December Discussion Post

[monkiainen]

It's time for our monthly discussion post! This post will remain open for you to contribute at any time, so no pressure. Even if you didn't get around to reading any of your selected books or opted out of participating for the month, you're still more than welcome to take part in the discussion.

Please copy and paste this in the comments!
<b>Who was your buddy this month?</b><br /><b>What books were chosen for you?</b><br /><b>Did you manage to read your books? Which ones?</b><br /><b>If you read more than one, did you enjoy them? What was your favorite?</b><br /><b>Would you recommend your chosen book(s)?</b><br /><b>Did you read anything else this month, outside of your chosen books?</b>

Comments

[fred_mouse]

Books selected for me by dancesontrains were The Southern Books Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (Grady Hendrix), The Dispatcher (John Scalzi), and The Talented Mr Ripley (Patricia Highsmith).

I've started the first one, and I haven't been able to get past one of the early scenes, which is very cringe comedy everything is going to go horribly wrong in a social way. And this is not the way to get me to care for the character. None of the earlier writing was enough to motivate me to keep going. The second, which I thought I could borrow, is in fact not the book I thought it was, and there are no copies in our state library system at all! The third turns out to be far more popular than a book of its age, and I've put a hold request on it that means I'll probably get to it in February.

So, not the most successful of months. However! In selecting books for dancesontrains, I was inspired to go find my copy of one of the books I picked for them, and read that. Dead Collection (Isaac Fellman) was a great read, lots of really clever world building and tiny details and I loved it. 5 stars.

[monkiainen]

Who was your buddy this month? siberian_angel
What books were chosen for you? Watership Down by Richard Adams, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, World without End by Ken Follett
Did you manage to read your books? Which ones? I read Watership Down and And Then There Were None, and I'm almost finished with World without End
If you read more than one, did you enjoy them? What was your favorite? All of my choices this month have been enjoyable books. My favourite of them is World without End without question. I just love historical novels with a massive amount of world-building!
Would you recommend your chosen book(s)? Yes, to all of them.
Did you read anything else this month, outside of your chosen books? I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

[dancesontrains]

Who was your buddy this month?
fred_mouse.

What books were chosen for you?
Killing Jericho - William Hussey, Dead Collections - Isaac Fellman, The Javelin Program - Derin Edala.

Did you manage to read your books? Which ones? I chose 'Dead Collections' as it was in my physical TBR. I did finish it, though I almost dropped it 60 pages in as I found the love interest character deeply irritating.


If you read more than one, did you enjoy them? What was your favorite?
I decided against searching for the others, as I'd either have had to purchase them or dig them up from the local library system.

Would you recommend your chosen book(s)?
Not really overall? It was a clearly personally felt exploration of gender and transness and archiving and love for flawed canons that leads people to write slash or femslash - oh, and the MC, Solomon, is a vampire, who was turned by doctors in order to keep him going after he died in an accident roughly a year after starting physical transition. It is set in San Fransisco in 2018 and feels incredibly of it's time and place, which is either a positive or a negative dependeding on your patience for the Bay Area.

As a fellow trans man, I was excited enough over this to purchase it despite my usual disinterest in vampires and vampire narratives. I was also looking forward to the romance, which sounded cute.

Positives - the language was beautiful, sense of time and place strong, the trans feelings and characters throughout the story clearly heartfelt, the bits of vampire worldbuilding we see are intriguing (with the disclaimer that I don't usually read vampire stories). The overall writing style with excerpts from the archives the MC is working on scattered in between the main story was pretty neat, and I found the ending touching. I also did finish reading it despite almost dropping it after 60 odd pages. I also appreciated the conversations about the MC's Jewish heritage and his relationship to it, though I'm not Jewish myself.

Negatives - I hugely disliked the romance as I found the love interest irritating. They (pronoun used deliberately, though it's not one they use when they first meet the MC) had a tendency to push the boundaries of the MC withoutout asking - e.g. when he refuses to tell them his deadname directly, they work it out and dig up decades-old listserv conversations the two of them had in their shared (fictional) fic fandom. I found this, combined with some other fetishising behaviour over his vampireness and transness, discomforting. And I didn't like the LI enough to make up for that, though I was more sympathetic by the end (people who haven't really confronted their own non-normative gender identity tend to behave weirdly to those who are more aware of theirs.) That refusal to confront gender is a strong theme across the whole book; sadly, the only cis lesbian is transphobic and I would have liked to meet any trans women.

The LI is also on the AO3 board - an old-school BNF - and in the old listserv posts they describe writing femslash as something harder than slash but that should be done. I was reminded of this infamous meta on the topic - https://fanlore.org/wiki/Eating_Your_Veggies.

Not really a positive or a negative - the mystery hinted at is slight and quickly answered; this is very much a character piece.

Did you read anything else this month, outside of your chosen books? Stuff for my university module, volumes 2 3 and 4 of 'Akira' by Katsuhiro Otomo, 'The Mystery of the Meanest Teacher' by Ryan North and Derek Charm (a children's graphic novel focused on younger versions of John Constantine and Zatanna at boarding school) and 'Wonder Woman: The True Amazon' by Jill Thompson (a beautifully painted kid-friendly version of Wonder Woman's origin before leaving for Man's World), a handful of comic book single issues.

[yourivy]

Thank you for elaborating so thoroughly on the book you read! It was genuinely interested to read about, although I am sorry to hear that you ended up not liking it a lot.

[dancesontrains]

I did end up mulling it over a lot after reading it! So it succeeded in that way, at least.

[fred_mouse]

Agree with so much of what you've said here. I really loved it, but I also found the love interest to be really poorly written. I came out of it feeling like it was a bit like reading Rainbow Rowel's Fangirl but for an older and more jaded audience. I think my one sentence review was 'I loved it but I have no idea who I would recommend it to'.

[dancesontrains]

Yeah, I also found a fair amount to touch my heart in ‘Dead Collections’. Despite my pile of complaints, I did rec (with heavy reservations) to a non binary Jewish librarian friend who lives in the Bay Area; I think they’d find the lead’s journey relatable, at the very least, and people on Goodreads were saying the locale was well drawn.

[fred_mouse]

I have also found a couple of friends to rec it to -- queer, either trans or librarian, heavily involved in fan culture, readers of fantasy and likely to appreciate the vampirism / disability themes.