I think we should get a re-do of the start of 2024. It feels like it has just been terrible for everyone. We had an ice storm over here in Portland that put us out of commission for a good week or so (despite what my work would have you believe.) Various people in my circle have had deaths in the family or terrible accidents. And then my own grandmother passed last week. It’s been a lot. So let’s just get into the books, yeah?
Tournament of Books Books I’ve Read This Month
Dayswork - Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
Written in snippets, this tells the story of a woman during the pandemic who becomes obsessed with Herman Melville. It’s mostly talking about the different things she’s discovered but through it, we see flashes of her marriage, her children, the life that she leads, how the pandemic has affected it. This book didn’t blow my mind, it wasn’t unputdownable, but I very much enjoyed it and would happily recommend it to people who enjoy this sort of fiction.
A body horror story about the near future, transphobia, parasites, and TERFS, this book is making a great point, is well written, and is the most gross thing I have potentially ever read. It has joined Confessions of a Mask by Mishima in the ‘Books That Have Almost Made Me Physically Ill While Reading In Public’ list. Is it doing this on purpose? Yes. Is it still just so much? … Yes. I know what it’s doing, in almost any other form, I would have loved it, but this was just stomach churning for me and not always in the way it intended.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
This book took over my brain while I was reading it. Set in an all too close future where the national past time isn’t baseball or football but the Chain-Gang All-Stars, where inmates are given the chance to shorten their sentences by fighting to the death on national television. Jumping between the points of view of the current highest ranking fighters, a new player to the game, a protestor, and a fan, this novel really explores systematic racism, capitalism, mass incarceration, and the willingness of people to look away. It’s also just really well written, heart-rending, and well paced as it races towards the inevitable conclusion. I personally wanted about twenty more pages, just to allow for a tiny bit of denouement but it was still excellent and I very much recommend.
The Lost Journals of Sacajewea - Debra Magpie Earling
Exactly what it says on the tin, this is more of a stream of consciousness telling of Sacajawea’s life from childhood to about halfway through the Lewis and Clark trip. Despite being less than 250 pages, this book took me an age to read. The language is incredibly poetic, in a way that’s beautiful but also took a lot of concentration to decipher at times. This kind of poetic language is not generally my cup of tea but I can see how it would really hit for other people. I enjoyed it but I don’t know if I’d rush out to read another book by this author.
If you asked me the plot of Blackouts, I don’t know if I could tell you. It’s about a young man taking care of an older man in his last days, it’s about being queer in America before the seventies, it’s about art and self expression. Like Dayswork, it flirts with historical fact and how those facts impact our protagonist. There’s a lot of art and black out poetry from actual pages of Sexual Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns in between prose, each piece of art with footnotes in the back written in character from our protagonist. I learned a lot from this book and it also just hit in ways I wasn’t expecting, highlighting the stories left out of the historical narrative. Highly recommended.
The Shamshine Blind - Paz Pardo
Who else loves the kind of book where it’s one genre’s storytelling style mixed with the world building of another? The Shamshine Blind is a noir thriller set in a science fictional universe where Argentina won the Falklands War with the use of their new weapon: colored pigments that poison the enemy with emotions. Set thirty years later, pigments are now used more like drugs, both in the pharmaceutical and recreational ways and our heroine, a pigment enforcement officer, gets a tipoff about a bad batch of Sunshine Yellow. It all spirals from there. I adored this book, all the worldbuilding mixed together with a mystery’s twists and turns. It’s a debut and I will definitely be checking out more from Pardo in the future!
Other, Non-Tournament Books I Read
The Summer Hikaru Died (Vol 1 and 2) - Mokumokuren
Heard about this series from some online listicle about ‘best manga you haven’t read’ I was checking out for work. Thanks, work! Set in a small country town in Japan, two high school boys, thick as thieves, contemplate the fact that one of them isn’t actually Hikaru but a spirit/monster/thing that has taken his shape after he went missing earlier in the summer. Strange things begin happening in the town, the boys try to ignore the increasing trouble, all while the village elders contemplate whether they have failed in their duties. Weird, interesting, strangely heartfelt, I’m looking forward to where this story goes.
Mislaid in Parts Half-Known - Seanan McGuire
The next Wayward Children book is here and it has dinosaurs in it. Ninth in the novella series, this one explores our newest child, Antsy, as she tries to fit in at Eleanor’s school. The series itself, about children who have come back from being dropped into magical lands and saving the world and now are trying to readjust to normal life, typically switches each book from a self-contained story of one child to the ongoing story of what’s going on at the boarding school the returnees attend. This is a school focused book, which is always a bit weaker, and it’s very much centered on Antsy, who was the child focus of the previous book. Both that and this are a little too heavy handed at times but at 150ish pages, I can’t be upset if it doesn’t 100% it the mark for me every time. As always, I look forward to the next.
Like I said, January has been a lot (hence the lateness of this missive.) My grandmother passed last week in her 91st year. She was the textbook example of a grandmother, kind and sweet and eager to spoil everyone. My father had been caring for her pretty much by himself for several years so I basically talked to her daily, calling the two of them every day on my drive home from work. It wasn’t unexpected, her decline had been ongoing, but it still sucks and I’ll miss her dearly.
I have so many happy memories of her, from going to bingo with her growing up (one time winning $700!) to spending the night with her and watching terrible television together in her big bed at 2 AM. No matter what I was doing, she’d give me “spending money” and then delight in the stories of what I did with it. (One of her favorites was giving my $50 for my drive back down to college in California and cracking up when I admitted I spent it buying out the supply of Fun Dip at the local candy shop.) She was very much a homebody who never really wanted to do more than be with her family and friends but one of my favorite stories of her has to do with that wedding picture. She and my grandfather dated throughout their teens but her mother, my great-grandmother, wasn’t sure how she felt about my grandfather so she forbid her from marrying him until she turned 18. So she turned 18 on July 1st and that photo is from their wedding day on July 2nd.
I was very lucky to have four amazing grandparents, all characters in their own way, all very much part of my life with lots of stories I could tell about all of them. They’re all gone now but they live in on family stories, in silly songs, in old sayings that no one knows exactly where they came from but you say them in that same cadence anyway. And I hope I manage to pass along the wisdom, the kindness, the silliness, the love that I received from them in my own way.
This newsletter was much later than it should have been but hopefully I get my things together for February’s. I’ll see you all on the other side.