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I Didn’t Read Any Books For a Few Months, Actually
This is basically my entire summer prose reading list. I’ve had six months of mostly comics (since they’re easy to read on the ReMarkable) and rpg manuals.
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan - The autobiography of an English professor at Colby College who’s trans; and transitioned when she was 40 (circa 2001) and was married with kids. The version I read was updated ten years after the first printing with additional afterwords from the author and her wife. (Spoilers, everything works out okay.) It’s a pretty decent memoir with some humor to it, but the afterward written by Richard Russo (the author’s best friend and colleague) goes a fair way to explaining why he has more novels published than she does—that chapter has some of the best lines in the book. I also found it interesting to contrast this story against Mae Dean, a webcomic author who’s my age and did a similar transition at the same point in her life, but two decades later. Boylan clearly had to explain what being transgender meant to everyone in her life because it was pretty much new to all of them; including writing detailed letters and giving out suggested readings. Dean put some things up on Twitter and called it a day.
In An Absent Dream by Seanen McGuire - Like the previous two books in the Wayward Children series, this isn't a story that needs to be told; it's a prequel side tale and an expansion of essentially a minor character. That said, McGuire is making very good use of this world and its conceits to tell other stories in a fairytale sort of way. Sugar Sky was about being a fat girl and society's reaction to it. This is about capitalism, and I could probably write another 200 pages about the layers to that. (The part I find most interesting about Lundy specifically is that this did not, in any way, need to be her story. The ending that puts her in place for the first book feels like an afterthought in a bunch of ways.)
Six Sacred Swords by Andrew Rowe - A warrior-mage from another land is sent to a strange new continent to meet the local goddess, and quickly discovers that this involves climbing spires and collecting legendary swords. Most of the action is setting up classic video game setpiece dungeons and watching the main character find out-of-context solutions for them—he disintegrates a bunch of locks and makes friends with multiple boss monsters, among other things. It’s a mish-mash of fantasy worldbuilding and video game parody. (And according to the afterword, was originally created as an tabletop rpg setting, which isn’t the slightest bit surprising.) I ran out of book when we went to the beach, so I pulled a semi-random Prime Reading book; and this was decent for what it is, but I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequels.
She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan - The autobiography of an English professor at Colby College who’s trans; and transitioned when she was 40 (circa 2001) and was married with kids. The version I read was updated ten years after the first printing with additional afterwords from the author and her wife. (Spoilers, everything works out okay.) It’s a pretty decent memoir with some humor to it, but the afterward written by Richard Russo (the author’s best friend and colleague) goes a fair way to explaining why he has more novels published than she does—that chapter has some of the best lines in the book. I also found it interesting to contrast this story against Mae Dean, a webcomic author who’s my age and did a similar transition at the same point in her life, but two decades later. Boylan clearly had to explain what being transgender meant to everyone in her life because it was pretty much new to all of them; including writing detailed letters and giving out suggested readings. Dean put some things up on Twitter and called it a day.
In An Absent Dream by Seanen McGuire - Like the previous two books in the Wayward Children series, this isn't a story that needs to be told; it's a prequel side tale and an expansion of essentially a minor character. That said, McGuire is making very good use of this world and its conceits to tell other stories in a fairytale sort of way. Sugar Sky was about being a fat girl and society's reaction to it. This is about capitalism, and I could probably write another 200 pages about the layers to that. (The part I find most interesting about Lundy specifically is that this did not, in any way, need to be her story. The ending that puts her in place for the first book feels like an afterthought in a bunch of ways.)
Six Sacred Swords by Andrew Rowe - A warrior-mage from another land is sent to a strange new continent to meet the local goddess, and quickly discovers that this involves climbing spires and collecting legendary swords. Most of the action is setting up classic video game setpiece dungeons and watching the main character find out-of-context solutions for them—he disintegrates a bunch of locks and makes friends with multiple boss monsters, among other things. It’s a mish-mash of fantasy worldbuilding and video game parody. (And according to the afterword, was originally created as an tabletop rpg setting, which isn’t the slightest bit surprising.) I ran out of book when we went to the beach, so I pulled a semi-random Prime Reading book; and this was decent for what it is, but I don’t think I’ll bother with the sequels.