I DNF’d Simon Doyle’s “Runaway Train,” gave it a one-star review on account of its misogynistic tropes, and swore I’d never read another book of his.
TI DNF’d Simon Doyle’s “Runaway Train,” gave it a one-star review on account of its misogynistic tropes, and swore I’d never read another book of his.
Thank goodness I have a bad memory for names, because “This Is Not a Vampire Story” is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I’d never have requested the ARC if “Simon Doyle” had rung a bell.
Take the “ageless vampire” of romance seriously. Have the vampire -- Victor is his name, and he was turned at 17 -- never forget his first and only love, whom he abandoned for reasons I won’t specify because, although you’ll probably guess them at some point, you emphatically don’t want the spoiler. Have that vampire return, in his lover’s advanced old age, to work at the care home where the lover and other friends of their youth now live. Give full weight to the loss, the grief, the betrayal, the longing to take away the pain of the beloved.
The result is shattering.
At moments, Doyle steps too hard on an insight or a bit of symbolism. “The love we give away is the only love we keep” — please, no. And although the first person is the only narrative voice that could possibly work — Victor’s account needs the intimacy — in this story it has one inevitable pitfall. But, well, who cares.
Doyle borrows some of the usual literary conceits about vampires: the vampire who turns Victor arrives at his seaside town in a rotting ship; once turned, Victor has no heartbeat, he can't eat human food or eat anything but blood, sunlight burns him, and he doesn't age. He retains his surprising wit and his human capacity for feeling. Which is why this is not a vampire story, just the most beautiful, heartbreaking love story I can imagine.
Gessen isn't the best narrator in the world, but that's a trivial objection really. The future is apparently history in the US as well, and so much foGessen isn't the best narrator in the world, but that's a trivial objection really. The future is apparently history in the US as well, and so much for "That's not who we are as Americans," eh?
Tagged "gender stuff" although there's little explicit discussion of gender politics, but masculinism looms over ice hockey culture. I include the culTagged "gender stuff" although there's little explicit discussion of gender politics, but masculinism looms over ice hockey culture. I include the culture of women's ice hockey.
I fell almost reluctantly into hockey romances, specifically m/m hockey romances, and then started reading around a bit about actual hockey and watching highlights on YouTube, slowed way down so I could follow the action. Even knowing only the little I'd osmosed from reading hockrom, I had to be awed by the speed and skill. (So that's why people call him Connor McJesus!) And the body checks don't look so terrible on video, at .75 or .5 speed. But I'd read about CTE in football, and even in hockrom the guys have concussions sometimes, and I'd read Ari Baran's Game Misconduct and everybody who reads m/m hockrom has heard of Taylor Fitzpatrick's Thrown Off the Ice, even if like me they ward their Kindle against it. So I started looking into CTE in hockey and ...
... it's worse than I thought. It's much, much worse than I thought. All those body checks, all that checking into the boards. Repeated bangs to the brain. Even with helmets. Even if there's no direct blow to the head.
Derek Boogaard was an enforcer, enforcers being the dudes whose role is to "protect" their teammates and to take revenge if a teammate is deliberately hit or hurt. Enforcers die, on average, 10 years younger than other hockey players (and if I'm not misreading the article linked there, ice hockey players aren't noted for their longevity, period). Enforcers often die, if not of diagnosed CTE then of causes associated with it: substance abuse disorder, depression, car accidents. The substance abuse has a great deal to do with the cumulative physical damage an enforcer sustains -- well, that most ice hockey players seem to sustain. Play ice hockey and, whether or not you get into fights, you're guaranteed to be in significant pain a significant portion of the time.
What might be even more shocking is that I learned from poking around on ice hockey message boards, like the NHL subreddit, that plenty of hockey fans think trends away from fighting make the sport less entertaining and exciting and less, you know, manly. Of Gary Bettman we will not speak except to say that he's still lying about the link between CTE and head impacts in hockey.
