Happy autumn, bookworms! And what could be better, on a crisp fall day, than donning your comfiest sweater and curling up with a book?
I’m excited to get back into writing about books! After my dishonorable discharge from PhD school in 2016, I installed a block in my brain around criticism, writing about books, and having thoughts about stuff more generally. I put myself through hell in grad school, trying to be smart enough and live up to my own unrealistic expectations. My experience there quite literally drove me insane. So, you can see why there’d be a block. I’m hoping that with this blog, I’ll be able to ease back into criticism in a gentle way, and hopefully not cause another mental breakdown. Or if I do have another mental breakdown, at least now I’ll be able to blog about it. And THAT’S using lemons to make lemonade! ;)
These are all the books I read in the past ~2 months or so, in no particular order.
THE BACCHAE (Euripedes, 407 BC) By golly, this play has everything! Hordes of frothing, hallucinating women…cattle stripped of their flesh…fountains of milk and wine spurting from the soil…living mountains…emasculated kings…brutal dismemberments…shapeshifting gods…cannibalism…cross-dressing…everything! This is one of my favorite works of literature. I read it for the first time in college, and I’ve enjoyed revisiting it every couple of years since then. It is a bloody, brutal phantasmagoria that depicts what happens when man refuses to acknowledge the godliness of the gods. The moral of the play can be summed up with this quotation, spoken by Cadmus following the tragedy’s climax: “If there is anyone who holds deities in contempt, let him consider this man’s [Pentheus’] death and believe in the gods.”
THE PUSSY DETECTIVE (DuVay Knox, 2022) I was sold on this book as soon as I heard the premise. A detective who specializes in lost and missing pussy? Genius. I was expecting the book to follow a more traditional mystery-noir-detective plot trajectory, but that’s not really what it’s about. The pussy detective is less a “detective” as such, and more of a sexual-psychospiritual healer. The mysteries he solves are inner mysteries – mysteries of the human psyche, and spirit – and pussy. This is a bawdy, funny novel about spiritual regrooving. The thing that really makes it pop is the style. DuVay Knox is a born wordsmith, and you can practically taste the delight he takes in the possibilities of language – taking it apart, putting it back together in new ways: what his narrator calls “being Ebonically incorrect.” The ending leaves plenty of room for a sequel, or even a series, which I would definitely be excited to read should it come to fruition.
DETRANSITION, BABY (Torrey Peters, 2021) A beautiful piece of literary fiction, a sort of dramedy of manners, hyper attuned to the emotional-energetic matrix of transfeminine experience. For Torrey Peters’ characters, even in detransition there is no escape from the monologue, the internal/infernal perpetual armchair gender theorist. Torrey writes these characters so well that it almost hurts to read. I wanted to give the characters a Xanax. I wanted to give them a hug. I wanted them to calm down, they need to discover meditation or something. It feels like a weird way to praise Torrey’s writing, but I think it’s a testament to the book’s success that you kind of get sick of these people. Or at least I did, which maybe says more about me than it does about the book.
DARRYL (Jackie Ess, 2021) A hilarious, searching novel about the struggle of types to become individuals. One of the most genius uses of “character” as a literary device I’ve ever seen. The book is structured as a series of comic monologues; it could be performed as a one-man play and I bet it would be a big hit. Generically it begins as a sex farce, then darkens and deepens into a transgressive psychosexual thriller (or maybe it’s a dark psychosexual thriller from the beginning, but the narrator is too naive to realize that’s what’s happening?) I read it twice, first on my own and second with my book club. Some of the people in my book club didn’t like Darryl as a character – they felt he was unlikable, or even that he was too much of a cuck and that that made him irritating. I definitely liked the book more the first time. The second time I did get a little sick of the character. But the comedy is so sparkling, and the voice is so perfect and precise. It carried me through. Jackie Ess is the smartest kind of writer – the kind who doesn’t ever feel the need to prove her intelligence. Adopting Darryl’s voice allows her to poke and prod at the excesses of contemporary subcultural grouping mechanisms without moralizing or seeming disingenuous or rude.
