't appealing.

Suddenly the blind panic of the red-meat right to clamp down on abortion first, then come after the rest of the bodily and spiritual autonomy that so threatens their control, makes all the sense in the world. Heterosexuality is, from a QUILTBAG person's perspective, a terrible tragedy indeed. It's conflated with heteronormativity. Demoting "heterosexuality" to a sexual behavior is a darn good project. I myownself have engaged in heterosexuality (didn't much like it). In heteronormativity, even, and I REALLY didn't like that. Stopped it a long time ago.

So Author Ward, standing outside the institution and hollering at the guards, is onto a winner for all of me. She wouldn't be if she hadn't decoupled "heterosexuality" to the straight version of "homosexuality"...that simply describes what sexual behaviors one engages in. Now the problem, the enemy, is identified as "heteronormativity" or the cultural monolith of patriarchal abuse and control. The inmates in the institution need freeing! They need it badly and now. This moment in history is an inflection point. We can see that because every single facet of the progressive social and economic agendas are being fought by the social-control freaks using every tool and trick the centuries of their ruthlessly enforced dominance have given them. Because they know that, given freedom to choose, people aren't going to choose their way in majority numbers.

Racists fear being made into a minority...why? Heteronormatives fear living in a world with people who love in different ways...why? Because they fear the repression they're nakedly, openly enacting against us. "Sucks to be you" is their silent, though getting less and less so, taunt.

So there's value in this exercise for me, a cis white American male, a scion of almost godlike privilege.

The problems with a lesbian-only critique of straightness are clear, including a lack of critical straight participants in this exercise and the exclusion of all Y-chromosome bearers. I refuse to believe not one male has ever made a critique of heteronormative culture that is valid, that does not wholly or partially exemplify the misogynistic mode of control. But there's another beam in the author's eye: TERFs like Adrienne Rich and Cherie Moraga. Of all the marginalized groups that need a voice in this chorus, the trans community is top of my list...not one word. I'm poking at the author's lack of inclusiveness because inclusion is what the author's demanding. But only for XXwomen...? I thought biological determinism was among the patriarchy's tools of control....

So I don't think the read is perfect. I do think it enlightened me and brought thoughts to the surface of my mind that I really enjoy having there. Yes, we need to educate our heteronormative society's mainstream about the costs to them all of the horrible system that's in place. But let's stop excluding people as part of that, and Author Ward's presentation of trenchant and valuable arguments does that regrettable thing.

116 Bi : Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Genderqueer Youth by Ritch C. Savin-Williams

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: What bisexual youth can tell us about today’s gender and sexual identities

Despite the increasing visibility of LGBTQ people in American culture, our understanding of bisexuality—perhaps one of the least visible sexual orientations—remains superficial at best. Yet five times as many people identify as bisexual than as gay or lesbian, and, if we were to include the many bisexual people who remain hidden from sight, including those who simultaneously identify as pansexual, fluid, genderqueer, and no label, as much as 25 percent of the population is estimated to be bisexual.

In Bi, Ritch C. Savin-Williams brings bisexuality out of the shadows, particularly as Gen Z and millennial youth and young adults increasingly reject traditional sexual labels altogether. Drawing on interviews with bisexual youth from a range of racial, ethnic, and social class groups, he reveals to us how bisexuals define their own sexual orientation and experiences—in their own words. Savin-Williams shows how and why people might identify as bisexual as a result of their biology or upbringing; as a bridge or transition to something else; as a consequence of their curiosity; or for a range of other equally valid reasons.

Savin-Williams provides an important new understanding of bisexuality as an orientation, behavior, and identity. Bi shows us that bisexuality is seen and embraced as a valid sexual identity more than ever before, giving us timely and much-needed insight into the complex, fascinating experiences of bisexual youth themselves.

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

My Review: I'm not sure that the author is clear on some things that strongly impact the efficacy of this read. It seems, at some points, as though Author Savin-Williams is using "genderqueer" as a sexual orientation; at others, he clearly shows that he understands this (and nonbinary) are genders which might or might not impact another person's sexual interest in the person whose gender is expressed that way. Also, bisexuality is treated as a binary of sex, not in any way impacted by gender expression. I do not think this is the case, or at least it hasn't been in my own experience.

These are not small matters. But, in reading the case studies and interviews of young people who identify in many and various ways, these aren't issues on which they experience any doubt or confusion. I suppose this is understandable, as the author's prose isn't hugely dry or eye-wateringly dense; it is, nonetheless, presenting the author's understanding of the topic. That can get tangled in a reader's mind unless the very greatest possible care is taken to express distinctions with an absolute minimum of ambiguity. This editorial care felt inadequate to this reader, admittedly quite old and joyously binary. I might simply have missed something.

I asked for this DRC because I wanted a book to share with my grands. I was hoping, because it's focused on the youth of the twenty-first century, that it would be readable by those youth. It's not a great choice, I'm sad to say. I wouldn't give it to any of them, especially not my transmasc grandchild, because too often I felt Savin-Williams was dismissing the profiled person's self-definition by bringing all focus off gender and placing the emphasis on biological sex.

A completely-outside-the-author's-control cavil is that the DRC is a BEAR to navigate. I am entirely sure this is an issue with the vile, satanic PDF interfacing with my Kindle, but it required me to do a lot of fancy footwork to follow along as people were interviewed, or as points were made, and they happened to coincide with a page break. I'm not willing to ignore the issues but I've taken extra care to think about my rating of 3* of five very carefully. Am I blaming the story for the book's issues? Hence those three shiny stars when I started out with two.

All in all, I felt more disappointment due to my desired focus being unavailable in this project than I did with every other presentation issue. The author and/or publisher's title gave me to understand that all the identities listed in the subtitle would be more than touched on, and the groups mentioned would be the audience as well as the topic. I was incorrect in my assumption. The groups of young people were not, in my observation, treated with the respect they earned by taking part in the various studies. People, of all ages, are who they say they are; and lumping everyone from an enby/aro person to a cisqueer woman as "bisexual" did nothing for inclusion. It fostered confusion, and it did so avoidably.

117 Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Despite all the welcome changes that have happened in our culture and laws over the past few decades in regards to sexuality, the subject remains one of the most influential but least understood aspects of our lives. For psychologist and bestselling author Julia Shaw, this is both professional and personal—Shaw studies the science of sexuality and she herself is proudly and vocally bisexual.

It’s an admission, she writes, that usually causes people’s pupils to dilate, their cheeks to flush, and their questions to start flowing. Ask people to name famous bisexual actors, politicians, writers, or scientists, and they draw a blank. Despite statistics that show bisexuality is more common than homosexuality, bisexuality is often invisible.

In BI: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw probes the science and culture of attraction beyond the binary. From the invention of heterosexuality to the history of the Kinsey scale, as well as asylum seekers trying to defend their bisexuality in a court of law, there is so much more to explore than most have ever realized. Drawing on her own original research—and her own experiences—this is a personal and scientific manifesto; it’s an exploration of the complexities of the human sexual experience and a declaration of love and respect for the nonconformists among us.

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

My Review: I've contended publicly that bisexuality is the disrespected stepchild of the QUILTBAG community. When one says "bisexual" without the modifier "man/male" the presumption is one's referring to a woman/female. And that's what Author Shaw has set out to correct...that sense of non-inclusion that heteronormative society, whether straight or gay, attaches to labeled people. No one ever explains to you, "oh, I'm straight" because we assume they are unless they make a point of not being. And bisexuality, being by its nature focused on sexual activity, is simply not an acceptable identity in the heteronormative prescriptivist world.

Author Shaw, who also includes a lot of other identities in her discussion, corrects this misperception with an assertion that bisexuality is in fact an identity and to diminish that is to indulge in bi erasure. When that erasure comes at you from all sources and angles, including the one with a letter for your identity in its public face, that can feel disheartening and rejecting.

What Author Shaw does is build a good case, based on research and science, for the existence and validity of the identity "bisexual" as a separate thing. It's an equal to "gay" or "lesbian" or "straight" (which term I dislike because its connotation is "as opposed to 'bent'" and that doesn't thrill me) not a way-station on a road heading one way or the other. Thinking outside binaries is the great revolution in consciousness of this century. It's a giant gift to our descendants to recognize, affirm, and support their outside-our-experience identities. That does mean, however, learning what those identities are as well as what they want to be called.

Learning about bisexuality is not the challenge it was in the past. When I was a teen and wondering what to call myself ("faggot" wasn't gonna cut it for internal monologues, but it's accurate) I found a book called Loving Them Both: A Study of Bisexuality by Colin MacInnes, son of Angela Thirkell and her first husband. "Maybe that fits," I thought after reading it. It didn't, but at least I found something to help me try on an identity that just does not exist in pop culture. That book existed for me; it gave me information I'd never have found otherwise (though it was written in 1970 and was very much of its time); and the newcomers to adolescence and adulthood need the same help I found. That's Author Ward's book.

That she is a psychologist, with a special interest in criminality, makes me believe her research chops are top-notch even if I don't know what sources she's used. Consulting the Notes will disabuse anyone of the notion that she's just makin' it up. This is someone who makes a living as a psychologist, there's no way in heck she doesn't cite her sources. And they're impressively complete and diverse.

What's all this in aid of? It's a sad fact that, like most people who are bisexual, Author Ward wasn't really sure what that meant or if it, as an identity not a sexual desire, really existed. Unlike most people, she set out to do something to help people in their own searches for identity when they're feeling surer and surer that "straight" is for jackets not for them. There's always a process in developing an identity. In most cultures it's called "growing up." In modern Western culture, we're possessed of both a bewildering freedom to decide for ourselves and a grim paucity of examples for anything outside heteronormative society. Remember I said the author was a psychologist? Bet you can't guess what she did....

These are Author Ward's "Six Stages of Bidentity Development."

1. Stage 1. Loneliness: I must be the only one who feels this way, no one ever talks about it.


2. Stage 2. Euphoria: I'm NOT the only one! Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee!! Now I can start living!


3. Stage 3. Disappointment: What do you mean, I'm not queer/activist/leftist/whatever enough?! I'm just ME! What's with this judgment?


4. Stage 4. Mourning: How can anyone stand to be so cruel/ignorant/prejudiced? I'm a real person!



5. Stage 5. Anger: HOW DARE YOU?!? We are valid, real people with feelings and needs!


6. Stage 6. Peace: Wait...I am real, I have loved ones and others who accept me and are like me, and nothing the jackanapes do or say will make that different. (I call this the "It's not what you call me, it's what I answer to" stage.)

If you take no other thing away from reading this review, I hope it is that there is something out there in the world that can support and guide those not satisfied with the heteronormative world's offerings towards a different, possibly more comfortable and complete, identity. If you know someone who's on that journey, if you might be yourself, or if you're just curious about what the hell all the fuss is about, read Author Ward's enjoyable, informative, and authoritative prose.

No one needs to feel alone. Not when Author Ward's here to show a new path.

>97 richardderus: Some may miss the play on words. a "Stroke Book" is 50's slang for a book to masturbate to.

>135 magicians_nephew: Much much later than the 1950s. I don't want to bring it up (!) in the review but it gave me a laugh all the way through.

We’ll, I caught that, and actually did a double-take on the title. Then read the review and got a chuckle. 😂

Congrats on completing soo many reviews! Richard, the reviewer rockstar :)

>138 figsfromthistle:

>137 drneutron: Heh.

>134 richardderus: Parts of it sound like my experience, especially with regard to gender identification. Except that I thought that *everyone* was like me, until conditioned by culture to shut down the parts of themselves not acceptable to what I'd now call cis-hetero-normativity.

Morning, Richard. Great job with the reviews. Very impressive. We are going to enjoy a couple of fine summer days, until it begins to heat up again. I am well into Arctic Dreams and really enjoying this one. His writing is wonderful.

>141 msf59: Hiya Mark! Thanks, I'm pretty pleased. I *might* even break fifty if the books I've got in process cooperate and remain easy to review if I finish them.

