Summer Reading (June and July Books)
Jul. 30th, 2018 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kIt's been prime reading outside with a beverage weather these last couple of months, so.
What You Want to See - Kristen Lepionka
The Unexpected Truth About Animals: a menagerie of the misunderstood - Lucy Cooke
You All Grow Up and Leave Me: a memoir of teenage obsession - Piper Weiss
The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza - Shaun David Hutchinson
The House on Half Moon Street - Alex Reeve
Provenance - Ann Leckie
Tell it to The Bees - Fiona Shaw
Force of Nature - Jane Harper
Feel Free - Zadie Smith
Difficult Women - Roxane Gay
Who is Vera Kelly? - Rosalie Knecht
The Photographer - Craig Robertson
Whee, I'd been looking forward to the second Roxane Weary book, about a hard-drinking, noirish, bisexual private eye and What You Want to See did not let me down.
If you have ever wanted to horrify the people down the pub with anecdotes about necrophiliac penguins then The Unexpected Truth About Animals is the book for you. It's also the book for you if you like Mary Roach, books where it's clear the author knows her stuff and is only too delighted to be telling you about, or gross out humour. I loved it a lot.
You all Grow Up and Leave Me featured two things I constitutionally have a hard time sympathising with: 1) poor little rich kids, and 2) people writing books about other people's tragedies to which they happen to have been adjacent. Piper Weiss was a teenager on the upper west side when her tennis couch was found to have sexually abused some of his students, although not her. It was not a badly written memoir and might be quite an interesting read if, unlike me, you could muster up a more nuanced opinion of the author than: you are a bad person and you should feel bad about having written this.
The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza is YA about a teenager who was the product of a virgin birth who discovers that she has the power to heal the sick, but with the side effect that every time she does other people get raptured to god knows where. I was loaned this ages ago and kept not reading it because that plot summary did nothing for me. But in the end it had loads of things I dug. A bisexual protagonist! And no love triangle! Teenager characters who behaved like teenagers and not mini 35 year olds! An ambiguous end!
Caution: if you dislike ambiguity in your resolutions the lack of explanations in this one will probably make you want to bite people, but it really worked for me, better than probably any more definite conclusion could have.
The House on Half Moon Street is Victorian set crime novel featuring a transgender man as its hero. Not a woman dressing as man to escape the restrictions placed on woman at the time (those are good too, its just not what this is...) but an actual trans guy, although poor Leo (formally Charlotte) doesn't have that language for it. And it is so good. It's apparently the first in a series and I for one cannot wait.
Content warning, because forewarned is forearmed: there is a very brief scene where our hero is raped, because I know that might be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
Provenance was... I guess it was nice to see what humanity is like outside the Radch, and maybe I liked the Imperial Radch trilogy a little less than everybody else (I actually remember very little about them, although it was only a couple of years ago that I read them) but this was just, kind of, fine.
Mostly I use tumblr as a way of getting notified as to whenever two female characters are going to make out in a movie or on tv, which was how I came to see the trailer for Tell it to the Bees staring Holliday Grainger and Anna Pacquin. And I immediately went and read the book, set in post-war Britain where a single mother falls in love with the local lady doctor; it has a happy ending and is de-frickin-lightful.
Zadie Smith is smarter than I am. I mean, I already knew that. But her essay collection Feel Free makes it clear that she's smarter than me by the same order of magnitude as I'm smarter than my dog. I was really impressed by her take on the brexit vote, and when she was talking about Get Out or Key & Peele it was almost like we shared a common language, but then she got onto modern art or experimental film... Zadie Smith is smarter than I am, and it makes for an impressive collection but not necessarily an enjoyable one.
I don't always remember that I like Roxane Gay's writing, because every time I finish one of her books I'm so raw that I need, like, a year to recover. But then I go back, because her writing is like...cauterising a wound.Dangerous Women, her collection of short stories is the same: beautifully written, deeply upsetting.
Content warning: sexual violence. whoa boy, sexual violence.
Who is Vera Kelly? is an understated, low-key spy novel about a lesbian (bisexual? Vera thinks of herself as a homosexual but sleeps with a guy more than once during the book, so) CIA operative in Buenos Aires on the eve of the Argentine revolution. It's good, but it's low low-key. If you go in expecting James Bond then you will be disappointed.
My favourite bit was the flashback to Vera's first time in a lesbian bar where no one will talk to her because they all think she's a cop. That's what I'm going to chose to believe from now on: everyone thinks I'm a cop.
The Photographer is a perfectly serviceable tartan noir. I mean that in the most neutral possible way.
(Graphic Novel:
Batwoman: The Many Arms of Death
Heh. Didn't love. It's been suggested to me that maybe I'd like the earlier run of Batwoman better. Or Batgirl.)