As to masculinism in women's professional ice hockey, here you go. The tl;dr as always is that gender essentialism is BS and women aren't any smarter or nicer than men.
John Branch writes: "Nobody dreams of playing hockey so that they can hurt other people. It just goes that way." Off the ice, Derek Boogaard seems to have been kind, gentle, generous, not too bright, and desperate for attention and affection. He probably should have been the giant dude all the toddlers climb on in day care and nursery school, but instead he grew up to be a feared enforcer in the NHL, so he's dead.
Broke my heart in two ways -- first, as the protagonist/narrator, Peter, suffers from, begins to confront, and finally nearly dies of, his history of Broke my heart in two ways -- first, as the protagonist/narrator, Peter, suffers from, begins to confront, and finally nearly dies of, his history of extreme sexual abuse in childhood and adolescence; second, by going narratively off the rails in the last third. Discussion under a spoiler cut: please note my tags, besides which what follows includes actual plot spoilers.
(view spoiler)[Throughout Origin Story, and occasionally in the previous volume, Two Natures, we've seen Peter have panic attacks, flashbacks, and intrusive thoughts about the multiple rapes he experienced when he was thirteen. The perpetrators were Jonas, the owner of a comics store where Peter hung out, and some adult male friends of Jonas. At the point where Origin Story begins to fall apart as a novel, Peter attends a seder at which, seeing his mother clean a baby whose diaper is being changed, he suddenly begins to remember that she raped him in his very early childhood -- toddlerhood or even sooner. Not unreasonably, this and the sudden death, probably by suicide, of his cousin Ben, leads Peter to crash and burn. He makes a serious go at suicide, from which he's rescued at the last possible moment, and after that begins, slowly, to move toward facing his past and recovering from it.
So much has gone right in the novel up to the point of that seder. Notably, the way Peter's memories of the rapes during his adolescence keep intruding on him despite his best efforts at suppressing them comports very well with how PTSD works and even with my own experience of traumatic events (9/11, for example: I live in NYC and saw a portion of the events at the WTC at first hand). But I balked at the sudden return of Peter's memories of his mother's abuse, because I remember the life-ruining false-memory nightmares of the 1980s and 1990s, such as the McMartin Preschool case; there now exists some controversy over the possible existence of "dissociative amnesia," but the most rigorous analyses I've been able to find suggest it's not compatible with what's known about memory formation. (For example, this article. Additionally, Thanujeni Pathman, PhD, and Patricia Bauer, PhD, "Memory and Early Brain Development," from the online Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development, write that very young children do form memories but not in a way accessible later in life -- the authors don't discuss memories of traumatic events, but for obvious ethical reasons there's no way to conduct prospective testing of any such memories, while retrospective tests are inevitably tainted by the possible conflation of children's memories with recollections described by the adults around them.) My confidence in this part of Peter's story was further undermined by seeing the author's source notes, which include among other sigh-inducing works at least one 1990s repressed-memory special.
But even apart from the dubious realism of Peter's experience from this point onward, what happened to the rapes by Jonas et al.? These disappear from the story, as if they never happened. Does Peter ever tell his young queer friend and artistic collaborator, Ty/Tai, why they should steer clear of Jonas, and never mind that Ty/Tai is super sexually sophisticated on account of having done sex work when even younger? We never find out.
Besides this, Reiter starts piling on to a Grand Guignol extent. Not only was Peter raped by his mother and by Jonas and his friends, he was apparently also abused by his cousin Ben, who in turn seems to have been abused by his music teacher, and one person who appears only by name but, it's hinted, is Peter's long-lost aunt, mentions recovered memories of incestuous abuse. Was there more? I may have lost track. And look, I'm sure that in the nonfictional world there are plenty of families with entwined, multigenerational histories of sexual abuse, but you can't credibly introduce a theme like that in the last third of your novel, and doing so becomes even more of a problem when you completely drop the thread you've been working with up to that point. (hide spoiler)]
Oh, yeah, and a Jungian shrink turns up being weird but beneficial. Always depressing, given that Jung was a racist POS despite having some pretty though sadly unfalsifiable ideas.