>140 ArlieS: I'm quite sure more people are like you than you're led to believe, Arlie. There's no one way to be, and that scares people even (especially?) ones who aren't what They tell them to be.

Wordle 373 3/6

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I've had enough coffee, I guess, to make this one a doddle. AEONS, MIRTH, RETRO

‘Morning, Rdear! Happy Monday to you.

>132 richardderus: - >134 richardderus: Gonna pass for now, come back and read the reviews. Jenna’s home and I want to post a hello but not dig deep down into your always excellent reviews.

>143 richardderus: Congrats on 3. I took 5, and got to show Jenna what Wordle is. She’s seen folks post about it but didn’t know how it worked. She’s not really interested in it herself, but was fascinated by it.

Another relaxing day here at the house. Bill’s working from home but doesn’t have much to do today. Jenna’s doing laundry while I hang out for a bit on LT.

*smooch* from Madame TVT

>144 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! I'm glad you're here. I saw your Wordle earlier, and suspected you were distracted by something to take 5 to get to that word. (It being one I know you use.)

Happy Monday! Sounds like the house is filling up...hoping for some Karentime to be manifest soon. *smooch*

118 The 16th Second by Ted A Richard

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The 16th Second is the autobiography of a small-town gay boy from Deep South Louisiana who survived homophobia, alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse, rape, and HIV/AIDS to become somebody that no one, not even he, expected.

The story winds through his childhood, where Ted had become accustomed to coming in second. Weaving a tale of drama, heartache, and failure to the path leading him to figure out what it takes to come in first, and why it mattered.

His childhood recollection of “never being good enough” morphs into a world of delusions of grandeur as his search for fame seems to never materialize which causes him to create his own definition of fame.

It is a story of redemption and success after years of searching helped him realize that he had to let go of the fame of the past (which never existed), and begin living in the present in order to secure his future.

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

My Review: My fellow old gay Texan guys: Remember Colt Michael? Here he is again! If you read This Week in Texas in the 1980s like I did...well, you'll remember Colt Michael. I now know he was Ted Richard, a Catholic Cajun boy. We even worked for the same department store (me before him), Foley's. Never met the man then, but I know him better now than I ever would've had we met in our 20s. (Though seeing the photos from the 1980s editions of TWIT was really cool.)

What I thought most about was how similar we were in the outlines of our experiences...losing a gay high-school friend to vehicle accidents, being brought to know our real sexual natures by older men whose experience was just perfect for the awakening, being raped by trusted authority figures (his a priest, mine my mother)...and how very much we both lost to AIDS. My goddesses, what a scourge.

What makes me rate this book as a four-star read, then, is that sense of fellow feeling, and the way he writes. It's like having a conversation with him, he definitely "writes the way he talks." That worked for me; it might or might not for you. How much do you want an excitable old gay guy whoopin' and hollerin' in his Cajun accent right in your ear? Do what I did, read a chapter a day, and even those who maybe don't want to have the whole experience all at once will likely enjoy it.

As to why you'd want to read it...learn something from your elders? relive a little corner of your past? experience a life very unlike your own? Whatever resonates. I hope you'll give Ted/Colt a few hours of your time.

Okay, I've lost track. What number June review is >146 richardderus:?

>147 katiekrug: It's number 40. Forty-one will go up later today. It's still getting polished.

My God, man! And it's not like you post crummy comments like I do. Very impressive!

>149 katiekrug: Heh...I can't claim to be superbeing, I decided this month's theme, consulted the Kindle, and started reading and making rough reviews back in March. It kept me from having to scramble to fill days. Heck, I'm reduced to making gang-posts on my blog to fit them all in...something I usually reserve for single-author multiple reviews like Mike Chen or Jordan L. Hawk.

It did bite me today, though...>133 richardderus: wasn't priced, linked, or formatted right on the first post because I don't like the book. Got sloppy, which isn't how I want my blog to look.

I think you can be forgiven for the occasional misstep. xx

>151 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie. I'd be more tolerant of my mistake there if it wasn't that early-morning version that went out to 1,887 email subscribers. *sigh*

119 A Union Like Ours: The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney by Scott Bane

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney’s death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

During a hospital stay, years into their relationship, Matthiessen confessed to Cheney that “never once has the freshness of your life lost any trace of its magic for me. Every day is a new discovery of your wealth.” Situating the couple’s private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the United States. From the vantage point of the present day, with marriage equality enacted into law, Bane provides a window into the realities faced by same-sex couples in the early twentieth century, as they maintained relationships in the face of overt discrimination and the absence of legal protections.

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

My Review: Never have the words "it takes one to know one" been put to a more positive, more constructive use than in Scott Bane's double biography of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. Bane and his husband, journalist David Dunlap, are the same generational distance apart...fifteen years as opposed to twenty...that F.O. and Russell were, and face some of the same cultural mismatches that they did. Like them, the author and his husband are in it for the long haul. It grounds this work in a shared lived experience, then, and explains the recognition that Bane brings to the delight and the toil of building a life together. Romance is about passion and excitement, discovery and laughter; marriage is about farts and morning breath, balancing the checkbook...and laughter. Can't laugh together? Won't last. These men loved the same things, art and culture and their upper-class life; but they always stayed in touch with the interpersonal fundamentals that provide a rock to build on.

From their providential meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris, F.O. and Russell were companions. F.O.'s youth, the fourth of four children of divoced parents, was spent in Tarrytown, a short train trip from Manhattan and its gay-sex paradise that he took full advantage of. He was a boarder at the Hackley School, a Unitarian-run college prep organization that gave him the freedom from his (slightly neglectful, it sounded to me) mother to come and go as he would within curfews. It was also a more-or-less accepted thing that boarding schools would have sexual experimentation in them. It's not different now, but it was more laissez-faire then, so long as it didn't transgress limits. Russell's life, as he was from an even-wealthier family, was less structured around upper-middle-class concerns; he was eleventh of eleven children, and accordingly largely left to his own devices. Like F.O., Russell went to Yale and was brought into Skull and Bones; unlike F.O., he was not focused or driven. The artistic urge that Russell pursued wasn't driving him, the way F.O.'s ambitions were driving him; the direction F.O. would take wasn't set but the passion for reading, literature, was there and the organizational zeal was too, yet to be married. They were equally well matched in their shared passion for men, though again at ends of a spectrum: F.O. loved sex and sexuality, with men; Russell loved men, and expressed it through sex.

This 1926 portrait from RussellCheney.com of F.O. in Florence shows how tenderly Russell regarded his "Matty"
These men, then, were perfectly suited to each other, their union fated and destined to be one that was harmonious. Though it certainly faced challenges...Russell's alcoholism and health issues, F.O.'s political convictions drew unwanted attention, the pair swapped places as the financial backer of their life together...it was an enduring institution in their lives. F.O.'s tender care for Russell as his alcoholism took over his life was exemplary. Author Bane and his husband have faced down other health challenges together, which really informs the way he writes about the frailty of the person you love overtaking all other concerns. As the love of my life died of AIDS 30 years ago this past May, I am very clear about this cost and the willingness the committed spouse has to bear it. I felt so...validated...by this multilayered reflection of my own life.

The ending of the book was hard to read. It's a given that people will die; it's not a given that this will ever be easy, will ever be quantifiably manageable. F.O.'s ultimate inability to save Russell from the consequences of his alcoholism felt so tragic to me. It's always true that an addict loves their addiction, but we always hope they'll love us more. Sadly for F.O., Russell couldn't love him more than the booze. After Russell's 1945 death at the then-venerable age of sixty-three, F.O. entered the long-term partner's decline. It was exacerbated by his ongoing conflicts with a severely conservatizing society, his employers' attitude towards his politics, and the vast shoreless ocean of survivorhood.

In the end, F.O. Matthiessen, a monadnock of literary theory and a champion of modernist literary products, could not face the world without his center and mainstay. He took his own life on (appropriately) April Fool's Day, 1950, at forty-eight. We are much the poorer for his absence from our cultural conversation far too soon.

I hope you'll read this fascinating, well-made and thoroughly sourced life of two fine gay men. In #PrideMonth, how can you resist?

Apparently, I've had a LiveJournal account for 18 years as of today. As I can't recall when or why I set it up, that email wishing me happy anniversary was...random.

I hadn't thought of LJ this decade, and now I've got an account!

120 The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Rating: 3? 5? 9? stars of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q, a chilling fable about the necessity—and impossibility—of productivity, art, and love in an age governed by capitalist logic.

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse…

C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it?

Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors is a mordantly funny tour through through a world where not only civic infrastructure but our darkest desires (not to mention our novels) are vulnerable to malware; where mythical creatures talk like Don DeLillo; where love is little more than a blip in our metadata. It peers into How We Got Here and asks What We Do Next, charting the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.

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

My Review: All progress, so it seems, is coupled to regression elsewhere. — Author JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS, The Visitors

A Hymn of Praise to the Great Publisher AND OTHER STORIES, which dwelleth in the Sheffield of Reeds, the Rulers of Literature! Thou art the first-born fruit of Stefan Tobler's psychic womb. Thou art they whose brows are lofty. Thou hast gained possession of the Formula of Publishing, Publishing = Supply + Demand + Magic, and used this with the rank and dignity of the divine forebears Knopf, Calder, and Busby. Thy literary nous is wide-spread. Thy existence shall resound in the welkin of words. Grant thou to me glory in reading and breadth in comprehension in the form of an unbenighted reader, and the power to pass in through and to pass out from the bewilderingly dense and mannerèd prose of this, thy author JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS, whose words possess humor and trenchance yet surpass my ability to grasp them.

Homage to thee, O Progenitors of Those En Avant. I have fought for thee, I am one of those who wisheth for words of wisdom and meaning beyond those that make the women tear out their hair. I unbolt the door on the Shrine of Feminism in TERFless lands. I enter in among and come forth with the Goddesses of Literary Experimentation on the day of the destruction of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling. I look upon the hidden things in THE VISITORS and recite the words of the liturgy of Rachel Cusk.

Hail, O Ye Who Make Perfect Souls to enter into the House of Woolf and Stein, make ye the well-instructed soul of the Reader Mudge. Let him hear even as ye hear; let him have sight even as ye have sight; let him stand up under this onslaught of ideas even as ye have stood up; let him take his seat even as ye have taken your seats, for he is mightily worn out.

Hail, O Ye Who Open Up The Way, who act as guides through the thickets of recursion and coding-inflected ideas, to the perfect souls in the House of Literature. May he enter into the House of AND OTHER STORIES with boldness, because there is no trace of compehension in him. May there be no opposition made to him, nor may he be sent out again therefrom for his dimwittedness. May he not be found light in the Balance, and may the Feather of Book-Ma'at decide his case.

with my most sincere apologies to the shade of E.A. Wallis Budge, translator of The Book of Going Forth By Day, to whose prose I have done great and grievous violence; and to JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS, whose erudition and verve with language dwarf my own limited capacities to comprehend them

‘Morning, RD! I’m not sure ‘happy’ is appropriate, but … Something Tuesday to you. I’m getting more and more distraught with the state of our country.

>146 richardderus: Another review to go back to look at, alas.

>153 richardderus: Onto the wish list it goes.

edited to add: Federalist No. 16 posting up.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Distressing and disturbing things are afoot. It's impossible not to notice...and what distresses and disturbs me the most is that there are people in this country, in this group even, who think this is a GOOD thing. Something to be celebrated.

That's nauseating to me.

I'll come get my dose soon. *smooch*

Wordle 374 4/6

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There needs to be a word for "I forgot and used a wrong letter again" AEONS, MIRTH, TROLL, DROLL

121 My Volcano by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: My Volcano is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a menagerie of characters, as they each undergo personal eruptions, while the Earth itself is constantly shifting. Parable, myth, science-fiction, eco-horror, My Volcano is a radical work of literary art, emerging as a subversive, intoxicating artistic statement by John Elizabeth Stintzi.

