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Total: 17 books

-- Madness by Sam Sax;
-- Darkness Visible by William Styron;
-- Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior;
-- The Long March by William Styron;
-- In the Clap Shack by William Styron;
-- Conclave by Robert Harris;
-- Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker;
-- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima;
-- The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai;
-- The Tale of a Niggun by Elie Wiesel;
-- Train Dreams by Denis Johnson;
-- DK Eyewitness: Vietnam War by Stuart Murray;
-- On Killing by Dave Grossman;
-- Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse;
-- Casa Valentina by Harvey Fierstein;
-- Vietnam: A Complete Photographic History by Michael Maclear;
-- Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien.

Poetry, a bite-sized memoir, a comic book, a war novella, a play, a political thriller, an art book, a short novel, a Japanese novella, an illustrated poem, a Western novella, a children's nonfiction book, two very opposing nonfiction books, another play (gay this time), a photo book, and a National Book Award winner -- it's a pretty good balance. Only three of the books were really big and meaty; the rest were small and varied enough to keep things fun.

I made it about halfway through "We Bury Our Dead," a nonfiction book about a murder at Harvard that sort of muses about archaeology and history, memory and meaning. It's well-written, and when I do pick it up, I blitz through several chapters at a time. But then I leave it untouched for days.

Least favorite book ... On Killing, but even that had value, was worth reading. And I got through it in one sitting, even though it's pretty thick. On the one hand, it's a compassionate book to Vietnam vets and makes some valid points about PTSD and man's resistance to killing other people. But it's also an unashamed propaganda piece, and the author has used it to launch his career teaching U.S. policemen to shoot anyone who doesn't obey orders quickly enough. If it weren't for what the author's done with it, I would have rated it 4 stars -- despite several rhetorical flaws, including faulty research. But knowing the motive behind it, what he's done with it, I had to rate it a 3, and it's left a bad taste in my mouth for days. I'd recommend Achilles in Vietnam instead. It makes many of the same insightful points about PTSD and murder, and it's also compassionate, but it's much more frank and realistic. It doesn't shy away from the atrocities in Vietnam.

Favorite book ... ooh, that's tough! Illustrator II got me back into drawing. The Long March and Going After Cacciato are excellent war novels; TLM is more subtle, GAC is more beautiful. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea is probably the best book I read this month; writing-wise I'd rate it above all the others. But, like On Killing, this one is more difficult to rate when you add the context of Mishima's life and death to it. Without that context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written allegory about the perils of Japanese nationalism. With the context, it's a chilling, beautifully-written manifesto. Train Dreams is short, lyrical, gritty, and haunting -- it takes a nonlinear view of a man's life on the frontier at the turn of the century, with elements of magical realism. 

But all things weighed, I gotta go with Casa Valentina. It's a fictionalization of the Casa Susanna story -- blisteringly funny and heart-wrenching, also an excellent time-capsule peek into queer struggles/discourse that have completely changed over time, to the point where they're unrecognizable. And in a battle between five good straight books and one good queer book, the queer book is always gonna win with me XD (Wait, did I just classify Barker and Mishima as straight?? "Sailor" is definitely a "straight" story, no textual queerness, but queerness haunts it; "Illustrator" of course is very queer, textually and subtextually. But "Casa Valentina" is a Queer Story through-and-through).

Total: 17 books

— Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie;
— Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights by Granand;
— Loverboy by Irwin Hasen;
— Crash by J.G. Ballard;
— Rainbow Man by M.J. Engh;
— It Waits in the Woods by Josh Malerman;
— Boy by James Hanley;
— Endless Fall: A Little Chronicle by Mohamed Leftah;
— Hi Honey, I'm Homo!: Sitcoms, Specials, and the Queering of American Culture by Matt Baume;
— Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan;
— Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville;
— The Clown by Heinrich Böll;
— Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad;
— The Melting by Lize Spit;
— White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky;
— Henry Henry by Allen Bratton;
— Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.

Still reading:

— Silence by Shusaku Endo;
— Olivia by Dorothy Strachey
— School for Barbarians by Erika Mann.

So many good standouts this month.

( Read more... )

(I went to the zoo on Saturday and a 7-hour hike on Sunday! I'm beat).

Total: 8 books

— The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam by Yahiya Emerick;
— Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha;
— Encounters with the Paranormal: Science, Knowledge and Belief edited by Kendrick Frazier;
— Escape from St. Hell by Lewis Hancox;
— Triads by Poppy Z. Brite;
— It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese;
— Molecules by Theodore Gray;
— Reactions by Theodore Gray.

