In our monthly book club, we discuss whatever we happen to be reading and ask everyone in the comments to do the same. What Are You Reading This Month?
Trixie And Katya’s Guide To Modern Womanhood
I’ll be honest, these days, you won’t find me desperately clinging to RuPaul’s Drag Race or any of its offshoots like I have in the past. However, I remain hungry for the various fruits that have dropped from that profoundly fertile tree, like the abiding friendship between alumnx Trixie Mattel and Katya, which has spawned multiple webseries and an upcoming book, Trixie And Katya’s Guide To Modern Womanhood. The Drag Race superstars have managed to boil down their collective, unmatched charisma to a series of essays—a working mix of satire and earnestness—that offer up advice on beauty, relationships, self-love, and friendship. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek play on the etiquette books of yore, there is no part of this breezy read that isn’t thoroughly engaging, from the color-popped fashion magazine aesthetic (complete with an appropriately fun, mildly intrusive photo spread) to the conversational banter that has always been key to the pair’s shared success. It arrives on bookshelves on July 14—a fitting premiere for an ideal summertime read. [Shannon Miller]
My Meteorite: Or, Without The Random There Can Be No New Thing by Harry Dodge
For reasons that perhaps need no explaining, I’ve found it difficult to read literature lately. My attention glances off anything that isn’t news or commentary, what I feel like I need to know right now. That can make it challenging to latch onto more ruminative works like Harry Dodge’s peripatetic My Meteorite: Or, Without The Random There Can Be No New Thing (March 17, Penguin). In his first book, the interdisciplinary artist—and co-founder of San Francisco’s one-time queer coffeehouse and performance space The Bearded Lady—roams from subject to subject, and back and forth in time: his father dying; his mother dying; meeting his birth mother; his partner, Maggie Nelson, publishing The Argonauts. As Dodge considers the idea that “reality multiplies… when an event takes place… that it peels off into infinite other universes, splits, decorticates, in order to accommodate both (or many) versions of the present,” his language also expands. The prose takes on an ecstatic, shouting-from-the-rooftops energy reminiscent of the Beats (e.g., “I had grown tendrils to every cosmic iota and was not at all certain that I wanted a name, beyond EVERY”). Reading My Meteorite is to bear witness to an individual whose heart is at once so hungry and so full that it seems constantly on the edge of bursting. It can make for an overwhelming experience, but Dodge argues for keeping oneself so open, for all the possibilities it creates. “Proliferation is the hammer,” he writes, “the force that makes the bulges we were unable to imagine ourselves.” [Laura Adamczyk]
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I’m reading the shampoo bottle, Wash, Rinse, Repeat. It’s what they based the Tom Cruise movie on.
One of the rare cases where the movie is superior to the source material.
On the subject of movie adaptations that improve on the books: I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of Phillip K Dick, so I like almost all of those adaptations more than their original stories. Also felt like Crazy Rich Asians fixed a lot of its source material’s biggest flaws (which makes me hopeful that the rest of the trilogy, if they ever get made, won’t have such diminishing returns as the books had).
ooh, Brooklyn for me, because Eilis is such a non-entity in print and seems like an actual human thanks to Saoirse Ronan.
Stonewall by Martin Duberman. Nonfiction. It basically follows the lives of six people from diverse backgrounds from childhood, through the Sixties, their involvement in the Stonewall Riot, and the after effects.
Well so far in June I’ve read the first two books in the Three Body Problem series and I’m like halfway through the last one. Pretty good I’d say.
I read Rachel Neumeier’s new book Tuyo, a fantasy stand-alone that has a big focus on people from two very different societies learning how to coexist and move past intolerance. In a similar theme, read books 2 and 3 of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers, and her novella, To Be Taught, If Fortunate. Liked A Closed and Common Orbit a lot, and enjoyed the novella’s science focus, if not the open ended resolution, wasn’t as big a fan of Record of a Spaceborn Few. I like the general “alien cultures interacting” elements in that series, and a view of a humanity that managed not to kill itself, but Record was a little too scattershot for me. Also read This is How You Lose the Time War, which was very well written, although maybe not super satisfying in terms of how it was plotted (clearly not the main point). Had fun looking up more obscure references from it, like “apophenic as a haruspex”. Enjoyed the 1st 2 books from Jessie Mihalik’s Consortium trilogy, waiting on the 3rd one to become available at my library. (and waiting on the most recent Murderbot, which I’ve got on hold)Also: lots of romance novels, and the Guild Hunter series by Nalini Singh.
Acceptance, the final book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. And I just started Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year on audio.Other books read in June:White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (June’s book in my “12 months, 12 Women Writers” 2020 reading project)The Soul of an Octopus by Sy MontgomeryThe Family Upstairs by Lisa JewellGodshot by Chelsea Bieker
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to update on a What are You Reading post. Last few books included, The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed it in general, Stephenson is hit or miss for me, but the world and the story line following Nell, I really enjoyed. The latest Murderbot. Great as always. If you haven’t given the Murderbot books a try, I highly recommend them. Funny but thoughtful, good sci-fi with great action, and they are a quick read. Currently reading Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I read the whole Temeraire series, which I liked a lot, but she is writing on a whole other level with this book. It is imaginative, thought-provoking and includes a character that may become one of my favorite characters ever. It is really, really good.
Isn’t Diamond Age the one that ends with a giant orgy? I really enjoyed most of that book, but I remember it got pretty weird in its end game. Really like Murderbot and Spinning Silver too – good picks!
Why it certainly is! Yes, a giant orgy, a live sex show, and a peasant uprising. It is a weird book.
The Orgy/Spontaneous human combustion was about 2/3rds the way through.
I just finished NOS4A2 and will be starting Magno Girl by Joe Canzano.
Currently reading Living with a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich whose mind is so sharp and relentlessly curious, even her teenage journals are stunningly well written. Also recently enjoyed If I Had Your Face, a novel about young women living in Seoul and grappling with Korea’s intense misogynistic culture of beauty, and Oliver Sacks’s Oaxaca Journal which was delightful.
I had a choice to either start reading the Murderbot series, or “The Way of Kings” by Brandon Sanderson. Whelp, I started with “The Way of Kings” and I’m going to be in it for a long while! So detailed it can be a tad difficult remembering all the different races and how they are described. My one regret is I’m reading this on a Kindle Paperwhite so I can’t really see the illustrations, or zoom in on them!
I recently finished reading, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. It continued the streak of the book being better than the movie.
This month has been Perdido Street Station and Stories of Your Life
The Rapist by Les Edgerton.
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.