Not gonna lie, I was crushed when Origin Story went to pieces, because up to that point it was one of the most convincing and moving portrayals I've ever seen of a person struggling with the damage sexual assault (and familial neglect, etc. etc.) has done to his mind and heart. Ten stars for that, three stars for the book overall, and how I wish that could be different.
Thanks to NetGalley and Saddle Road Press for the ARC....more
I felt obliged to read this because I'd picked up an ARC of Reiter's Origin Story without realizing that it was a sequel, so I cSix stars, at minimum.
I felt obliged to read this because I'd picked up an ARC of Reiter's Origin Story without realizing that it was a sequel, so I can't really take the time to review in depth. [ETA: Oops.] However.
I've lived in NYC since 1980 and I'm queer. So I'm here to say that Two Natures slammed me back hard into a time I had almost managed to -- not forget, okay, but put behind me: the time of young emaciated purple-spotted men in wheelchairs. The metallic smell of pentamidine. (Pneumocystis pneumonia treatment.) The obituaries. The obituaries. The obituaries.
This is something like a bildungsroman, in that Julian Selkirk, narrator and protagonist, has just started college at the beginning and by the end is a twenty-five-year-old AIDS widower tentatively beginning a long-delayed relationship with his dead partner's best friend. Normally I'd put that under a spoiler tag, but I really don't think suspense about the plot matters here: the point is the evocation of that time and place and the depth and complexity of the characters making their way through it, or brought by bad luck and/or self-destructiveness to not make their way through.
As it happens, not only was I living in NYC during the early and mid 1990s, when Two Natures is set, I spent several years living in the same neighborhood as Julian, which puts me in a position to say that Reiter's evocation of the time is very nearly perfect. If the author ever does re-edit and republish, though, I offer a suggestion: double-check those Starbucks coffees, because I'm pretty sure Starbucks wasn't a thing in the city yet.
More unpleasantly jarring were a few casual instances of drive-by fatphobia, misogyny, and transphobia. I'm of two minds about these, because they're appropriate to Julian's character, especially given his social and professional situation -- he's not always the nicest person in the world, and he's a fashion photographer; plus, the attitudes he expresses were pretty much SOP at the time, especially among white cis gay men. I could have done without, even back then. But. Julian is so real, and part of what makes him so fascinating is the gulf that emerges between his occasional nastiness and his behavior, most especially the tender care he and Phil's friend Peter take of Phil during his illness. Perhaps all I want to say is that readers should expect to love and grieve with someone they also, not infrequently, will want to slap. Also, you may have to step away repeatedly and read some fluff -- Two Natures is just that painful.
In closing: it's beyond me why I'm about to post only the twenty-first GR review of a book that ought to be famous....more
Serious scholar of ancient history + dry, acidulous, and punning sense of humor + narrator perfectly in tune with the work. But that word "serious" isSerious scholar of ancient history + dry, acidulous, and punning sense of humor + narrator perfectly in tune with the work. But that word "serious" is crucial, because although Southon cracks a lot of jokes at the expense of upper-class Romans, she's got plenty to say about the sheer savagery of Roman civilization. I might not have thought there was a system of slavery worse than US chattel slavery, for example -- especially because freedmen were more of a thing in ancient Rome -- but wow was I wrong about that. Consider that when a US enslaver was killed by one of the people he enslaved, it was not the practice to crucify all of the people "owned" by that enslaver. Yes, crucify. Yes, all.
One of Southon's throughlines is that in the view of upper-class Romans, most people (slaves, actors, sex workers, bakers, basically anyone who wasn't one of them) had no special right to life, or more specifically to not be killed, and furthermore to not be killed in the cruelest way possible. Hence not only crucifixion but also gladiatorial "games," the killing of criminals by hungry and/or terrified beasts, and reenactments of famous battles staged for entertainment, death of combatants not optional. The portions of "A Fatal Thing" in which Southon discusses the kinds of killing that arose from elite Romans' understanding of what made a homicide murder rather than justified retribution or simple entertainment are horrific. No cracking of jokes here.