Random others:

— An old issue of Skeptical Inquirer that I read cover to cover
— The Autopsy of Herbert West (zine)
— The first chapter of a book on treating LGBTQ patients in a therapy setting that a friend sent to me
— Gargoyles 12 and Gargoyles: Quest 1 & 2!

Total: 32 "books"

— Herbert West, Re-Animator by H.P. Lovecraft (censored audiobook read by Jeffrey Combs)
— Adversary by Blue Delliquanti;
— Re-Animator by Jeff Rovin;
— Faces: Paul Davis Portraits by Paul Davis;
— Kubla Khan: A Pop-Up Version of Coleridge's Classic by Nick Bantock;
— The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon;
— The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson;
— The Dead by James Joyce;
— Mineola, Mineola by Paula Martinac;
— Herbert West: Reanimator (uncensored text edition) by H.P. Lovecraft;
— Diary of a Madman by Lu Xun;
— Re-Animator: Death is Just the Beginning by Steven Philip Jones;
— Pickman's Model by H.P. Lovecraft;
— Re-Animator: Dawn of the Reanimator by Bill Spangler;
— Cold Air by H.P. Lovecraft;
— Army of Darkness vs. Re-Animator by James Kuhoric;
— The Thing on the Doorstep by H.P. Lovecraft;
— The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan;
— The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft;
— Chartwell Manor by Glenn Head;
— Hamlet by William Shakespeare;
— The Prince by Niccolo Macchiavelli;
— James Baldwin: The Last Interview by James Baldwin;
— Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens by Kate Bornstein;
— No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics by Justin Hall;
— The Old Gun by Mo Yan;
— Barn Burning by William Faulkner;
— A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf;
— The Legacy by Virginia Woolf;
— The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio;
— Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang;
— Lesbian Lists by Dell Richards.

And I'm currently on page 253 of "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara and Chapter 8 of "A Court of Thorns and Roses" by ... well, I don't know the author's name off-hand T__T Sorry.

Wow! I thought I didn't do a lot of reading this month; if you'd asked me off the top of my head, I would have only remembered the Re-Animator comics because they were so bad! And "Heart of Thomas" because it was so recent, and so good XD A lot of these are novellas and short stories, all of which were excellent. And I get to make the rules, so I'm counting them as books XD

This month I read Kate Bornstein for the first time, sank deep into a Re-Animator obsession, realized I actually really like Lovecraft's writing (I used to HATE it), finally finished "No Straight Lines," an anthology I read the first 50% of years ago, read a cookbook front-to-finish, and got my socks blown off by "Chartwell Manor" and "Heart of Thomas," one very American comic book about molestation/rape at a boys' boarding school and one very Japanese manga about the same thing.

Total: 20 books

— The Odyssey by T.E. Lawrence;
— Odyssey by Stanley Lombardo;
— Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming by Jonathan Shay;
— Lighter than My Shadow by Katie Green;
— The Inferno by Dante Alighieri;
— Fame by Andy Warhol;
— If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson;
— Three Character Classic;
— Metamorphoses by Ovid;
— The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope;
— Assassinated Beauty: Photographs of Manic Street Preachers by Kevin Cummins;
— The Bhagavad Gita by Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa;
— This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadusz Borowski;
— Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake;
— Bisclavret by Marie de France;
— Six Lais d'Amour by Marie de France;
— Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre;
— On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy by Elizabeth Bruenig;
— The Analects by Confucius;
— Daodejing by Lao Tzu.

Books I read significant chunks of:

— Private Shaw and Public Shaw by Stanley Weintraub;
— David Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones;
— Angels Before Man by Rafael Nicolas.

And I don't normally count fanfics on here but I want to give a shout out to Forward but Never Forget/XOXO by Lullabyes, the Silco-centric Arcane fic I've been reading...it's almost 300K now, and it's higher quality than most novels I've read lately 💀

Of the books I read, my favorites were Bisclavret, Metamorphoses, and Warhol's Fame. Also worth noting is "On Human Slaughter," a very slim book collecting Elizabeth Bruenig's articles on the death penalty for The Atlantic. The only book I didn't particularly like is the Bhagavad-Gita, which I expected to LOVE... I think it reminded me too much of the religious schooling I got as a kid