What Have I Been Reading? (2020 batch #6)
Nov. 16th, 2020 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Fire Never Goes Out by Noelle Stevenson I had not realized that Stevenson is only 28; this memoir only chronicles a decade and only in snippet form. (You can go into a lot of detail about 10 years. This doesn’t; it’s a few doodle comics from each year, some photos, and a year-end blog post. There’s very little in the way of stories and mostly just strings of emotional impressions.) Honestly, this feels like the publisher wanted a book, and this was the material she had on hand.
Safety Protocols for Human Holidays by Angel Martinez – A “humans are weird” story on a multi-species starship as the other officers try to figure out why Human Jen is malfunctioning. Then the security officer assigned to the task develops feelings, so there’s LGBTQ interspecies romance in the mix. This is closer to being a short story than even a novella, but it’s fun.
The Lightning-Struck Heart by TJ Klune – M/M romance set in an anachronism stew (Jethrien called anachronism soup, but it’s too thick for that), featuring magic that works at the speed of plot and the author not knowing how Dukes work. You read it for the snark, and oh man, there is such snark. The author clear tries to set up characters as being menacing, or haughty, or somehow above this nonsense, but anybody who gets a speaking role is a sassy bitch. (The author’s bio notes that he’s queer. Bitch, really?) This isn’t a good book, but it’s a very fun book, and you can tell from the first 20 pages if you’ll like it, because the rest of the book is just more of that.
Jew(ish): A primer, A memoir, A manual, A plea by Matt Greene – A book about being culturally but not religiously Jewish in today’s world. The thing is, this is a scattershot book apparently pieced together from a failed novel and a collection of essays that fails to have a coherent narrative or central idea. Several chapters have his personal history and history of other British Jews he knows. One chapter is just documenting recent antisemitic comments and actions by various British and American politicians. Which is then followed by details of the “holocaust tour” he took of the camps in Poland and Germany. Greene clearly has no love for Jewish tradition (and recounts some unhappy memories of religion in his youth), and seems both resentful of the fact that he’s Jewish but unwilling to let go of it. I hate being the guy who cries “victimhood fetish”, but…kinda? Also, he tells a story about a play he wrote falling flat before a Jewish audience, revealing to the reader if not himself that he’s not actually very good at reading a room. Who’s the audience of this book? Apparently not other nonpracticing Jews (like me), or necessarily observant Jews, or even really non-Jews, who won’t get many of the references he doesn’t explain. I suspect there are much better books about the culturally Jewish experience, and now I want to read one of those.
Safety Protocols for Human Holidays by Angel Martinez – A “humans are weird” story on a multi-species starship as the other officers try to figure out why Human Jen is malfunctioning. Then the security officer assigned to the task develops feelings, so there’s LGBTQ interspecies romance in the mix. This is closer to being a short story than even a novella, but it’s fun.
The Lightning-Struck Heart by TJ Klune – M/M romance set in an anachronism stew (Jethrien called anachronism soup, but it’s too thick for that), featuring magic that works at the speed of plot and the author not knowing how Dukes work. You read it for the snark, and oh man, there is such snark. The author clear tries to set up characters as being menacing, or haughty, or somehow above this nonsense, but anybody who gets a speaking role is a sassy bitch. (The author’s bio notes that he’s queer. Bitch, really?) This isn’t a good book, but it’s a very fun book, and you can tell from the first 20 pages if you’ll like it, because the rest of the book is just more of that.
Jew(ish): A primer, A memoir, A manual, A plea by Matt Greene – A book about being culturally but not religiously Jewish in today’s world. The thing is, this is a scattershot book apparently pieced together from a failed novel and a collection of essays that fails to have a coherent narrative or central idea. Several chapters have his personal history and history of other British Jews he knows. One chapter is just documenting recent antisemitic comments and actions by various British and American politicians. Which is then followed by details of the “holocaust tour” he took of the camps in Poland and Germany. Greene clearly has no love for Jewish tradition (and recounts some unhappy memories of religion in his youth), and seems both resentful of the fact that he’s Jewish but unwilling to let go of it. I hate being the guy who cries “victimhood fetish”, but…kinda? Also, he tells a story about a play he wrote falling flat before a Jewish audience, revealing to the reader if not himself that he’s not actually very good at reading a room. Who’s the audience of this book? Apparently not other nonpracticing Jews (like me), or necessarily observant Jews, or even really non-Jews, who won’t get many of the references he doesn’t explain. I suspect there are much better books about the culturally Jewish experience, and now I want to read one of those.
