Books I read in September + October, 2025
Nov. 1st, 2025 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1 Total:
September: 4 books
-- The Official Boy Scout Handbook (1970s) by William Hillcourt;
-- SUPER LOVERS Vol. 1 by Miyuki Abe;
-- The Rats by James Herbert;
-- Nam by Mark Baker.
The Boy Scout handbook was useful for "Cry of the Loon," since Ira was in the Scouts as a kid; "SUPER LOVERS" was a random manga I saw on a "BL nostalgia" video, and it was the only one I'd never heard of. Cute art, wildly funny dramatic storyline; I may have actually read 2-3 volumes but didn't bother to log them on Goodreads. "The Rats" is a very fun, compact horror novel from the 60s or 70s, set in London's slums, where foreign mutant rats start devouring the locals. Very class-conscious, excellent at making you fall in love with a character within one chapter (because, of course, that's all they get before they're eaten alive. By rats.)
"Nam" was a collection of anonymized first-hand accounts of the war from American soldiers and medics, which was very interesting. I think this for every Vietnam book, but it's wild how many of them have a reputation as being viciously pro- or anti-war, and then you read them and you're like, "...which part?" The pro- or anti- sentiment is almost indistinguishable with all of them. "Nam" was supposedly anti-war, and I'd say it does a good job of not glorifying the war at all -- it shows the gruesome immoral aspects of that war in nauseating detail, especially when the doctors tell their stories of patient neglect and racism. But that vicious, graphic detail is also shared by "pro-war" books I've read, like "On Killing."
October: 10 books
-- Foe by Iain Reid;
-- Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt;
-- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut;
-- Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov;
-- Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis;
-- Fantastic Orgy by Alexander M. Frey;
-- Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood;
-- David Lynch: Someone is in My House by David Lynch;
-- Death Book by Bruce LaBruce;
-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet.
DNF'd: Walking Practice by Dolki Min. This was hyped up so much and I found it ... a struggle. Bland, repetitive prose, and I couldn't get into the main character or the set-up at all. It felt like a less successful Murder Bot, and I already didn't LOVE Murder Bot. "Walking Practice" is very similar: it's about an anxious alien who's been stranded on Earth for years and feels disconnected from humanity and convinced of its own worthlessness/evil nature. Like Murderbot, it's genderless; unlike MB it's very sexual, and it feeds off humans by assuming appealing forms, seducing them, and then eating them when they're at their most pliant, post-orgasm. Sounds great; wasn't. I got like 76% through it before I stopped torturing myself.
Started: Desperate Living by John Waters. It's a screenplay so I just pick through it when I want a laugh.
"Foe" and "Tell Me I'm Worthless" were the only less-than-stellar reads this month, everything else got a full 5 stars. "Foe" is just an okay thriller; excellent at the start, horrible by the end, overall just average. Iain Reid is more famous for "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," which I haven't read yet, despite buying it as soon as it came out! It wasn't famous yet at the time, I don't think, but I saw it in the horror section, and the title really appealed to me...
"Tell Me I'm Worthless" is my new worst enemy. God, that book. It was so bad that I live-blogged my entire reading to Madelgard, and force-fed screenshots to her to prove I wasn't exaggerating. It's got to be the most unsubtle, condescending, smug book I've ever read. There's a constant air of "I know you, my readers, are stupid as hell, so I'll have to spell this out for you: FASCISM IS BAD!!" Like yes, I know??? I agree?? Why are you interrupting the narrative AGAIN to explicitly tell me that the monster in this horror book is a metaphor for fascism? It's not even a metaphor at this point, it's just a haunted house that you keep reminding me is LITERALLY FASCISM INCARNATE. Agh!!