I fear that the above may make "A Fatal Thing" sound like nothing more than bloodthirsty recitation of Roman crimes. No. First of all, there's that throughline considering how murder is defined and what justifies any kind of killing, under what circumstances. Second, upper-class Romans have successfully seeded a popular image of themselves as dignified, upright, in many ways admirable and virtuous.
Think of Cicero: it's pretty well known that he had not only a talent for oratory but also a gigantic ego; now how does it affect our image of him to remember that he attended and apparently enjoyed gladiatorial spectacles and beast killings? The ever so respectable (and also radically right-wing) Cato Institute is named for, as Southon puts it, "a man so dreadful even the Romans barely liked him." Here's a quotation from a public-domain translation of his De agri cultura: "Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous." Also, when slaves are sick their rations should be cut back. What an admirable dude.
A terrific book, sharp, insightful, often appalling, excellent material to aim at anyone in danger of feeling too much esteem for those legendary "classical virtues."...more
I'm so far behind on reading and reviewing ARCs that I won't take the time to write a full review of this. Just a few points:
1. Extraordinary handlingI'm so far behind on reading and reviewing ARCs that I won't take the time to write a full review of this. Just a few points:
1. Extraordinary handling of the characters' linguistic registers: the peasants' English; the nobles' Frenchified English; the cleric's English, swamped by Latinisms, circumlocutory and awkward.
2. Of these, the peasants' English, whose vocabulary and sentence structure are least familiar to a 21st-century reader, will probably give trouble; I had to pause often, even though I studied medieval English literature in college. A word to the wise: it's worth every bit of that trouble.
3. I read and re-read and re-re-read so many passages for their sheer beauty.
4. No one is morally pure here, but I nevertheless loved Hab/Madlen and Will with all my heart.
5. It's 14th-century England, violence of all kinds, against women, men, and animals, is frequent, and the plague is heading your way. Brace yourself.
6. Heartbreaking and beautiful and instantly one of the books I love best in all my life. I shlepped a hardcover copy to Europe and back and would not have left it behind for anything. I owe @Mab a debt of thanks for drawing my attention to it in her review of another book. ...more
This review is for the audiobook, but that format isn't yet listed on GR.
I very much enjoyed the first version of WftF, narrated by Alexander Doddy. TThis review is for the audiobook, but that format isn't yet listed on GR.
I very much enjoyed the first version of WftF, narrated by Alexander Doddy. This one differs in two important ways: it adds Marius's post-Edwin story, and it's narrated by Will Watt. Will Watt narrated -- performed, really -- 10 Things That Never Happened; he was wonderful, and I'm pleased to say that he's wonderful in this as well. As a USian, I can't judge how accurately he renders regional accents, but to my ear he's terrific. Each character voice is distinct, and Adam calling Edwin "petal" is outright swoony.
Having read that first version of Waiting for the Flood, you might think there's no way you could ever feel sympathy for Marius. Prepare to have that expectation undermined: Marius's reasons for leaving Edwin and for his generally obnoxious, not to say unkind, behavior broke my heart. If I jam my critic hat down hard I will admit that it's difficult to see why someone who grew up in such a loving (if often overbearing) family would be chock-full of self-loathing; but perhaps this comes back to the devastating knowledge that has undone him in many ways. No spoilers: you have to read or listen. I'll just say that I actually cried out in distress when Marius told Leo the truth.
The last section of this new Waiting for the Flood returns to Edwin's POV, in which he's (of course!) happy with Adam and, if not quite friends with Marius, at least in a condition of more-than-truce. Unlike most epilogues, this one adds value, with Edwin's perspective on Marius as he is "now," and also in seeing how different Marius's barbs feel once he's let go of the self-protective impulse to hurt everyone who comes near.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC, and I hope Will Watt narrates more m/m romance: he's already a favorite of mine....more
I often find, with Gregory Ashe's books, that I have to work my way up to reading them or take breaks from them. What with, you know, the suspense andI often find, with Gregory Ashe's books, that I have to work my way up to reading them or take breaks from them. What with, you know, the suspense and the emotional intensity and the general rough ride.