On June 2, 2016, a protrusion of rock growing from the Central Park Reservoir is spotted by a jogger. Three weeks later, when it finally stops growing, it’s nearly two-and-a-half miles tall, and has been determined to be an active volcano.

As the volcano grows and then looms over New York, an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself transported 500 years into the past, where he witnesses the fall of the Aztec Empire; a Nigerian scholar in Tokyo studies a folktale about a woman of fire who descends a mountain and destroys an entire village; a white trans writer in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse tends to Syrian refugees in Greece while grappling with the trauma of living through the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic farmer in Mongolia is stung by a bee, magically transforming him into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aspires to connect every living thing into its consciousness.

With its riveting and audacious vision, My Volcano is a tapestry on fire, a distorted and cinematic new work from the fiercely talented John Elizabeth Stintzi.

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

My Review: Remember Cloud Atlas? How people fussed and fumed over its interlocking time-narratives, and complained that they were "obscurantist divagations unequaled since Pynchon took the stylus away from Gertrude Stein"? (Okay, okay, I'm quoting myself from Goodreads. Sue me.)

But really, this is a challenge for linear readers to get any information or pleasure from reading it. If you'll give Author Stintzi a lot of rope, you can lasso a meaning from all two hundred-plus chapters. (I lost track at two-hundred four, and was reading way after that.) There's something...overwhelming...about that many voices coming at you, no matter what story they're telling. I don't think for an instant that was accidental. It was a choice, a decision to make the polyphony (babble to some of us) of the modern info-saturated landscape into an experiential reality. In that aim, it feels like Author Stintzi is channeling Annihilation with the entire Earth as Area X. People become something Other, as in a spiky plant; the things they pass by casually turn into that same spiky plant; what better visualization of the radicalizing effect of social media?

One character even says, I didn't want to say anything because someone would tell me they knew, about the appearance of a freakin' VOLCANO in Manhattan! That utter break in the fabric of reality wasn't worth commenting on in case it was "old news" and you'd look like you were out of touch for saying anything about it! This also echoes the storytelling hook Author Stintzi uses of beginning each character's section (they're too short for me to call them "chapters" with a straight (!) face) with a now-commonplace personal disaster...a body transformed, a police shooting, a homeless person being violated...that simply, numbingly, takes place. Nothing is made of this. In a world where Sandy Hook didn't result in stringent gun-control laws, that's a given. Sadly.

Which, I think, nicely makes their point for them: The story's set in 2016, the year a giant volcano appeared and took over every aspect of our lives and has shaped the vile, reprehensible political and social landscape of 2022. Too many of us live inside echo chambers, bubbles of resounding agreement with any willingness to agree to disagree. I certainly do...and I'm stayin' in here. In placing the action in that before-and-after year, Author Stintzi remodels reality to punish Humankind for its unkindness and carelessness and concupiscence.

The real question I see emerging from the immensity of Author Stintzi's imagination is not can Humankind be saved...should Humankind be saved? We can exist in a world where the weirdest, awfulest, cruelest (one section deals with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, another historical inflection point) disasters elicit nothing, not a single impulse, towards others' needs, but only our own.

One character, called only "the white trans writer", is seen writing away...feedback of the most bracing honesty (read: the truth hurts) foremost in their mind, trying to make a story about an alien planet work. (Author Stintzi's nonbinary, not trans, but the point is made.) They're in some kind of existential despair. Writing will, in fact, do that to you. And listing the forty-nine names of the victims of 2016's Pulse nightclub shooting will reinforce that despair if you're One of Us...but the character speaks for the whole world when they say:

Eventually, sitting down to write the novel felt like sitting down to watch the end of the world. As if they were simply waiting to watch the planet finally spill its fetid, destructive insides out.

That is what Author Stintzi's accomplished with My Volcano, and it's either a cathartic emesis or a wracking, heaving hurl of the toxic crap you took in to make everything okay for a few hours.

Okay. The remaining eight reviews to be posted through Thursday are written and polished. My goal for this Cavalcade of Queerness, if y'all will recall, was to post thirty-three reviews. I *actually* have FIFTY! with those that are ready to go.

FIFTY. In one month! Yes, true, I've been reading and writing since March. A goal clearly articulated will, it seems, motivate me more than I previously knew it would.

...my fingers hurt...

>159 richardderus: Annnnd, on to the TBR list it goes. I love non-linear complicated things (when in the right mood and able to concentrate).

>160 richardderus: Whew! That's quite an accomplishment, even if you did start reading/writing in March. I've *only* managed 34 books since March.

>160 richardderus: so many reviews! I am in awe.

Happy Wednesday, Richard. Good review of My Volcano. Another one to add to the list. My week is going along fine so far and it looks like I get to visit Jack this morning, while Bree rides with friends. May do some birding first.

‘Morning, RDear.

A multitude of happy reading and baby animal photos later, I’m feeling a tad better than yesterday, but only because I’m eschewing news for a bit.

>159 richardderus: Remember Cloud Atlas? How people fussed and fumed over its interlocking time-narratives, and complained that they were "obscurantist divagations unequaled since Pynchon took the stylus away from Gertrude Stein"? (Okay, okay, I'm quoting myself from Goodreads. Sue me.) As soon as I read the words ‘obscurantist divagations’ I knew you were quoting yourself. Gonna pass. Even if it would be a cathartic emesis. I don't like vomiting. Of course, I don't think too many people do, but still.

>160 richardderus: Starting in March, hurting fingers, and a laudable goal. Impressive.

*smooch*

122 The Geography of Pluto by Christopher DiRaddo

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Twenty-eight-year-old Will, a teacher living in Montreal's gay village, has spent the last few months recovering from a breakup with his first serious boyfriend, Max. He has resumed his search for companionship, but has he truly moved on?

Will's mother Katherine - one of the few people, perhaps the only one, who loves him unconditionally - is also in recovery, from a bout with colon cancer that haunts her body and mind with the possibility of relapse.

Having experienced heartbreak, and fearful of tragedy, Will must come to terms with the rule of impermanence: to see past lost treasures and unwanted returns, to find hope and solace in the absolute certainty of change.

In The Geography of Pluto, Christopher DiRaddo perfectly captures the ebb and flow of life through the insightful, exciting, and often playful story of a young man's day-to-day struggle with uncertainty.

I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT FROM A CANADIAN FRIEND. THANKS!

My Review: What I can tell you is that this is a reading experience to savor, because it's got the meditative quality of all the best bildungsromans. It's not precisely The Sorrows of Young Werther (thank goodness) but it's as deeply felt and its hero is very much a hero.

What I can't tell you is what the heck made me pick it for a Canadian friend to send to me in 2015. (He's no longer my friend, so naming no names.) I guess I wanted a Canadian gay man's perspective...? I don't know but thank goodness he chose to gift me this book, and I got to meet Will and his loved ones. I don't think I'll forget Angie, the lesbian bestie, any time soon..."you {gays} have it so good, there's always a party or something, lesbians are boring!" as Will's trying to process heartbreak...and while I don't want to remember Max, I know I will. *guilty memories*

Into every ordinary life...Will's mother, close to him, doesn't know he's gay (or so he thinks). She's now, after a long motherhood without a coparent, facing the worst sort of news: Terminal cancer. This is, as anyone who's lived through it knows, a death sentence for whoever the person you were before your loved one was diagnosed as well as for them. It's a long and bitter war, Will learns, to be there for someone you love as they die. He is up to the challenge, though, and does his mother proud: He comes out to her. And, before she dies, the "...unspoken truth that would weigh upon her until she was ready to confront it: that she was the mother of a gay man," is spoken and it (predictably) isn't anything that awful in their lives.

It is with Max, Will's first serious love, that I got squirmy. He is Mr. Right! He's so {insert laundry list of delightful things}! He and I will grow old together. And Max is thinking, "this is great, I like this guy and the sex really works, but I need something else," and doesn't share that with the passionately in-love Will because, well, the sex really works. So when the inevitable happens and he breaks up with Will, only one of them is devastated and it's not Max. Who, need I mention, recrudesces like a malign growth in Will's world...he simply can't just Be Done, get over it, without Max wanting...something.

I guess it's a no-brainer to realize that Will, a geography teacher by profession, living in Montreal, a city whose geography is ever-present, unignorable, and quite beautiful, will describe same to reader. It's a pleasure to read. The descriptions are embedded, and frequently at spoiler-sensitive times, or I'd quote one or two. The reason I bring it up is that it's one of my favorite things about the read. I had a firm sense of place, I was oriented in Will's world, and I've been to Montreal only twice. That's a good job of world-building, Author DiRaddo. The wonderful ending of the book takes us, in Will's musings, out to Pluto the ex-planet, the cold world beyond anything Humankind's ever known. Will says about its 2006 demotion from planethood:

Is anything truly permanent? Can anything ever be when your own universe can surprise you with something new about itself—correcting a fact you were taught to believe your entire life? The teacher in me wonders what they will do now with the old textbooks, the ones that count the planets in our solar system as nine. The little boy in me feels betrayed by the astronomers, the curtain pulled further back on the limits of science. But the lover in me is optimistic, content that something so cold and distant is perhaps more understandable.

So that's it. Will's ordinary life is just...ordinary. He lives, loves, hurts, laughs in Montreal. He questions his choices and his sanity, his luck and his lovers. He does it all at the turn of the millennium, which honestly feels like History now. And I was in my forties! So there's a lot to learn about younger people, their ways and their means; but there's really so much more that simply feels like the best kind of homecoming to me. I remember these passages, including his coping with a parent's loss and a lost parent. Will felt like a man I'd gladly have to a dinner party and expect he'd be a great asset to my circle of friends.

I suppose it's all just the long way to say: I think Will's a good guy, and I hope you'll give him a chance on this blind date I'm urging you to go on with him.

>164 karenmarie: *smooch* Thank you, dear, that's a lovely compliment indeed.

Eschew! Eschew! Bless you.

>163 msf59: Yay for more Jack time! I'm so glad Bree is taking care to get time off, and that her family's so willing to take some weight off of her.

>162 LovingLit: *bows* Thanks, Megan.

>161 bell7: Only *snort* "only 34" *giggle*

That's 33 more than the largest minority of us who read manage in a year, and 34 more than the silenced majority read at all!

Wordle 375 5/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟨🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
...!!!... AEONS, MIRTH, BADLY, WACKY, GAWKY

Come back to my thread, I've posted The Federalist No 17.

123 Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this highly-lauded novel, a filmmaker meets a woman named Cosima at an Italian espresso bar, spinning a gorgeous tale of love and the creative process.

An auteur, together with his lead actors, is at a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest film. Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman who takes him on a walk to uncover the city's secrets, historic and personal. As the walk unwinds, a story of love and tragedy emerges, and he begins to see the chance meeting as fate. He is entranced, wholly clear in his mind: her story must surely form the basis for his next film. This is a novel about cinema, flâneurs, and queer love — it is about the sometimes troubled, sometimes ecstatic creative process, and the toll it takes on its makers. But it is also a novel about stories, and the persistent question of who has the right to tell them.

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

My Review: First, read this:

There was a moment in a theatre as the lights went down that you truly understood the depth of your vulnerability: that for all the good wishes and the boosting presence of family around you, the truth that you were about to be judged was inescapable. Your visual imagination and use of language, your depth and humour, as well as compassion and emotional intelligence: these were to be dissected, held aloft and appraised. I knew of no other art form that took apart a human being to the same degree of complexity.
–and–
I was jealous of the lives novelists lived but I knew that I was not a solitary creature. Novels were a different kind of cage, one where you willingly locked yourself in. {His newly discovered muse} had something of the captive in her, I thought; that same mixture of passion and restraint I’d seen in other novelists I’d worked with.

The words, musings really, of a cinema auteur of the pretentiously arty sort; all the inducement, or warning, you need about the read to come. I'm pretty sure you know right now which it is for you. I was left eager for more as I read the first sentence:

I flew to the Italian city of B. to attend the film festival in late March. Our entry into the competition, a liberal adaptation of William Maxwell’s novel The Folded Leaf, had been officially confirmed, and I was expected to participate in three days of interviews and panels to promote the release, with a jury screening on the second evening.