(I also felt that there was a weird assumption -- very telling about the author -- that everyone secretly hates their minority friends, and is just constantly teeming with bigoted thoughts about them?? I don't think that's true, and I think it's a sad way to view the world; AND if you insist that everyone thinks that way, then ofc I'm going to assume YOU think about minorities that way, and I'm not going to feel inclined to listen to a lecture from you about social justice. Don't tell me that you hate Jewish people and then presume you're qualified to lecture about antisemitism because you know it's bad. Yes, everybody has internalized bigotry of various kinds, but I don't think it's helpful or correct to assume that your cis straight friends are constantly thinking, "Ugh, I'm so embarrassed to be seen with a trans woman. Trans women are just so gross, you know? So gross and degenerate. Evil, in fact. I mean, I like THIS one, but OBVIOUSLY if a trans woman ever came onto me I would kill her." I mean, god... "When I hang out with my Jewish friend, I can't help but think about how Jewish people run the world and are actually super evil...maybe we should exterminate them...? but I know that's bad and wrong of me, so I'm officially qualified to teach YOU, dear reader, about fascism!" No, you know what, I will accept a lecture on fascism but I'd like it to be from someone who isn't constantly mentally shouting slurs)
"Our Lady of the Flowers" and "Dykette" were my favorite reads of the month, I think. This was my first time reading Jean Genet and he may be my new favorite author. Everything in this book is so lush, so sexual. It's a hypnotic mix of fairy-tale sugar and disgusting bodily fluids, all rendered with the same affection and eroticism. "Dykette" has an average rating of 3 stars, so it's not for everyone, but I had a CRAZY good time reading it -- it follows three lesbian couples over a 10-day Christmas vacation they share together. An older, settled couple (Jules and Miranda) hosts, and the story is narrated by Sasha, a young insecure femme dating butch artist Jesse. Sasha is obsessed with Jules, the older butch, and viciously jealous of Darcy, the femme part of the other young couple who joins them. It's a very funny, kind of sad examination of butch/femme dynamics, the nature of camp and performance in queer relationships ... and I think there's a hefty element of, like, "Is it WRONG to want to perform, and have others perform with me? It's annoying for SURE, but is it *wrong*?" Which I thought was excellent, because a lot of classic femme performance involves behaviors we've started to call out as toxic. It reminded me a lot of my ex-wife, who was definitely the stereotypical femme.
Is it bad to be a stereotypical femme? A performance femme, I mean, not just a lesbian who happens to wear makeup? I don't think so. But are there going to be issues in a relationship like that --? For sure. Communication issues, drama, all kinds of delicious things to read about (and to experience, to a certain extent, if you enjoy dramatic highs and lows).
I also really enjoyed the one-two punch of Fantastic Orgy and Goodbye to Berlin, which were written during the same period, one by a straight German author and one by Christopher Isherwood (gay, English). Isherwood gets a lot of flack, or maybe it's mostly self-flagellation, about his ignorance re: the rise of fascism in Germany at the time, but Goodbye to Berlin definitely faces the issue head-on -- it's not the focus of the novel, but it is the heart and theme. Whereas Fantastic Orgy references it only obliquely, metaphorically, if at all. Still, both were excellent and moving. Fantastic Orgy is much shorter and more bizarre, sort of sci-fi/fantasy: there are automatons, freak shows, magical gardens filled with rich people and tigers, fairy-tale type stories of beggars and aristocrats.
Death Book and Someone Is in My House are both art books by directors Bruce LaBruce and David Lynch. Death Book is photography only, explicit queer photos of death, similar to Yukio Mishima's Death of a Man but more gory. I mean, REALLY gory! "Someone Is in My House" is mixed-media art by Lynch, including standard paintings, photography and sculpture, matchbook drawings, etc. Both excellent.
And then for Transparent Things and Mother Night -- neither had a super-affecting story, emotionally, but both were great. Transparent Things follows a man named Hugh Person (insert Brian Griffin writing joke here: "I'll call my protagonist Norm, because he's Normal. That's one for the scholars 100 years down the line.") who goes to Switzerland for the third time in his life, and the story cycles back through his memories there -- the death of his father, the day he met his wife, etc. Mother Night follows an American double agent who wrote propaganda for Nazi Germany but also smuggled messages to the American military, and it deals with the question of identity and what you become when you "pretend" to be something -- whether the main character, Howard, really was a Nazi or not, whether it matters, whether he deserves to die.
Overall a great month of reading.
September: 4 books
-- The Official Boy Scout Handbook (1970s) by William Hillcourt;
-- SUPER LOVERS Vol. 1 by Miyuki Abe;
-- The Rats by James Herbert;
-- Nam by Mark Baker.