LAZY EYES (James Nulick, 2022) James Nulick is frighteningly brilliant. His sentences are silky, seductive, mysterious, prismatic, like glittering jewels. He inhabits his characters like a shadowy puppeteer. James has told me he’s not a believer but I almost don’t believe him. Or maybe I do, maybe he’s not a believer, but his writing is – kind of like how Courtney Love says she’s not psychic but her lyrics are. My favorite stories in the collection were the ones involving animals – “Claws,” where the narrator is a cat yearning to be reincarnated as a human, and “The Black Doberman,” which anatomizes the erotic tension between a couple and their dog. Dark, disturbing, haunted, and haunting stuff.
NARROW ROOMS (James Purdy, 1978) This book is wild! It’s like…mythological gay retard gothic sex melodrama set in the Appalachian mountains. It is gory and horrifying. It also has some really weird sex scenes. I like a book that depicts the abject horror of being a gay man. I wonder if that’s why Purdy hasn’t been canonized, even in the world of gay literature: his work is too bleak and distressing to fit into popular historical narratives of diversity, assimilation, rising above struggle, etc. It’s not a pleasant vision of homosexuality, or life, or love, or fate. But I think it’s a very deep one, and true.
IN A SHALLOW GRAVE (James Purdy, 1975) One of the strangest and most moving love stories I’ve ever read. There is a comic element here that’s missing from Narrow Rooms, I think in part due to its first-person narrator. The narrator of this book was disfigured in Vietnam, and all his bones and arteries and veins are on the outside of his body. He sits in his old farmhouse writing letters to the woman he thought he would marry, who is terrified of him now on account of his inside-out appearance. I don't want to spoil what happens, it's too perfect, so if anything about that description sounds interesting to you, just read it. I think it rivals Wuthering Heights, in terms of wild, Gothic, weird, funny, slightly supernatural love stories.
MARIGOLD (Troy James Weaver, 2016) This is such a beautiful book on every level, from the style to the pacing to the voice to the interior design to the cover. It’s a work of art that fits in your pocket. Other authors & presses should take notes. Troy’s voice is so precisely his, when you read it you go: Only one person in the entire history of the universe could have written this. And that’s especially impressive given the book's brevity and economy of means. There is so much feeling in this book, contained in so few words. It is intense and poetic and bleakly comic. It cuts clean through to the bone.
HOW TO HEAL YOURSELF WHEN NO ONE ELSE CAN (Amy B. Scher, 2020) I didn’t read this straight through, just skimmed parts and skipped around to get to the exercises. The basic thesis of the book is that many physical illnesses are caused by thought patterns buried deep within the subconscious mind. Negative experiences from your past, or even experiences from past lives, “install” harmful thoughts and beliefs that manifest in various physical and psychic symptoms. The book includes exercises to help readers hack into the subconscious mind and reprogram these harmful thoughts and beliefs, as a means of energetic self-healing. I found the argument of the book compelling, but so far haven’t noticed any improvements in my health after doing the exercises. The idea that my subconscious mind is making me sick in order to protect me resonates on a very deep level. I’m going to continue with the exercises, and will write another review if I see any improvement in my symptoms.
THE RICHEST MAN IN BABYLON (George S. Clason, 1926) My uncle recommended I read this to learn more about personal finance. I read the first few chapters. It’s kind of boring but it has good advice if you’re interested in developing a healthier relationship with money. My favorite piece of advice in the book is to remember that a portion of all the money you earn is yours to keep. I never really thought about it that way before.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (OSCAR WILDE, 1891) RIP Oscar Wilde – you would have loved TWITTER. I didn’t actually finish this, and I wasn’t paying very close attention to the 40 or so pages that I did read. I just couldn’t get on the right wavelength, I guess. I did however enjoy the aphorisms that form the book’s famous “Preface," including this one: "All art is quite useless."
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