...because that novel contains one of my commonplace book's fattest sections. Maxwell's story, simple on the surface, of unrequited and unrequested love, is a tour-de-force of understatement that would be damned close to impossible to film. How does one get this:

But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey... On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where.

...onto film? How in the hell can Lymie, the speaker, ever be really captured outside a reader's head? So we know what kind of filmmaker we're with in B., and it ain't Quentin Tarantino. Did Wallace Shawn ever direct a film? It would've been a lot like the narrator's films, I'll wager.

As he is in B. for the second time with a film almost certainly receiving an award, I was a touch surprised that Maestro (the tag that everyone uses to refer to and address the narrator, ugh) didn't have his husband and son with him. They are there in spirit, I suppose; the Maestro does refer to them. But the principal story here is about Cosima, a novelist who meets the Maestro quite by accident (or is it an accident?). Her long, intimate ramble and rambling chat with him becomes the center of the Maestro's world. He is captivated, both by Cosima and her story of a dead and gone artist lover of hers. He does what I think all truly driven artists do: He absorbs Cosima's story, Cosima's love; he appropriates them, in more modern terms. After all, he's decided with the arrogance of his sex and class that he's Going To Make This Film, the life and art of these lovers. So what that Cosima doesn't want him to? Who owns the facts?

The Maestro, then, is accustomed to taking what he wants. It's also obvious in his creepily Hitchcockesque insertion of himself into his lead actors' (from The Folded Leaf, the novel he's filmed, remember?) new off-screen romance. He's very benign about it, but it's there, and it reads badly in the twenty-first century. As it's intended to do....

The unbearably lush sensory world of Italy, its food and its lavish sensual feast of a landscape, is all I can picture after this read. The parties and events surrounding the Maestro's film release aren't very interesting to me, and luckily receded into the background as I read, but I'm attuned to the food and wine descriptions. (If I were a dog, I'd be reward-oriented in training.)

The stylistic choice to make each chapter a paragraph makes sense when one twigs to the fact this is a récit. All speech not the Maestro's is reported by him, is heard through his ears. We're always inside his head, always with his eyes doing our seeing...it's actually like we're the audience at the movie of his life. In fact, based on what he says, I'm willing to bet the Maestro's a narcissist on the ragged edge of pre-disorder-level presentation. It wouldn't take much to shove him into a full-blown clinical case.

The simple saving grace for the Maestro is, I suspect, that he's a storyteller by profession and passion.

Too much of life is given to analysis. I agree with that, I said, more than you realise. That's not to say I want to live blindly, maestro, more that you have to give yourself up to the day in order to live it. I learned a lesson from reading that novel. You're not always in control of when and how things end. What you can control is whether you embrace the moment.

You're not in control of how things end...but the author, the auteur, is. And there's no better place to be than that. The truth is the Maestro will always assume control of wherever he is, whenever he is there.

The main response I predict most people will have to the story is formal: Many are the folk who do not like absent dialogue tags and paragraphs that go on for pages. These are not the readers for Govinden's strange and lovely artwork. If you enjoyed Milkman with its men called things like Maybe-boyfriend and the neverending sentence with "the fact that" as a kind of punctuation in Lucy Elliman's Ducks, Newburyport, you'll be fine with this read. In fact it's downright simple in comparison to those two, or their French ancestors Pinget or Proust.

If those aren't happy memories for you, this isn't likely to be either. If you're willing to put in some concentration I predict this story in its very 21st century preoccupations with story, ownership, misogyny, and the Cult of the Creator, you'll like this read a lot.

>168 karenmarie: Good on ye, Karen. Wish I could get more people to look at the The Federalist Papers.

>170 magicians_nephew:, >168 karenmarie: I like the fact that there's great reading making its way around the site.

>160 richardderus: Yay... Congratulations RD.

>154 richardderus: I still use an LJ clone - not LJ itself, not since it got bought by Russians who imposed untranslated rules everyone on it is supposed to obey. (Even before that, I was already posting elsewhere, with automatic cross posting to LJ, because LJ itself had become a magnet for DOS attacks.)

I strongly recommend Dreamwidth (www.dreamwidth.org) as a far far better alternatives than FaceBook, or anything else a modern person would think of when listing social media sites. OTOH, librarything's discussion forums do a pretty good job of filling a similar niche, with more people active; you may well not feel a need for anything of the kind.

>157 richardderus: I'm now very much aware that the US is not my country. I immigrated here in the 1990s, and now that I'm retired there's nothing holding me here - except practicalities (paid off house, tons of stuff to move) - and a housemate who refuses to move anywhere cold.

If the political conflict gets sufficiently worse, we'll each wind up back in the countries we came from, having retained citizenship - but I'd much rather leave in a planned and controlled fashion, together, and bringing our stuff with us.

I adapted to a lot of American particularity over the years. But at this point, I've exceeded my limit.

>160 richardderus: Woot!

124 This Cleaving and This Burning by J.A. Wainwright

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two unrelated, aspiring writers, born on the same day in the same year to parents with the same first names, grow up together and eventually gain national prominence as authors. As the years pass, the complex sexual identities of Miller Sark and Hal Pierce undermine their intense private relationship, inflicting damage that cannot be undone by the distinction of their fiction and poetry. Inspired by the lives and works of American literary giants Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane, This Cleaving and This Burning reveals the passion and purpose behind masks of public reputation and creative expression.

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

My Review: The bones of this story are based on Hemingway and Hart Crane, a sadly now-forgotten poet popular in the 1920s for his exaggeratedly obscurantist poetry. He was much on the model of T.S. Eliot, though far more, um, impressionistic in his vocabulary and stylistic affectations. For all that, he had a spark of some beautiful thing, a light that shone from his lines (as oddly heard as they were:

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

These lines are from "Repose of Rivers" which is from his seminal collection White Buildings. Modern Queer Theory proponents like Thomas Yingling and Tim Dean have pushed back against heteronormative readings of Crane's poetry, arguing that his gayness was central to his sense of himself, and his sense of being a social pariah for his queerness was central to his poet's identity.

Any road, the friendship between Hemingway (a hugely overpraised writer in my never-remotely humble opinion) and Crane is not factual; it's factual that, had it happened, this is the way it would've ended given Hemingway's known homophobia.

The thing that drew me ever deeper into this read was the beautiful creative world these two inhabited, the joyous freedom of childhood and adolescence spent with light supervision allowing them to muse and think and just *be*. The way the words knit and tat and crochet the strands of character and story together was magical. There's really very little said, apart from a seriously climactic scene, about their natural world...and even that scene is far more about Hal's thoughts and feelings. The characters, based on real men, are themselves and not merely mouthpieces for a plot full of contrivances. It hews as closely to the known life-events of the men as it's possible to do within the confines of writing one's own story.

While the ending was a saddening thing to read, it was factual in its results and outlines. What I'd recommend to readers is that they come to this tale of the valences of long-term friendships, especially same-gender ones, with a spirit of discovery. The novel is about the transformative nature of Love in its many, many, bizarre and unhappy and joyful forms. The love between men-friends is one of the toughest to show in fiction unless one resorts to sports as a central metaphor. In the case of Miller and Hal, the center of their long and loving friendship is Miller's appreciation of the adornments of Hal's poetical imagination and Hal's appreciation of Miller's grounded, practical masculinity. The tragedy of an ending is always there in the rapture of a beginning, isn't it.

It's actually a bit of a surprise to me how much I ended up enjoying this read. I don't generally like tragic endings to queer stories but this one's both factual and handled with a real sensitivity to the story that's led up to it. The characters, always forefronted in Author Wainwright's hands, are very clearly heading into inevitability. Their hidden selves and their public presentations of self collide and fragment on the rocks of Love. It has happened forever; it will happen myriad times again. It's a testament to that reality's careful construction in This Cleaving and This Burning that it failed for once to trigger my knee-jerk hostility to this kind of ending.

I'll say this for Author Wainwright. Decades of writing, both poetry and novels, has led him into a beautiful green pasture of story that only he could inhabit with the lightness and rightness of touch to sell my resistant soul on such a painful, sad to read, finale for two fascinating characters.

>174 ArlieS: Hear! Hear!

>160 richardderus: Congratulations! (And take good care of those poor fingers. Maybe a manicure with a hand massage? I know that's something that makes my hands happy.)

I squeaked by today's Wordle in 6. Ugh.

So, I've moved back to the 75er group and hope you'll visit me here.

>178 Storeetllr: Thanks, Mary! I'm pretty pleased with myself, as I guess comes across.

Hand massages are anathema! I have lumps of acid on every joint...stirring them up is a Bad Bad Bad Idea, I'm sad to say.

I assume it had to do with the foolishness I saw earlier today. ::eyeroll::

>177 magicians_nephew:, >174 ArlieS: I am sad to say that is also how I feel...but this *is* my native place, if no longer my country. I live in a bastion of the world I want to see, but...bastions fall.

>175 ArlieS: Thanks!

>173 ArlieS: I'm pretty much over the whole finding-new-homes stage of digital citizenship, I confess. I've got plenty to occupy my time.

>178 Storeetllr: >179 richardderus: Yes. *sigh*

125 Disoriental by Négar Djavadi

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER OF THE 31st Lambda Literary Award—BEST BISEXUAL FICTION!

The Publisher Says: Kimiâ Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimiâ is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.

In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimiâ herself––punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own “disorientalization”—who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF AMAZON'S PRIME READING PROGRAM. USE THIS BENEFITS! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE, SO TAKE ALL ADVANTAGES.

My Review: From the off, this is a very musical, music-like story, told in the form of "Side A" and "Side B." This alerts us "...old enough to remember 45 rpm vinyl records know that the B-side is usually less interesting that the A-side. Side B is the failed side, the weak side", that we should expect the whole read to be inflected by this frame of reference. And lo and behold, it is!

Kimiâ, or "alchemy" as the word has come to us in English, is a magical confabulation of stories and ideas and history. She is in a fertility clinic when we meet her...she is making the future, deliberately and calculatedly, in other words...and she begins with many skips and backtrackings and forward-lurchings to relate to us the recent history of Iran. ("Recent" is relative, of course, since Iran's history dates back to the invention of the idea of civilization so dwarfs silly Western concepts like "history" and the yet-more-modern "prehistory.") Kimiâ's family, the whole huge swath of them...six uncles, a grandfather who had a wife for ever week of the year...are in their different ways shaping the world's as well as their own world's history.

Sara and Darius, her mom and dad, are revolutionaries against the Shah, though very much antithetical to the theocratic horrors of the Islamic state that replaced one cruel oppressor with another. Their exile to France doesn't dim their ardor for and connection to an Iran free and liberated from repression and tyranny. For Kimiâ that includes her sex's oppression and reduction to the role of housewives. She's a bisexual woman and very much anathema to the present regime. They don't acknowledge the existence of gay or bi identities in Iran.

It gives special poignance to the read to realize that Home, when it doesn't want you, isn't home anymore; and France, the land they're living in if not part of, is in the awful, wrenching process of a rightward shift that rejects foreigners like her. It's a miserable truth that Négar Djavadi, the author of the work, is living in that same France, writing in French, and unable to conceptualize a safe return to the land of her birth.

Sleep isn't about resting, it's about letting yourself settle, like the sediment at the bottom of a wine barrel. I'm nowhere near trusting this world that much.

It is, in the end, the birth, "that dark hyphen between the past and the future which, once crossed, closes again and condemns you to wander"...her own, your own, the one Kimiâ is going to endure soon enough...that provides Kimiâ's final reckoning with the subject of exile:

With the passage of time, the flesh of events decomposes, leaving only a skeleton of impressions on which to embroider. Undoubtedly there will come a day when even the impressions will only be a memory. And then there won’t be anything left to tell.