The Boy Scout handbook was useful for "Cry of the Loon," since Ira was in the Scouts as a kid; "SUPER LOVERS" was a random manga I saw on a "BL nostalgia" video, and it was the only one I'd never heard of. Cute art, wildly funny dramatic storyline; I may have actually read 2-3 volumes but didn't bother to log them on Goodreads. "The Rats" is a very fun, compact horror novel from the 60s or 70s, set in London's slums, where foreign mutant rats start devouring the locals. Very class-conscious, excellent at making you fall in love with a character within one chapter (because, of course, that's all they get before they're eaten alive. By rats.)
"Nam" was a collection of anonymized first-hand accounts of the war from American soldiers and medics, which was very interesting. I think this for every Vietnam book, but it's wild how many of them have a reputation as being viciously pro- or anti-war, and then you read them and you're like, "...which part?" The pro- or anti- sentiment is almost indistinguishable with all of them. "Nam" was supposedly anti-war, and I'd say it does a good job of not glorifying the war at all -- it shows the gruesome immoral aspects of that war in nauseating detail, especially when the doctors tell their stories of patient neglect and racism. But that vicious, graphic detail is also shared by "pro-war" books I've read, like "On Killing."
October: 10 books
-- Foe by Iain Reid;
-- Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt;
-- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut;
-- Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov;
-- Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis;
-- Fantastic Orgy by Alexander M. Frey;
-- Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood;
-- David Lynch: Someone is in My House by David Lynch;
-- Death Book by Bruce LaBruce;
-- Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet.
DNF'd: Walking Practice by Dolki Min. This was hyped up so much and I found it ... a struggle. Bland, repetitive prose, and I couldn't get into the main character or the set-up at all. It felt like a less successful Murder Bot, and I already didn't LOVE Murder Bot. "Walking Practice" is very similar: it's about an anxious alien who's been stranded on Earth for years and feels disconnected from humanity and convinced of its own worthlessness/evil nature. Like Murderbot, it's genderless; unlike MB it's very sexual, and it feeds off humans by assuming appealing forms, seducing them, and then eating them when they're at their most pliant, post-orgasm. Sounds great; wasn't. I got like 76% through it before I stopped torturing myself.
Started: Desperate Living by John Waters. It's a screenplay so I just pick through it when I want a laugh.
"Foe" and "Tell Me I'm Worthless" were the only less-than-stellar reads this month, everything else got a full 5 stars. "Foe" is just an okay thriller; excellent at the start, horrible by the end, overall just average. Iain Reid is more famous for "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," which I haven't read yet, despite buying it as soon as it came out! It wasn't famous yet at the time, I don't think, but I saw it in the horror section, and the title really appealed to me...
"Tell Me I'm Worthless" is my new worst enemy. God, that book. It was so bad that I live-blogged my entire reading to Madelgard, and force-fed screenshots to her to prove I wasn't exaggerating. It's got to be the most unsubtle, condescending, smug book I've ever read. There's a constant air of "I know you, my readers, are stupid as hell, so I'll have to spell this out for you: FASCISM IS BAD!!" Like yes, I know??? I agree?? Why are you interrupting the narrative AGAIN to explicitly tell me that the monster in this horror book is a metaphor for fascism? It's not even a metaphor at this point, it's just a haunted house that you keep reminding me is LITERALLY FASCISM INCARNATE. Agh!!
