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Amateur, by Thomas Page McBee
An account of going into boxing as a trans man, McBee working through feelings about masculinity and violence and ways men socialise (and don’t) in America at the present time. Also the ways his transition has changed his relationship to family members. McBee is a journalist and his interviews with various researchers on masculinity and race are woven through the book. Liked this a lot, zipped through it, wrote many reflections about it and my own experience of masculinity that I can’t reach because I’m under this cat.
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
Trans archivist vampire romance, pretty even-handed in its coverage of each of these four things. Protagonist had recently begun transitioning, stepping into a new vibrancy of life, when he was infected with vampirism, a disease with many of the usual effects, most notably, the problem of sunlight: any trace of the sun is lethal and its mere proximity is terrifying. The protagonist takes refuge in his job as an archivist in a sunken archive in which he is safe from the sun, sleeping in his office without his superiors’ knowledge, living a dryly sustained life in desperate need of changes he does not necessarily consider possible, but towards which he is strongly prompted after meeting a donor to the archive with issues of her own. I did not trip and fall into this book quite as headlong as into Fellman’s The Two Doctors Gorski the other week, partly because there were things I didn’t like about the resolution, but this is one of those cases where I was too tired to think clearly but the resolution because I self-defeating stayed up far too late to finish it. I love Fellman’s style.
Partway through:
Confounding Oaths, by Alexis Hall. Gay regency romance narrated by Puck. I am coming down on being more irritated than charmed by Puck’s narration and the similar registers of his wit and the mortals’ wit, so reading slow and may or may not finish, (he protests too much about his distance from mortal business and lack of care for it, claims to like chaos but shows every sign of being rather humanly attached to the people whose story he’s narration) but there is something basically pleasing in having a fairy zipping around as the omniscient narrator, paying attention to whatever he feels like. (At one point some characters go to the opera and he goes and pays attention to someone else for a bit because he finds the opera so dull.) As for plot, so far there is a ball and a duel and one of those deeply unwise wishes. This is a sequel that I have jumped to, I may find book one.
This book a good dilution for:
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Halfway through. A book of matter-of-fact cruelty and grotesquery .A house of cards of bitterly funny ironies in which everyone is at all times lying more than might be expected. I am more or less liking it, it was not disturbing me, yet I have stalled in the middle due to not wanting to read about the things it’s about. In a small medieval township in a world not exactly ours but near enough, a hale god-fearing lamb-herder beats his deformed son, who is glad of it because God will love him for it. The violence is so taken for granted between them that without it, their relationship would come to make no sense.
One reason I want to finish this book is that I want to know whether I agree with my friend who read it and hated it so much that when I said I’d really liked another book by Moshfegh she was, not quite closed to the possibility, but extremely surprised.
Cat is still here! This is unusually calm, social evening behaviour for this cat, who would usually be on a circuit of the neighborhood about now.
An account of going into boxing as a trans man, McBee working through feelings about masculinity and violence and ways men socialise (and don’t) in America at the present time. Also the ways his transition has changed his relationship to family members. McBee is a journalist and his interviews with various researchers on masculinity and race are woven through the book. Liked this a lot, zipped through it, wrote many reflections about it and my own experience of masculinity that I can’t reach because I’m under this cat.
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
Trans archivist vampire romance, pretty even-handed in its coverage of each of these four things. Protagonist had recently begun transitioning, stepping into a new vibrancy of life, when he was infected with vampirism, a disease with many of the usual effects, most notably, the problem of sunlight: any trace of the sun is lethal and its mere proximity is terrifying. The protagonist takes refuge in his job as an archivist in a sunken archive in which he is safe from the sun, sleeping in his office without his superiors’ knowledge, living a dryly sustained life in desperate need of changes he does not necessarily consider possible, but towards which he is strongly prompted after meeting a donor to the archive with issues of her own. I did not trip and fall into this book quite as headlong as into Fellman’s The Two Doctors Gorski the other week, partly because there were things I didn’t like about the resolution, but this is one of those cases where I was too tired to think clearly but the resolution because I self-defeating stayed up far too late to finish it. I love Fellman’s style.
Partway through:
Confounding Oaths, by Alexis Hall. Gay regency romance narrated by Puck. I am coming down on being more irritated than charmed by Puck’s narration and the similar registers of his wit and the mortals’ wit, so reading slow and may or may not finish, (he protests too much about his distance from mortal business and lack of care for it, claims to like chaos but shows every sign of being rather humanly attached to the people whose story he’s narration) but there is something basically pleasing in having a fairy zipping around as the omniscient narrator, paying attention to whatever he feels like. (At one point some characters go to the opera and he goes and pays attention to someone else for a bit because he finds the opera so dull.) As for plot, so far there is a ball and a duel and one of those deeply unwise wishes. This is a sequel that I have jumped to, I may find book one.
This book a good dilution for:
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. Halfway through. A book of matter-of-fact cruelty and grotesquery .A house of cards of bitterly funny ironies in which everyone is at all times lying more than might be expected. I am more or less liking it, it was not disturbing me, yet I have stalled in the middle due to not wanting to read about the things it’s about. In a small medieval township in a world not exactly ours but near enough, a hale god-fearing lamb-herder beats his deformed son, who is glad of it because God will love him for it. The violence is so taken for granted between them that without it, their relationship would come to make no sense.
One reason I want to finish this book is that I want to know whether I agree with my friend who read it and hated it so much that when I said I’d really liked another book by Moshfegh she was, not quite closed to the possibility, but extremely surprised.
Cat is still here! This is unusually calm, social evening behaviour for this cat, who would usually be on a circuit of the neighborhood about now.