She is compelled "to let myself be guided by the flow of images and free associations, the natural fits and starts, the hollows and bumps carved into my memories by time." She is the witness, the one whose between-state of emigrant/immigrant is definitional; her responsibility equally to the parents and family whose worlds are so different from hers, and the life she's making whose existence will continue a line of existences that partake in many beautiful, braided strands of the bread we eat with our every act, that we call History.

>180 Storeetllr: Well, that's crappy. I'm so sorry.

>159 richardderus: OK, I'm intrigued. I adored Cloud Atlas and while this sounds very different, the non-linear, multi-voice thing does appeal. For being different, as much as anything else.
The chances of my library getting it any time soon are practically zero, but hey ho, on the wishlist it goes.

I can't imagine 50 reviews in a month *faints*

>182 richardderus: Thanks, Richard. I didn't usually bring politics into the GD. I find a lot of space in others' (i.e., your) threads to spout off once in awhile, but not all my friends are denizens of that group and didn't deserve to be called out. That's why I moved.

Hello Richard. I've enjoyed getting caught up with you, and you got me with >134 richardderus: and >153 richardderus:. How is life treating you, other than acid on your joints and our country rotting?

>185 AMQS: Hi Anne! I really delight in having snagged your eyes for >153 richardderus: and >134 richardderus:, they're each very very good reads.

I'm less delighted about the world's horrors...we're not going to see a better result from this, I'm afraid. The world They want is hell to me, and millions like me. It's soul-crushing.

How 'bout them Mets? Lovely weather we're having.

>184 Storeetllr: It's a place I've never liked and have avoided, so now I can resume radio silence there.

>183 Helenliz: Hi Helen! I'm hopeful that Stintzi's peculiar, intense novel will please you.

I'm not at all sure I'll reach that level ever again! It doesn't seem like something I'll ever set out to accomplish deliberately. I'm pretty whupped. I've huddled up with Arabella to relax!

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

The number of reviews you write is amazing!

>186 richardderus: I've huddled up with Arabella to relax! Excellent choice, it's one of my favourite Heyers.

Happy Thursday!

I enjoy reading your reviews. 50 of them in one month is insane though ;)

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Thursday to you.

>174 ArlieS: My daughter, born and raised here in the US, is making “I want to move to another country” noises. Of course, that won’t happen any time soon, if ever, but it expresses her hurt and upset and frustration with what is going on here. I did tell her to at least get her passport…

>178 Storeetllr: Starred and posted.

I got Wordle in 3...

I was going to read The Federalist No 18 this morning, but got caught up in my edition of Canterbury Tales Rendered into Modern English by J. U. Nicolson, the first time I've thought to go look at what I actually have in response to a question by Susan a while back on her thread.

*smooch*

Sweet Thursday, Richard. A hot one here today. This will keep me mostly indoors. It appears, your day consists of reading and writing reviews. Not a bad life. Do you stop to eat once in a while?

126 The Wasteland by Harper Jameson

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The extraordinary career and devastating life of T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. He works at a bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London’s elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, Mr. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. Only in his imagination does the world drip with color.

Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same.

Jack introduces Mr. Eliot to the gay underground of early twentieth-century London and to feelings Mr. Eliot had crammed down and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Mr. Eliot’s fame increases, pressure for conformity does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism’s increasingly popular message of traditional values, and the allure of untold success present him with a decision that could have devastating consequences.

The Wasteland is the untold story of T.S. Eliot, his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory, and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.

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

My Review: Sadness. Grey, enveloping sadness. That's the take-away I had from this technically adept reinvention of poet T.S Eliot's early-1920s life in London.

Even if there were no light on the bank, Mr. Eliot would still know it was there. It's always there, waiting to welcome him with open arms, more than willing to take more tocks from his clock.
–and–
"We return you now to our regular broadcast," the announcer drones.

"Clair de Lune." Claude Debussy. Relaxation. Baloney.

Baloney indeed, and more than just that in a penitential dry sandwich consumed in a lonely penitentiary. With the aplomb of a dab hand at this fantastical-reimaging stuff, Eliot's life is peopled with the souls embodied and conjured on a magical-realist visit with the great poet. We even see him conjuring Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock (whose peaches are uneaten and coffee spoons resolutely empty) on the day he learns his new crush, Jack, is no longer with the bank. But Mr. Eliot is in for a major surprise in this case....

...as are the readers of this historical fantasia on themes of gay men's circumscribed lives. Mr. Eliot, for I cannot bear to call him Tom, is a creative and passionate soul in the body of a Puritan. He is deformed and damaged by a world he despises as he obeys it. Mr. Eliot will get his revenge. He blares forth a trumpet of poetic passion that has stood its ground atop English-language poetry. Its creator is given, here, by Author Jameson, a life that commingles reality and fantasy as only a poet could merit, warrant, summon forth from beyond the grave's creative silence.

>191 msf59: ...eat...! I knew I forgot something! No wonder my clothes don't fit.

Stay inside. It's summer, we're old, let's not push it.

>190 karenmarie: Hi Horrible! I am glad you're spending time with the classics even if not THAT classic. It informs the landscape of the bodice- (or, my preference, codpiece-) ripper.

I haven't Wordled yet. I am still undercaffeinated and that's never a winning strategy. I'll post later. *smooch*

>189 figsfromthistle: Thank you, Anita, it's a nice compliment to receive. I'm sure I won't touch that record for a long, long time. If ever. It takes quite a lot out of me.

Happy Thursday! *smooch*

>188 Helenliz: It's one of the peaks in her canon, to me at least. Poor frail fainting Miss Blackburn! The dinner-table scene...sheer slapstick delight without a banana peel or a pratfall to be found. How I love reading her masterful creations!

126 Arcadia by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam (tr. Ruth Diver)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An English-language debut that reveals and subverts contemporary conceptions of normative sexuality, capitalist culture, and environmental degradation.

Winner, Prix du Livre Inter, 2019

Farah moves into Liberty House–an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature–at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune’s spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, looks, or ability. On her fifteenth birthday, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to question the confines of gender, and the hypocritical principles those within and outside the confraternity live by. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What is it to be part of a community? What is the endgame for a utopia that exists alongside refugees seeking shelter by the millions and in a society moving ever farther away from nature and its protections. As Liberty House devolves into a dystopia amidst charges of sexual abuse, it starts to look a lot like the larger world, confused in its fears and selfish hedonism.

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam delivers a magisterial novel, a scathing critique of innocence in the contemporary world.

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

My Review: Really, really squicked out by what I see as a borderline-coercive sexual relationship between a fifteen-year-old who's just discovered they're intersex and the much-older leader of the cult that they and their family now belong to. I took a long break from the read because I was not sure I wanted to finish this entire story. It brought up my mother's sexually abusive power-plays against me. That was not comfortable at all.

So I'm unusually alert to sexual undertones in relationships between kids and adults. I felt Arcady, the cult/commune leader, was less grooming Farah than responding to Farah's burgeoning sense of themself as a sexual, intersex person. While that doesn't lessen my personal discomfort with Arcady's power imbalance with Farah, it does show that Author Bayamack-Tam possesses a clear sense of the need to keep the power dynamic in balance. Add to that Farah's rare and possibly genetically-heritable anatomical anomaly resulting in an indeterminate sex and gender presentation.

Prime candidate for a charismatic cult leader's sexual manipulation. Which, it must be said, is present; but the clear and repeated caveat from older Arcady is that they reach maturity before he will sexually engage with them. Farah, quite understandably, is not willing to wait some indeterminate amount of time for someone not her to decide they're capable of offering informed consent and, mirabile dictu, pushes the schedule to meet their burgeoning sexual desires.

Totally understand that. But great-grandfather does not think with a teen's hormones, and holds Arcady to a higher standard. But anyway, this was not anything Farah regrets or has doubts about; and again, the stage was set for this to be as unrevolting as possible because we know what Farah is thinking and feeling.

I've gone on about the subject and left out the nudist free-spirit grandmother, the cypher parents who really are affectless, the communards whose existence is merely suggested not explored in even the slightest depth...in general, this is a decent novel by a hippie-wannabe, a French-lady Brautigan, with an agenda and an axe being ground noisily in the background. Also a fun story to read.

Wordle 376 3/6

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I literally could not think of another word with those letters at all. "DUTCH" was out...no demonyms...AEONS, MIRTH, HUTCH

>196 richardderus: I went with beefcake as word 3 before getting it in 4. I suggest we all remain silent on what that says about me...

It falls squarely into my blind spot on multiple use of a single letter.

>197 Helenliz: *snort*

takes one to know one

>196 richardderus: You turned the tables on me dear fellow - I was happy with 4 guesses but you trumped me.

>196 richardderus: I needed all 6 to get there.

>200 FAMeulstee: Given the word, I fail to be surprised. Not one of English's more frequently used words. I just literally couldn't see anything other than it once I twigged to the vowel and the final consonant.

>199 PaulCranswick: It's such a weird word for most, PC, but my mother had a big one in our house so I grew up saying and hearing the word.

>197 Helenliz: No, no, perfectly understandable. (In other words, exactly what I did, all of it.)

>202 humouress: *snort*

takes one to know two

>192 richardderus: Must admit i know bugger-all about T. S. Eliot's life outside of his poetry - i THINK i knew he was gay and sort of knew what being gay would have meant to a man in his state of play.

Going to read this one. Thanks for the pointer.

>196 richardderus: I ran the clock out on this one and didn't get it.

Still have a blind spot about words that have the same later in two places.

>205 magicians_nephew: I guess it's the Mama Factor that made it the only word I saw.

>204 magicians_nephew: It's a solid read, Jim. I hope you'll enjoy it.

>202 humouress: *fist bump*

>196 richardderus: In a weird twist, Wordlebot informed me that DUTCH is one of the 2,309 potential answers. I'm assuming because of the "go dutch" usage. For future reference.

Also, dropping off pre-long weekend smooches. Because I know you'll be very busy celebrating Canada Day tomorrow. *maple leaf covered smooches*

>208 MickyFine: !!! I am shocked. But great, thanks. I'll file that tidbit away. *smooch*

Sure, why not, I'd way rather have y'all's problems than ours.

JUNE IN REVIEW

Ninety-seven reviews this second quarter; the best, no question, was Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir by Rajiv Mohabir. Looks like the total annualized could end up at 358! I'm not at all confident that will happen. I'm not sure I even want it to...fifty reviews blog-posted this month was exhausting.

>186 richardderus: Oh, great choice to decompress! Arabella is one of my favorite Heyers!

>192 richardderus: I'm putting this on my TBR list as I really like Eliot's poetry, and I'm really not much for poetry in general.

Wordle took me 5 tries today. All I had was T and U until the 4th try, so getting it in 5 wasn't bad.

>190 karenmarie: Thanks, Karen! My daughter's making noises about moving too. I think currently her top choice is New Zealand. I have a friend in Portugal who loves it there, so that would be my choice. Like your daughter, it won't be soon, if ever, but it is indicative of the sense of betrayal we are all feeling right now. And the fear. Me, I'll be dead before the worst comes, but I worry so much for the grandkids.

>211 Storeetllr: Isn't is horrifying to feel relieved that we're going to be dead in the medium-term future (less than 20 years)? I'm starting to feel it's cruel for me to think of it lovingly, like manumission from the hideous world They want to live in.

I remind myself often that They feel the same way about this world and are just trying to make things better for Them. *shudder* Imagine living in that fetid hell-swamp of an imagination.

Back to Arabella. *smooch*

Hiya, RDear. Happy Friday to you.

>192 richardderus: Color me ignorant – I did not realize that Eliot was a closeted gay man. However, although I have 3 books by him on my shelves, I have only read Old Possum’s Book of Practical you-know-whats.

>193 richardderus: I’m still shunning the news. Classics and other books are keeping me happily occupied. I’m looking forward to seeing your yesterday’s Wordle as I scroll down.

>196 richardderus: Bravo!