What You Want to See - Kristen Lepionka
The Unexpected Truth About Animals: a menagerie of the misunderstood - Lucy Cooke
You All Grow Up and Leave Me: a memoir of teenage obsession - Piper Weiss
The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza - Shaun David Hutchinson
The House on Half Moon Street - Alex Reeve
Provenance - Ann Leckie
Tell it to The Bees - Fiona Shaw
Force of Nature - Jane Harper
Feel Free - Zadie Smith
Difficult Women - Roxane Gay
Who is Vera Kelly? - Rosalie Knecht
The Photographer - Craig Robertson
Whee, I'd been looking forward to the second Roxane Weary book, about a hard-drinking, noirish, bisexual private eye and What You Want to See did not let me down.
If you have ever wanted to horrify the people down the pub with anecdotes about necrophiliac penguins then The Unexpected Truth About Animals is the book for you. It's also the book for you if you like Mary Roach, books where it's clear the author knows her stuff and is only too delighted to be telling you about, or gross out humour. I loved it a lot.
You all Grow Up and Leave Me featured two things I constitutionally have a hard time sympathising with: 1) poor little rich kids, and 2) people writing books about other people's tragedies to which they happen to have been adjacent. Piper Weiss was a teenager on the upper west side when her tennis couch was found to have sexually abused some of his students, although not her. It was not a badly written memoir and might be quite an interesting read if, unlike me, you could muster up a more nuanced opinion of the author than: you are a bad person and you should feel bad about having written this.
The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza is YA about a teenager who was the product of a virgin birth who discovers that she has the power to heal the sick, but with the side effect that every time she does other people get raptured to god knows where. I was loaned this ages ago and kept not reading it because that plot summary did nothing for me. But in the end it had loads of things I dug. A bisexual protagonist! And no love triangle! Teenager characters who behaved like teenagers and not mini 35 year olds! An ambiguous end!
Caution: if you dislike ambiguity in your resolutions the lack of explanations in this one will probably make you want to bite people, but it really worked for me, better than probably any more definite conclusion could have.
The House on Half Moon Street is Victorian set crime novel featuring a transgender man as its hero. Not a woman dressing as man to escape the restrictions placed on woman at the time (those are good too, its just not what this is...) but an actual trans guy, although poor Leo (formally Charlotte) doesn't have that language for it. And it is so good. It's apparently the first in a series and I for one cannot wait.
Content warning, because forewarned is forearmed: there is a very brief scene where our hero is raped, because I know that might be a deal breaker for a lot of people.
Provenance was... I guess it was nice to see what humanity is like outside the Radch, and maybe I liked the Imperial Radch trilogy a little less than everybody else (I actually remember very little about them, although it was only a couple of years ago that I read them) but this was just, kind of, fine.
Mostly I use tumblr as a way of getting notified as to whenever two female characters are going to make out in a movie or on tv, which was how I came to see the trailer for Tell it to the Bees staring Holliday Grainger and Anna Pacquin. And I immediately went and read the book, set in post-war Britain where a single mother falls in love with the local lady doctor; it has a happy ending and is de-frickin-lightful.
Zadie Smith is smarter than I am. I mean, I already knew that. But her essay collection Feel Free makes it clear that she's smarter than me by the same order of magnitude as I'm smarter than my dog. I was really impressed by her take on the brexit vote, and when she was talking about Get Out or Key & Peele it was almost like we shared a common language, but then she got onto modern art or experimental film... Zadie Smith is smarter than I am, and it makes for an impressive collection but not necessarily an enjoyable one.
I don't always remember that I like Roxane Gay's writing, because every time I finish one of her books I'm so raw that I need, like, a year to recover. But then I go back, because her writing is like...cauterising a wound.Dangerous Women, her collection of short stories is the same: beautifully written, deeply upsetting.
Content warning: sexual violence. whoa boy, sexual violence.
Who is Vera Kelly? is an understated, low-key spy novel about a lesbian (bisexual? Vera thinks of herself as a homosexual but sleeps with a guy more than once during the book, so) CIA operative in Buenos Aires on the eve of the Argentine revolution. It's good, but it's low low-key. If you go in expecting James Bond then you will be disappointed.
My favourite bit was the flashback to Vera's first time in a lesbian bar where no one will talk to her because they all think she's a cop. That's what I'm going to chose to believe from now on: everyone thinks I'm a cop.
The Photographer is a perfectly serviceable tartan noir. I mean that in the most neutral possible way.
(Graphic Novel:
Batwoman: The Many Arms of Death
Heh. Didn't love. It's been suggested to me that maybe I'd like the earlier run of Batwoman better. Or Batgirl.)