As for The Evening Wolves, I fled for a solid week about two chapters in, because John-Henry Somerset had just been arrested for child porn. False-accusation narratives terrify me anyway, and the secondhand shame and humiliation (child porn, FFS!) just about undid me. Mantra: Greg Ashe always pulls it out of the fire at the last minute. Greg Ashe always pulls it out of the fire at the last minute. Greg Ashe ...
Yes. Yes, he pulled it out of the fire. By the way, this is also the Hazard-and-Somerset novel for anyone who might just possibly have felt that maaaaaaaaaaaybe John-Henry has gotten off a little lightly for his atrocious behavior as a teenage bully and overall golden boy whose rich, influential parents can always make his troubles go away. Here's the reckoning, folks.
*laughs weakly*
Also -- here's a teaser, because I'm a terrible person -- you know how Shaw is always going on about how he and Emery are soulmates? They are. Oh, they are.
Thanks to GA for the ARC; this is my honest, and very shook up, opinion. ...more
One of those books I'm not qualified to review, so I read reviews by subject-matter experts. These left me with the impression that at least some critOne of those books I'm not qualified to review, so I read reviews by subject-matter experts. These left me with the impression that at least some critical comments by professional historians had more to do with academic rivalries than with the book I was listening to. For example, I read a review complaining that Snyder doesn't cover postwar anti-Semitism in Poland, but as it happened I was listening to exactly the part of Bloodlands that discusses, yes, postwar anti-Semitism in Poland. (It is true that Snyder omits mention of the Jedwabne massacre, but the big picture's there.)
Some other reviews cited factual errors, which are surely inevitable in a work of which the audio is 19 hours long, so again I was unconvinced -- the criticism struck me as trivial in itself and as almost willfully oblivious to Bloodland's chief themes as I understand them:
One, how the people "between Hitler and Stalin" were sometimes victims, sometimes perpetrators, sometimes bystanders, depending on the year, or who did what to you when they last occupied the territory where you lived, or whether you were trying to save yourself by betraying others, or whether you were being rounded up and forced to dig the pit into which you were then shot. The least controversial example might be that of those Ukrainians who, having suffered unspeakably under Stalin, then welcomed the German invasion and collaborated in the slaughter of Jews, whether because they were anti-Semitic to begin with or "just" trying to save their own lives.
Two, the sheer scale of civilian and other noncombatant deaths (Soviet soldiers held as POWs by the Wehrmacht and deliberately starved to death, for example, would be "other noncombatants"). Snyder cites 14 million and (in the afterword) lists all the deaths and murders he isn't including, because they fall outside the book's scope: combatants, of course, but also civilians such as Romanian Jews, who were murdered by Romanians (but Romania was not one of the countries successively occupied by the Soviet Union and Germany).
Three, the convenience of allowing ourselves to identify with the victims of all this slaughter rather than with the perpetrators or the bystanders. That we, and I do mean we, could, like the peoples of the Bloodlands, be victims/perpetrators/bystanders, depending on what circumstances befall us, is much less convenient to consider, especially because it precludes us from weaponizing victim status to deny the human claims of other people. --Who, if we're necessarily victims, must necessarily be bystanders or perpetrators. Snyder isn't shy about drawing parallels to the present political moment in the U.S., or to other situations it's uncomfortable to contemplate.
Bloodlands was very listenable and at the same time very hard going. Among the many, many dreadful passages was a quotation from one German murderer's letter home to his wife. I gagged. It would be nice to expunge it from my mind, but that would be the opposite of the point of having learned about it in the first place.
ancientreader
>
Books:
heartbreaking
(42)