>201 richardderus: Common word here at our house - I have a large one in the dining room – gorgeous cherry, along with the table/2 leaves and 6 cane chairs, probably from the 1930s courtesy of Bill’s grandmother. Alas, the chairs need re-caning and it’s damned expensive. I also have two corner and one small glass-shelved hutch.

>210 richardderus: Congrats on an epic effort.

>211 Storeetllr: and >212 richardderus: It might be selfish of me to want to live another 25-30 years, tucked away here in my corner of central NC. However, I can’t see living in another country at my age. Sigh.

*smooch* from your own Horrible

Wordle 377 3/6

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Well...that was a blast from my past. AEONS, MIRTH, PINTO

>213 karenmarie: Avoid the news, it's not necessary to get yourself as pantiwadulous as I've been this whole week.

Thank you for the complimentary assessment, smoochling. I'm tuckered out from all that work. The month ended with an average of 181 blog views a day, which is just a tiny bit higher than the usual 145.

I badly, almost desperately, do not want to live that long. I do not wish to experience life in Gilead without a screen between me and it. I'm not sure I'll have any say in the matter. I pin my hopes on statistics...people with chronic conditions that affect kidneys and liver aren't good candidates for long life. *whew*

>214 richardderus: Cool beans, Richard! Me too!!!

I hardly know how to respond to your despair since I feel it too - and I've lived in this swamp all my life. It's hard to see any way out of decades and decades of dystopia. It used to be fun to read dystopian fiction. Not any more. Yet I cling to life and love and hope and joy somehow. I may go back to my own thread and write my screed that I developed in answer to Paul's comment about religious freedom being guaranteed by our Constitution. My main point is that my beloved and despised white/right brethren have conflated the Kingdom of God with the USA, especially the USA in the 1950s. They are as terrified of losing their privilege as their ancestors were of losing their slaves.
Sorry. This has gone on too long. I'll commit it to my thread if at all.

Anyway, *smooch* for the weekend.

Dropping in to say hi as I make my rounds.

>217 thornton37814: Hello Lori, I'm gladdened by your company. Please come back soon.

>216 LizzieD: Fine sentiments very nicely said, and thank you for sharing them here. *smooch*

>214 richardderus: I went ATONE, FONTS, PINTO - once I had the N and T in the right place and figured the O was last and not first, it was really the only option.

I answered your question over on my thread, btw.

‘Morning, RDear. Happy Saturday to you.

>214 richardderus: If you’re meaning a Pinto vehicle, Bill was gifted a brand new Pinto Station wagon by his grandmother when he graduated high school in 1975, his grandparents having owned one of the first Ford Dealerships in NC and still having family ties with the man she sold it to. Yeesh. What 19-year old would want a Pinto station wagon, excepting that it was free? And the way Bill's family and Bill work is to make things a surprise (I hate surprises), which means that the recipient of the gift has no choice in it. My first and cars were Datsun 1600 Roadsters.

>215 richardderus: I don’t have the medical conditions you, do, my dear one, and can understand your not wanting to prolong your stay on this currently very distressed planet.

>216 LizzieD: Alas, Peggy, you’re expressing my feelings, too.

*smooch* from your own Madame TVT Horrible

Burgoine #43

Arabella by Georgette Heyer

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Georgette Heyer had a handful of unforgettable heroines, of which Arabella is one of the most engaging.

Daughter of a modest country clergyman, Arabella Tallant is on her way to London when her carriage breaks down outside the hunting lodge of the wealthy Mr. Robert Beaumaris. Her pride stung when she overhears a remark of her host's, Arabella pretends to be an heiress, a pretense that deeply amuses the jaded Beau. To counter her white lie, Beaumaris launches her into high society and thereby subjects her to all kinds of fortune hunters and other embarrassments.

When compassionate Arabella rescues such unfortunate creatures as a mistreated chimney sweep and a mixed-breed mongrel, she foists them upon Beaumaris, who finds he rather enjoys the role of rescuer and is soon given the opportunity to prove his worth in the person of Arabella's impetuous young brother...

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THE LIBRARY! SHOW SOME SUPPORT FOR THEIR MISSION.

My Review: There is no need to review this decades-old delight. If you have read it, you know; if you have not, I urge you to the deed, and with all possible haste; and now I address those whose lips curl at such pedestrian, nay plebeian, entertainments:

The more fool you.

Time had done more to enlarge {Arabella's godmother and patroness's} figure than her mind, and it was not many days before her young charge had discovered that under a superficial worldly wisdom there was little but a vast amount of silliness.

–and–

Whatever the cause, social success was sweet; and since Arabella was a very human girl she could not help enjoying every moment of it.

–and–

"...Not as though he was a taking brat, either!’

‘What does that signify?’ said Arabella contemptuously. ‘I wonder how taking, my lord, you or I should be had we been brought up from infancy by a drunken foster-mother, sold while still only babies to a brutal master, and forced into a hateful trade!’

>220 karenmarie: Hey there, Horrible. I'm quite sure Bill appreciated the free car, if not the car that was free.

Datsun 1600s! Mercy, mercy me, you were indeed the pink of fashion for a SoCal lassie of the 1870s! I am completely with you on the hatred of surprises. They are so very seldom pleasant. Even when they are, they make me feel blindsided and that is unpleasant.

*smooch*

>219 bell7: I shall coddiwomple thitherward directly, Mary. Thanks!

Wordle 378 4/6

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I'm just lucky my third word was a word despite my not getting to the sixth letter of five in the one I meant to use. *sigh* AEONS, MIRTH, FORGE, EGRET

Hey there RD, I'm making the rounds, post-vacation. I have no hope of catching up; rather, I'm just zipping to the bottom of threads to say hello and I'll start fresh from here.

>213 karenmarie: No, it's not selfish. In fact, staying and working to change things is the most unselfish thing to do. I will probably stay too, but that doesn't mean I want to be here anymore. I mean, it's just exhausting. However, thinking of my daughter who's in her 30s and my granddaughter who's only 3-1/2, it might be best for them to move to a country that's treats women better, and, if they go, I guess I will too.

>221 richardderus: Excellent review of one of my favorite Heyers. Makes me want to reread it.

>223 richardderus: Took me 5 tries today to get it.

>216 LizzieD: Completely agree.

Happy weekend *smooch*

Glad Arabella was such a good one for you. I have a few Heyers on my TBR list and should consider adding that one.

>221 richardderus: I just love this one. She is so very human and engaging. And he's not too bad either. I find them more convincing than some of her pairings.

Sumer is icumen in, so I got bald as a cuckoo's egg (much to Rob's disgruntlement).

>228 Helenliz: It's peak Heyer, for sure. Just perfect!

>227 bell7: Indeed, Mary, it's one you'll want to read. In fact, it feels to me like a *perfect* first Heyer! *smooch*

>226 Storeetllr: 5 is good, since it's fewer than 6 and better than X. Let's never lose sight of that!

>225 Storeetllr: I'll carry y'all's luggage if we're headin' for New Zealand.

>224 lauralkeet: Hi Laura! I hope your vacay was a-okay. Always remember that posts >2 richardderus:, >3 richardderus:, >4 richardderus: have the curret thread's list of reviews if you just want to see what got treated while you were away.

>215 richardderus: *hug*

>216 LizzieD: I'm probably insane, but I just found your thread and stuck a star on it in order to read that screed, if and when you post it.

>225 Storeetllr: I'm still in the US only because my housemate refuses to move anywhere cold, and Canada is where I have citizenship. (We're both too old to move anywhere that requires that an immigrant be net useful, on average.) If she predeceases me, and I'm still capable of handling the move, I'm going home. (And I intend to do some planning in advance of any illness on her part, so I have a plan ready while overcome with grief.) Likewise if she decides she's had enough of the US, and retreats to the country she moved here from; if I can't get in there, I'll go back to Canada pronto.

I just hope we don't wind up leaving as refugees. Or even just being unable to sell possessions (such as our home) for anything near what it's worth.

>229 richardderus: Wow! That's not how I pictured you at all. Though OTOH, I'm not really sure how I pictured you.

>232 ArlieS: LOL

I have little idea if I should feel affronted or appeased by your uncertainty, but in truth I'm always amused when people see each other as they are instead of as they've been mentally pictured. We're so seldom right!

>231 ArlieS: It's so sad to me; I don't feel this is my country anymore. I'm used to needing to leave home, though, as I was born in California where I was unhappy every single day (though I didn't know it until Mama moved us to Texas). But Texas lurched rightward with the country in the 1980s and I had to leave. New York's been home for going on 40 years.

And still I feel threatened by the sheer awfulness of Them. I'd move to Canada but they ain't want me; I can't even imagine moving somewhere, though, if I'm honest, because those lumpy digits have lumpy companions on my feet, knees, hips, etc. I can just barely sit in a car for 45min to go somewhere I need/want to go!

I've made a tentative plan for reviews to write next month, since I've got eleven posts to make:

For July, from NetGalley

The Grand Illusion by Eoin Dempsey
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Upgrade by Blake Crouch
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

For July, from Edelweiss+

Putin's Trolls: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World by Jessikka Aro
The Bride of Almond Tree by Robert Hillman
The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles
Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos
Denial: How We Hide, Ignore, and Explain Away Problems by Jared Del Rosso
When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene by Timothy Beal

That’s an impressive number of reviews for June, Richard. Such thought provoking books too, I can see why Arabella. It has been a while since I read Heyer. I think I need to pick one up soon.

>235 Familyhistorian: Hi Meg! Thanks for the kind words, and that validation re: Heyer. She's not too demanding but does require focus, making her the perfect post-exertion cool-down read.

Happy week-ahead's reads!

Wordle 379 3/6

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I liked this one. AEONS, MIRTH, LILAC

>235 Familyhistorian: I see your autocorrect doesn't read Georgette Heyer either. I find it very annoying.

>238 humouress: Why it would read "Heyerdal" is far more puzzling to me than the fact it doesn't know who Heyer is.

>239 richardderus: That too. But it's done it so often that I've given up wondering.

>240 humouress: Well, if I had thought a minute longer, I'd've realized the reason is simple: Heyerdahl's a man and Heyer isn't so the man who set up the autocorrect knew who one was and not the other.

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Sunday to you.

>221 richardderus: I should probably re-read Arabella some time this year. Sigh. Unfortunately, I only have a ratty old mass market paperback. I want Sourcebooks editions with a particular cover, so just bought one on EBay.

>222 richardderus: I honestly am not sure Bill knew much better, poor boy. Even when he was in the Navy, which is when I met him in 1977, he had a medium-sized four-door Sedan of some sort. Yes, I loved my Roadsters and felt fashionable. And surprises – usually unpleasant, but always making one feel blindsided.

>229 richardderus: Makes sense to go bald as a cuckoo’s egg, but what about the effusive goatee? Not hot in the summer?

>235 Familyhistorian: I love the word Anthropocene, listened to every episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.

*smooch*

>242 karenmarie: Considering Heyer's place in your cosmogeny, I think it's shocking it's taken this long for you to get the edition you want of Arabella! Still, it's on the way, so the Universe can un-tilt. I hope your re-read turns out to be especially happy.

Given the family's Fordliness, it was probably a Granada. I had a 1971 Ford Falcon from Mexico as my sole Ford experience and had to give it to Mama when her batmobile died. I've forgotten what it was, now, but it really just passed out of usability beside the highway one day. That was the year I got my Gremlin.

The goatee's a sop to Rob's outraged sensibilities. He's moaning about my complete and utter disregard of his feelings and I needed something he can (notionally) run his fingers through to keep the peace. Hair doesn't much interest me, so his plangent sufferings aren't very impactful, but it's dead easy to keep the little patch a-growin' and serve his interests.

John McWhorter's book Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) is only $1.99 for Kindle today, so you might want to coddiwomple Ammyward.

I'm all in on the neologism "Anthropocene" too, since it's both elegant and explanatory. We need to make every reference to the current moment contain some form of reinforcement that this passage is very different from what came before and it's down to what we're doing that it is.

Good morning, Richard! You look a lot like one of my life-long friends whose hair placement is like yours. Kind of comfy for me to think of you this way.