(I also felt that there was a weird assumption -- very telling about the author -- that everyone secretly hates their minority friends, and is just constantly teeming with bigoted thoughts about them?? I don't think that's true, and I think it's a sad way to view the world; AND if you insist that everyone thinks that way, then ofc I'm going to assume YOU think about minorities that way, and I'm not going to feel inclined to listen to a lecture from you about social justice. Don't tell me that you hate Jewish people and then presume you're qualified to lecture about antisemitism because you know it's bad. Yes, everybody has internalized bigotry of various kinds, but I don't think it's helpful or correct to assume that your cis straight friends are constantly thinking, "Ugh, I'm so embarrassed to be seen with a trans woman. Trans women are just so gross, you know? So gross and degenerate. Evil, in fact. I mean, I like THIS one, but OBVIOUSLY if a trans woman ever came onto me I would kill her." I mean, god... "When I hang out with my Jewish friend, I can't help but think about how Jewish people run the world and are actually super evil...maybe we should exterminate them...? but I know that's bad and wrong of me, so I'm officially qualified to teach YOU, dear reader, about fascism!" No, you know what, I will accept a lecture on fascism but I'd like it to be from someone who isn't constantly mentally shouting slurs)
"Our Lady of the Flowers" and "Dykette" were my favorite reads of the month, I think. This was my first time reading Jean Genet and he may be my new favorite author. Everything in this book is so lush, so sexual. It's a hypnotic mix of fairy-tale sugar and disgusting bodily fluids, all rendered with the same affection and eroticism. "Dykette" has an average rating of 3 stars, so it's not for everyone, but I had a CRAZY good time reading it -- it follows three lesbian couples over a 10-day Christmas vacation they share together. An older, settled couple (Jules and Miranda) hosts, and the story is narrated by Sasha, a young insecure femme dating butch artist Jesse. Sasha is obsessed with Jules, the older butch, and viciously jealous of Darcy, the femme part of the other young couple who joins them. It's a very funny, kind of sad examination of butch/femme dynamics, the nature of camp and performance in queer relationships ... and I think there's a hefty element of, like, "Is it WRONG to want to perform, and have others perform with me? It's annoying for SURE, but is it *wrong*?" Which I thought was excellent, because a lot of classic femme performance involves behaviors we've started to call out as toxic. It reminded me a lot of my ex-wife, who was definitely the stereotypical femme.
Is it bad to be a stereotypical femme? A performance femme, I mean, not just a lesbian who happens to wear makeup? I don't think so. But are there going to be issues in a relationship like that --? For sure. Communication issues, drama, all kinds of delicious things to read about (and to experience, to a certain extent, if you enjoy dramatic highs and lows).
I also really enjoyed the one-two punch of Fantastic Orgy and Goodbye to Berlin, which were written during the same period, one by a straight German author and one by Christopher Isherwood (gay, English). Isherwood gets a lot of flack, or maybe it's mostly self-flagellation, about his ignorance re: the rise of fascism in Germany at the time, but Goodbye to Berlin definitely faces the issue head-on -- it's not the focus of the novel, but it is the heart and theme. Whereas Fantastic Orgy references it only obliquely, metaphorically, if at all. Still, both were excellent and moving. Fantastic Orgy is much shorter and more bizarre, sort of sci-fi/fantasy: there are automatons, freak shows, magical gardens filled with rich people and tigers, fairy-tale type stories of beggars and aristocrats.
Death Book and Someone Is in My House are both art books by directors Bruce LaBruce and David Lynch. Death Book is photography only, explicit queer photos of death, similar to Yukio Mishima's Death of a Man but more gory. I mean, REALLY gory! "Someone Is in My House" is mixed-media art by Lynch, including standard paintings, photography and sculpture, matchbook drawings, etc. Both excellent.
And then for Transparent Things and Mother Night -- neither had a super-affecting story, emotionally, but both were great. Transparent Things follows a man named Hugh Person (insert Brian Griffin writing joke here: "I'll call my protagonist Norm, because he's Normal. That's one for the scholars 100 years down the line.") who goes to Switzerland for the third time in his life, and the story cycles back through his memories there -- the death of his father, the day he met his wife, etc. Mother Night follows an American double agent who wrote propaganda for Nazi Germany but also smuggled messages to the American military, and it deals with the question of identity and what you become when you "pretend" to be something -- whether the main character, Howard, really was a Nazi or not, whether it matters, whether he deserves to die.
Overall a great month of reading.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-01 10:49 pm (UTC)My absolute best friend in the world is a trans woman and I'm cis.
I read Mother Night a really long time ago. Kurt Vonnegut is a really interesting writer.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-03 09:42 am (UTC)Yeah, I've always had diverse friend groups and I found it really sad that the author thinks everyone is secretly hateful, to such an extent. I think everyone who leans left has spent some time privately cataloging their internalized biases but I found it really hard to believe that the *majority* of people with diverse friend groups are secretly seething about The Damn Minorities in such a dark, violent way. It was such a major assumption of the book that, even if it had been well-written, I still would have disliked it. If we give the author grace and decide that SHE doesn't think that way about her friends, I still think it's unhealthy for her to assume they're thinking that way about her.