I just reread Arabella some year lately. I may have to abandon Convenient Marriage for the time being to reread a great favorite Unknown Ajax since Lucy has been reading and warbling about it.

As ever, I'm looking forward to your reviews, especially the Crouch and *Tomorrows*. Enjoy the rest of the holiday!

>244 LizzieD: Hiya Peggy! I'm glad my hirsute ornamentations are reminding you of someone you like, not someone you don't.

Oh, yes indeed it's never a bad time to read of the sackless hodgobbins and thatchgallowses of The Unknown Ajax. I'm thinking I'll get The Corinthian under my belt ere too much longer.

Gosh, I hope I like the Crouch more than I did his last one. I am very hopeful, but still remain a bit reserved after Recursion resoundingly failed.

Happy Sunday! *smooch*

>229 richardderus: You look like quite the hipster RD.

>246 Caroline_McElwee: *chuckle* Grandfather of one, permaybehaps. But I appreciate the age subtraction filter you've applied!

Morning, Richard. Happy 4th of July. Sue has been camping with the "girls" this weekend, so I have been enjoying some solo time at the homestead. A little birding, a lot of reading...living the life.

‘Morning, RDear, and happy Monday/Fourth of July to you.

>243 richardderus: Keeping the young man happy is not a bad thing at all. Bill says that his vehicle was actually a Mercury Monarch, the Lincoln/Mercury version of the Granada, so points to you. Falcons and Gremlins, oh my.

Thanks for the McWhorter tease. Alas, too late – it’s now back up to $12.99. However, The Story of Human Language, which I’ve now listened to twice since acquiring it in 2018, is a paean to language changing, not needing to get stuck in ruts, and creoles, pidgins, and other derivatives of ‘formal’ languages being just as valid. (I’m channeling the writing style of Alexander Hamilton in my own shabby way, with what are now considered run-on sentences and many commas.)

Speaking of Hamilton, I've just finished reading The Federalist No 21 and will post in a bit.

*smooch*

>229 richardderus: Your summer shave looks good, Richard dear!
Frank does the same in summer. You two could be family, with both bald head and grey beard :-)

Wordle 380 4/6

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Flurbled my way into 4. AEONS, MIRTH, LEVER (!!), SEVER

>250 FAMeulstee: Thanks, Anita! Yes, Frank and I are complementary on hairstyling, being practical old greybeards.

Have a lovely week-ahead's reads.

>249 karenmarie: Yep, a Falcon...from Mexico, no less. They were Torinos in the US. The difference was they had a smaller engine and rent-a-car level interior trim. The Gremlin was a year-end special with every bell and whistle they could pack on it.

I'll wander by to see what #21 has to say to us'ns in the 21st century. And, had you stopped by the day I put it up, well....

*smooch*

>248 msf59: Hi Mark! Sue's off camping!!! VOLUNTARILY!!! ...y'all're weird...but you're weird together, so what could be better.

>223 richardderus: I got the Wordle in spite of this word being one I am not familiar with. The letters just seemed to want to go there, and the options were so few I figured it was worth a shot!

*off to do my today's Wordle*
I broke my 58 day streak by not taking my laptop away on our mini break, so have some work to do to get back up there!

>253 LovingLit: Oh dear, Megan, I'm so sorry. It's a lousy, frustrating reason to lose a streak isn't it. Best of luck with your new streak!

*smooch*

Happy Monday!

Great buzz cut. What a long beard!

>255 figsfromthistle: Ha, yes Anita I had to leave my chinspinach long to keep Rob happy. He liked all of it long but I am driven MAD by long hair's ever-so-friendly way of creeping into my ears and flouncing around on my neck.

Thanks! *smooch*

Wordle 381 3/6

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Alphabetical-order fetish FTW AEONS, MIRTH, FIELD

Hiya, RD. Happy Tuesday to you.

>252 richardderus: Had I come back to your thread on the 3rd, I would have seen it. You’ll just have to tempt me to visit your thread twice a day more regularly…

>257 richardderus: I failed the test – I reverse alphabetical-ordered it and took 4.

*smooch*

>258 karenmarie: Oh well, we can't *all* be perfect, can we.

*snerk*

And here I am, back already!

Not perfect in every way, but

What's your Wordle alphabetical order thing about? I thought it would be making your guesses in alpha order but that doesn't apply today.

>261 lauralkeet: If there are, for a given arrangement of letters, several choices, I'll choose them in alpha order. Today, FIELD came before YIELD f/ex.

>260 karenmarie: *smooch*

((Hugs)) and **smooches** for today, RD. I hope you have a terrific one!

Oh I get it thanks RD!

>264 lauralkeet: Happy to oblige.

>263 alcottacre: Thank you, Stasia, it's been perfectly adequate. *smooch*

I fixed Heyer in my last post. Your explanation for the substitute name made a lot of sense. Have a good day, Richard, and don’t curse too much a today’s Wordle.

'Morning, Rdear, and happy Wednesday to you.

We had some major thunderstorms roll through yesterday early evening - I love strong weather that doesn't do any damage, of course - although we'll still be at 96F with a heat index of 102-108F today AND with a level 2 risk of storms. Ah, summer in NC.

Today's Wordle took me 5.

*smooch*

128 Fire on the Island by Timothy Jay Smith

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For lovers of crime fiction and the allure of the Greek islands, Fire on the Island is the perfect summer read.

FIRE ON THE ISLAND is a playful, romantic thriller set in contemporary Greece, with a gay Greek-American FBI agent, who is undercover on the island to investigate a series of mysterious fires. Set against the very real refugee crisis on the beautiful, sun-drenched Greek islands, this novel paints a loving portrait of a community in crisis. As the island residents grapple with declining tourism, poverty, refugees, family feuds, and a perilously damaged church, an arsonist invades their midst.

Nick Damigos, the FBI agent, arrives on the island just in time to witness the latest fire and save a beloved truffle-sniffing dog. Hailed as a hero and embraced by the community, Nick finds himself drawn to Takis, a young bartender who becomes his primary suspect, which is a problem because they're having an affair. Theirs is not the only complicated romance in the community and Takis isn't the only suspicious character on the island. Nick has to unravel the truth in time to prevent catastrophe, as he comes to terms with his own past trauma. In saving the village, he will go a long way toward saving himself.

A long time devotee of the Greek islands, Smith paints the setting with gorgeous color and empathy, ushering in a new romantic thriller with the charm of Zorba the Greek while shedding bright light on the very real challenges of life in contemporary Greece.

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

My Review: The main thing a person wants in a beach read is escape, right? A chance to see something new and different in the world while baking on a sandy stretch of not-my-problem, with a little light romance/sex tossed (!) in for fun. And here it is, laddies and gentlewomen: The prescription substance for your beach-read needs.

Nick is our sort-of PoV character, though I think the novel's fairly ensemble-cast-y. He provides the action that solves the problems, so it's not unfair to promote him to centrality. He's a Greek-American settled in Athens, where he does Greek-themed stuff for the FBI. Considering how important Greece is to many and various criminal enterprises within the US, this didn't raise my eyebrows. The situation in which Nick arrives...an active refugee crisis, a local problem with criminal arson, a subplot of Russian-mafia troubles...was, then, one in which I could certainly imagine US federal law enforcement taking enough of an interest to send someone to monitor.

I'm a little more skeptical about Nick's open gayness. Not so much in Greece...the history's there, and the Greek townspeople's homophobia isn't over- or under-played...but in the FBI. Gayness within the federal law enforcement establishment isn't surprising but its openness is to me. I suspended disbelief on the subject because I could simply be behind the times and am most certainly sour and suspicious of all law enforcement personnel.

That said, those were my principal struggles with the book's set-up; its delivery of them, and of the remaining elements of the plot, was most agreeably deft and disarming. I knew from the start that the idea of the village was to offer the storyteller a pressure cooker. The Greece-to-Australia pipeline is well and truly attested for generations now, and plays a large part here in this story. The ways Author Smith brought the connection to life were sneaky and very nicely executed, having the desired effect of making the guilt of Nick's local fling Takis look inevitable while making sure that he couldn't really be guilty. (You'll work that out in mere moments when the means of linking Takis to the crimes is presented.) So, while it plays out, enjoy the mummery. Likewise Nick, the scion of Greek emigrants, is treading a well-worn real-world path from Greece to Baltimore and back again. The refugee crisis is horribly real. Its dreadful, cruel scope isn't even as severe in the story as in reality. The ongoing Greek debt crisis is presented but not explored because, honestly, would you rather read about a sexy young guy setting his sights on a silver fox and then bedding him, or microeconomic consequences of predatory capitalism?

Me neither. And, for the ewww-ick homophobes, the sex is not explicit or more than sketched in. Perfect beach-read level sexytimes, with plenty of happy coupling left to the adult relationship veteran's inner eye. What sex wasn't pleasant to view to one's inner eye was the sadder-but-wiser loss of virginity for a teen girl, an event she precipitates and, while it was happening, realizes is pretty damned disappointing. She doesn't leave the experience with good feelings about it. She also realizes what her own responsibilities in the situation are when it threatens to run her true love's course into a brick wall. Luckily she's a sensible person and makes very sure to exert her quite considerable will towards the resolution she wants to bring about. I was pleased that she was both a teenager...moody, nasty, angry as hell about whatever it is that makes teens so angry...and a burgeoning adult, with a clear goal she sets when things are at their most bewilderingly loud. I liked her for that trait.

Her mother and grandparents have a surprising connection to the arsons that bring Nick to the island. Her family's Australian connection and resultant outsiderdom are played for some clear plot advantages. The family isn't as outside as they feel themselves to be. The village, in fact, doesn't come out of the arsons and the other terrible crimes that occur while Nick is there entirely unchanged. The problems Nick knew were festering and which his mere presence were always going to lance were the sorts of issues that confront small, tight-knit communities the world over. In the end, Nick's actions in pursuit of solutions are as well-aimed at the dark and ugly past as at the creepy present.

While I liked that aspect of the story, I think I might've liked Nick a lot more for his characterization than his actions. He's in the early stages of midlife. He's got a terrible, nightmarish trauma in his past that he doesn't like to reveal. As it has physical marks on his body, he's reluctant to be as slutty as most gay characters in beach reads are (goddesses please bless their anti-gravity underwear). His body dysmorphia comes from literal scarring events, and it's shown as being truly troubling for Nick to confront. Takis is the agent of his reassessment of the problem. It is shown that Takis is singularly uninterested in Nick's scars and quite empathetic with his scarring. That was a very nice side-show in their passionate seasonal fling.

I also particularly resonated with the fact that everyone from the island is shown as possessing a very solid motivation for their actions, and those motivations (dark or bright) were delineated in enough detail that I could make them part of my response to the tale as a whole. I think the author's investment of time in revealing the town's traumas caused and endured paid off...even the revelation of the arsonist led to the revelation of the motives and the sheer awfulness of Hatred, that dark miasma clouding the haters' ability to see the essential sameness of all human beings. It was well handled. I didn't condone the actions that led to the actions I didn't condone, which matryoshka-doll of a response is far more complex than most beach-read thrillers I've read over the years.

But there are no perfect experiences in this, our life, are there. I wasn't really impressed with the handling of the art-forgery subplot. and its blatant gaudy obviousness. I was moved, and saddened, by the reasons for arsonist's tricks. I wasn't at all impressed that the consequences were so severe for the present-day crimes and not equally severe for those that motivated them in the first place. I was very amused with the by-play between Takis and Nick, the way they make what can only be a season's romance into something both fun and important to them both. I suppose a door was left open at the end for them to reconnect but it was pretty heavily deterministically set down as "nevermore." A bit less of a hammerblow to the gauzy soft-focus desire for A Happy Ending to their happy endings wouldn't have come amisss, and as it was felt more like the author was caving in to pressure to close down that Happy Ending.

None of these are deal-breakers, I hasten to add. I want to read more Timothy Jay Smith stories and I can definitely recommend this one to you for your beach reading pleasure.

Happy mid week, Richard!

129 The Fourth Courier by Timothy Jay Smith

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For International Espionage Fans of Alan Furst and Daniel Silva, a new thriller set in post-Soviet era Poland.

It is 1992 in Warsaw, Poland, and the communist era has just ended. A series of grisly murders suddenly becomes an international case when it's feared that the victims may have been couriers smuggling nuclear material out of the defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends an agent to help with the investigation. When he learns that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb has disappeared, the race is on to find him—and the bomb—before it ends up in the wrong hands.

Smith’s depiction of post-cold war Poland is gloomily atmospheric and murky in a world where nothing is quite as it seems. Suspenseful, thrilling, and smart, The Fourth Courier brings together a straight white FBI agent and gay black CIA officer as they team up to uncover a gruesome plot involving murder, radioactive contraband, narcissistic government leaders, and unconscionable greed.

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

My Review: Atmospheric, dark thriller about the immediate aftermath of the USSR's fall, its consequences for the former Warsaw Pact countries (especially Poland), and a morally ambiguous story of how the balance of power stays balanced.

I was unsurprised to see the homophobia of the Eastern Bloc countries brought into focus...remember Swimming in the Dark? Nationalist Love?...but was quite surprised to see it used to make a US spy into a honey trap for a General known to be, um, susceptible. It's such a realpolitik maneuver that I've always assumed it was simply unknown. Silly me. If something can provide leverage, of course it's been used by both sides.

Kurt, our gay character, is both Black and a CIA honey trap for the self-loathing General. He's...fine with it. He uses his body, its beauty and power, to further the interests of his chosen side. This means he's not a good gay, or a good guy. This being Reality I'm all down with this in theory. In practice, as it's handled in this story, it's a bit more like prostitution than it is noble self-sacrifice. I'm not criticizing here but analyzing what it is that the two things have in common: Exchange of value. The sheer mercenary chill of Kurt giving the General what he craves is perfectly appropriate, if distasteful.

Again, the consummation of the act isn't explicit. It's more detailed than it was in Fire on the Island. It's staged in a shower, and that made me chuckle...let's keep it clean, boys!...and the ending, which is indeed Happy, is somewhat heavy-handedly made into a political commentary. But I wasn't anywhere near as creeped out as I routinely am in these sorts of situations when it's a woman using her body to get a man to do something for her side. My primary issue is: That's it. That's what Kurt's there to do, he does it, and buh bye now!

As with all the gay characters in the book, they serve a role and vacate the scene when it's fulfilled. I found Jay, straight and narrow Jay, uninteresting really. He was an investigator who didn't investigate but ran across answers. It's not like that is unknown in thrillerdom. It just doesn't endear him to me. And honestly I just do not care about his ex-wife or about his borning relationship with Lilka the Polish lady, which yet again (see review above) is clearly stated as Not Going Anywhere.

Nowhere near as much fun to read as Fire on the Island, but I wanted to finish the read. I was involved, I was entertained, and yet still I was unsatisfied because Kurt was underutilized. Why tell me about him at all if all he was there to do was fuck one guy and then melt down the shower drain with his jizz?

I don't doubt that straight people will like it more than I did.

>269 figsfromthistle: Hi Anita! Thanks, I'll look forward to it being so.

>267 karenmarie: There is no joy in that kind of heat. None whatever. I'm hopeful you can leave it outside where it belongs.

>267 karenmarie:, >266 Familyhistorian: Oh dear. I haven't Wordled yet, now I'm wondering if I should simply leave it....

>266 Familyhistorian: It's the logical explanation, Meg. I'm irked by it, but it's the one that fits.

Wordle 382 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
This has literally never happened to me before. AEONS, MIRTH, FLUNK, FLUFF

Wednesday *smooch*

>268 richardderus: Yay for satisfying beach reads!

>270 richardderus: Sounds like that one wasted an opportunity. Too bad about that.

Morning, Richard. I got the Wordle in six by the skin of my teeth. Grrrr.

Stay cool. I hope to.

*smooch*

>275 LizzieD: Hi Peggy! Six is still better than skunked, but it was a surprising word today.

It's almost 90° today, so I'm inside waiting for it to cool down before I so much as tip a toe outside.

>274 swynn: There's a lot to love about representation except when it's done like it's still 1992. Oh well, nothing's perfect.

>273 katiekrug: *smooch*

>272 richardderus: I needed one more try, Richard dear. And like you, no yellow letters, only green.

Wordle 382 5/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
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⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
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🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 peony, mirth, class, bluff, fluff

>277 FAMeulstee: Yay for getting it at all, Anita! Have a happy Wednesday night.

>272 richardderus: Your third word was the same as mine. Triple letters now?!

Happy Wednesday, Richard. Just a mid-week check in. We have cooled off a bit. Thank the gods! It looks like those books are treating you well.

>280 msf59: Hi Mark! I'm very glad you're cooling down. I'm pleased with the world's gifts today, indeed.

>279 humouress: Greetings, Milady. I wasn't at all pleased with the choice, but really had little surprise after thinking it over.

>262 richardderus: I do them in keyboard order when it comes to a few available options....top row, L-R, second the same, and then 'M' is the very last option (if it were even one to start with). Gee, I am articulate today, aren't I?

>272 richardderus: Aarrgh! So many F's! lol

>282 LovingLit: Indeed, Megan, indeed. So many!

*smooch*

Wordle was a challenge today! I was happy with five. WHALE (yeah, I know, I started with a random word), PLINK, FLOUT, FLUBS, FLUFF. Basically the last word it could've been at that point.

I warn you, you might not like today's Wordle.
Wordle 383 X/6

🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟨🟩🟨🟩

*sad trombone*

Happy Thursday, Richard dear!

>285 Helenliz: Thanks for preparing me today, Helen. I found the word, and the warning helped.

Wordle 383 5/6

🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜⬜⬜🟩
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That was a close-run thing! AEONS. MIRTH, ADDLE, AGAVE, AGAPE

'Morning, RDear, and happy Thursday to you.

It got to 99F at our house late yesterday afternoon. Ugh. We're always hotter than what's officially listed for the town we live near, and the official temp for today is 99F, so we'll probably break 100F by the end of the afternoon. Thank goodness for AC.

agape I had luck and inspiration on my side and got it in 3. Just sayin'...

The Federalist nos. 23 and 24 are up. I listened to them yesterday afternoon while using the treadmill.

*smooch*

130 The Bride of Almond Tree by Robert Hillman

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter Beth Hardy.

Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case her devotion is to the cause. Beth’s ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. This is the story of their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century—from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again—to find a way of being together.

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

My Review: Believing in A Cause has some costs. Patty and Wes Cunningham, Quaker siblings, are raised to believe their god has a purpose for them. When that purpose is made manifest, it is the organizing principle of the entirety of their lives from then on. World War II is the driver of Patty's purpose, as she serves Humanity in nursing its broken and abused; this takes her to Hiroshima and its almost unbearably damaged people, and her path in life is set for good. It leads her to the tender regard of a Japanese doctor, and Patty is sorted.

Wes, who serves in the war as a stretcher bearer, is wounded and realizes he wants one thing: to go home to Almond Tree, build a house, marry and raise kids who won't fight in wars. It isn't until this purpose in life is revealed to him that he begins to think about the party of the second part to this contract with god: mother/wife. When he sees his childhood friend Beth, everything clicks into place and he knows who he is to husband for his lifetime.

Elizabeth Hardy is a woman on fire. She ends World War II with an unquenchable Marxist faith, a belief that the Soviet Union is a Utopia, and that she must serve the Party however she can there in Australia. Wes, sweet and solid, isn't likely to assist her in any way getting the Revolution exported. His declaration of devotion is, well...not important to her. She says, "what about my sister? she'll do all that stuff for and with you!" but Wes, Quaker to his core, knows god wants him to serve Beth so he does.

Despite the devotion she does nothing to deserve and the huge amount of practical assistance she gets from Wes, Beth remains a loyal Communist to the point of being sent to prison over it. Beth's wildness is, it's clear, addictive to Wes and resonates with his own "must serve god's will" faith, so I was unsurprised by his eventual reward. Beth's passion leads her into ugly places and enables a user's streak in her. That she isn't perfect is, I admit, a relief but her imperfections are consistent throughout and clearly march along Wes's lines. After Beth becomes acquainted with the realities of Soviet Russia, she learns how far ideology can fall from reality. In the end, faithful, loyal Wes softens her landing and the life they lead can now begin.

Australia in the Cold War wasn't at terrible risk of falling into the Soviet orbit but there were many True Believers whose attempts to nudge the country there weren't successful. It's like all faiths to me, is Marxism. Unappealing, bringing out the worst in people, and making the world's most vile behavior Okay when it's for the cause. Wes and Patty's religious faith is presented as a contrast to Beth's political faith, but is equally gross. They're taught to be self-sacrificing for god's sake, not because it's the right thing to do. Wes doesn't even do the right thing! He enables an abuser and gets the back of her hand for it for far too long.

As historical fiction, I enjoyed the light shone on ordinary Australians' lives in the upheaval of WWII and its aftermath. As a novel, I wanted to shake Wes and shove him into Fanny Hardy's arms with a stern injunction to forget that crappy sister-in-law of his. And Beth needed to rot in the Soviet jail for her selfish, self-centered antics that could easily have cost her innocent family so much more.

>288 karenmarie: You got over 100° with humidex, then...you poor lambkin. *smooch*

Thanks, re: spoiler...I was agog at the word choice, thinking "GREEK is okay now?!" before recalling that it's an English word, too.

Thursday orisons!

>286 FAMeulstee: It helped a lot, didn't it Anita! I was very glad for the caution to look for the unusual today as I wouldn't have left to myself.

Have a lovely Thursday!

>285 Helenliz: Oh Helen, I'm so sorry you got skunked! I am sure it's down to the little cul-de-sac that word occupies in English. I'm very grateful that you spread the warning to be alert.

>284 bell7: It was indeed, Mary, and today's ain't a whit better! *smooch*

131 Iphigenia in Aulis: The Age of Bronze Edition by Edward Einhorn, Eric Shanower, Euripides

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: High King Agamemnon faces the most crushing dilemma of his life. Kill his beloved eldest daughter? Or forfeit victory in the Trojan War? A father’s secret plot clashes with a girl’s romantic dreams in this chilling classic play from Ancient Greece.

The most powerful dramatic script by EURIPIDES springs to life anew in a fresh adaptation by writer EDWARD EINHORN (Paradox in Oz, Fractions in Disguise, The Marriage of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein) with AGE OF BRONZE art by Eisner Award-winning ERIC SHANOWER (AGE OF BRONZE, Oz Graphic Novels, Little Nemo: Return to Slumberland).

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

My Review: A graphic-novel adaptation of the basic story of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

dramatis personae from age-of-bronze.com

I don't really know what else to say; if you haven't read those stories, or haven't seen the innumerable retellings in such media as exist then you've got one helluva learning curve ahead. This graphic version will, I suppose, do nicely to get you into the story. The idea that Agamemnon was required to kill his own child for a war against his sister-in-law's little bit on the side. It's a stupid reason to go to war, and the cost of it was staggering.

The art is, as you'd expect from Eric Shanower, convincing and technically accomplished. The story is adapted from Euripides by playwright Edward Einhorn. His success or failure is a matter of personal taste; I liked it fine.

Familiar or unfamiliar as you may be with the source material, it's a fantastic and worthy project, executed well, and solidly entertaining.

>291 richardderus: ohhh, I'm caught! I love a good retelling. I've not read a huge number of graphic novels, but I'm certainly tempted by that one.

Is that touchstone the right book?

>292 Helenliz: Yes it is. The ISBN13 is 9781534322158.

I hope you'll enjoy the read, Helen.

Y'all might want to watch Mary Roach's Royal Institution talk about Fuzz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zN3zX6e8cQ
What a hilarious time!

It's time for a new thread! Here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/342789