Book Post #1: The 2017 Experience

Original Publication Date: 2018–01–17

I like reading books, particularly novels. It’s enjoyable for me, and one of the more effective ways for me to escape the often-stressful real world. My reading productivity is highly correlated with my work productivity; so, the more work I need to do, the more books I’ll read.

Often after finishing a book, I have a few thoughts on the characters or the author’s narrative choices or so on. I’m pretty good at recording these half-formed thoughts. However, I’ve historically been terrible at either returning to these thoughts or exploring them properly in an actual piece of writing. In 2018, I’d like that to change.

As an introductory piece, I thought I’d write about my reading experiences in 2017. Of the fifty-odd books I read, most fit into three distinct clusters: 1) the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett; 2) LGBT-themed works (mainly fiction) and 3) books by sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold (my favourite author). I’ve written a few words on each cluster below.

Cluster 1: Discworld (Terry Pratchett)

I discovered Terry Pratchett in 2016 following some specific recommendations from a friend. I’d never read any Pratchett as a child. Nearly all take place in Pratchett’s Discworld, and I had always been intimidated by the sheer size of the fictional universe. Before his death in 2015, Pratchett had published 41 Discworld books, consisting of around 7 or 8 mostly independent subseries plus a few standalone works.

In any case, after reading about three City Watch novels (a prominent Discworld subseries) in 2016 and enjoying them immensely, I began tackling the universe as a whole in 2017. I started four new Discworld series: the Rincewind, Witches, Tiffany Aching and Death subseries.

Of these, I found the Witches and City Watch subseries to be the most enjoyable, particularly the City Watch series. The protagonists of both series (Granny Weatherwax and Sam Vimes, respectively) have strong moral codes tempered with charming idiosyncrasies that render them a pleasure to read about. Each series also has a cast of three-dimensional supporting characters, who usually have a compelling personal arc of their own in each respective entry in the series. Over the course of the year, I finished both series.

Pratchett’s writing style features a lot of wit and humour that isn’t expressed directly through the characters themselves; you rarely forget there is a Funny Person delivering this narrative to you. This is both good and bad; it’s hard, sometimes, to lose yourself in the Discworld when Pratchett is being meta or taking cracks at his own characters or throwing in ridiculous amounts of footnotes. The good side is that Pratchett’s style is refreshingly his own. It’s unique. Plus, more often than not, Pratchett succeeds in making you laugh or at least blow air out of your nose. These traits make Discworld novels ideal light reading material: a little bit of Pratchett brightens your day considerably.

Books Read (in order of how I read them)

The Fifth Elephant (City Watch #5)

Night Watch (City Watch #6)

Thud! (City Watch #7)

Mort (Death #1)

Equal Rites (Witches #1)

Snuff (City Watch #8)

Wyrd Sisters (Witches #2)

Witches Abroad (Witches #3)

Moving Pictures (Industrial Revolution #1)

Lords and Ladies (Witches #4)

The Wee Free Men (Tiffany Aching #1)

Maskitude (Witches #5)

The Truth (Industrial Revolution #2)

Reaper Man (Death #2)

Carpe Jugulum Witches #6)

Monstrous Regiment (Industrial Revolution #3)

A Hat Full of Sky (Tiffany Aching #2)

Cluster 2: LGBT

This was the first year I read more than a couple of books with gay or trans themes. Previously, reading queer literature was scary and confronting and so I didn’t really do it. This year, having come to terms with my gender identity, I was free to enjoy books with lesbian characters and romances for the first time. Reading these books was a wonderful escape from some of the harder times this year. It seems ridiculous now that I used to think of myself as aromantic; in hindsight, I just found straight romances boring and totally unappealing.

Of these books, there were a few I really loved and will certainly revisit in the future. One of these was probably the most well-known lesbian-themed book of the 21st century: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel. I didn’t actually realise it was a memoir until I picked it up from the library.

Fun Home isn’t a straightforward memoir. Bechdel is a professional cartoonist, and she uses her trade to tell her story. Using words and illustrations she explores her adolescence, adult life, and relationship with her parents, particularly her father. Bechdel uses a stream of consciousness, nonlinear style which I personally found very accessible. It was easy to get lost in her world, and her challenges and triumphs. Consequently, I finished the book very quickly.

Bechdel skillfully touches on a number of themes: her father’s abusive behaviour, self-acceptance of one’s sexuality, gender nonconformity, mental health, and different kinds of parenting. A key narrative underpinning the memoir is how her father’s twisted relationship with his sexuality warped and distorted the lives of his family members. Bechdel’s line “sexual shame is itself a kind of death” particularly touched me.

Another graphic memoir I really liked was My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, written by Kabi Nagata. The key incident the manga centres around, and opens on, is when Nagata hires a sex worker. Refreshingly, this isn’t seen as a bad thing. Nagata has a whole bunch of awful mental health problems which make just getting to the hotel a personal triumph. She isn’t shy about detailing her experiences with self-hatred, and her honesty made the memoir relatable as well as riveting. While there were a couple of places where the pacing seemed a little slow, Nagata made up for it with some incredibly satisfying final scenes.

In terms of fiction, two books I cherished were The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Annie on My Mind, for very different reasons. The former centres around a girl who is sent to conversion therapy. Before reading Post, conversion therapy had felt very abstract to me. After reading the book, I’m now somewhat grateful I came out relatively late. If I’d figured out I was trans 5 or so years ago or potentially even younger, and my parents came to know too, I expect I would have been sent to conversion therapy of some kind. It’s not every day a book gives you a new, vivid fear, and that’s a testament to Danforth’s writing.

Annie On My Mind, on the other hand, was just charming. I’d gone into the book aware of its reputation as a classic novel, and it delivered. I have the sort of connection to this book that I think a lot of straight women have to Jane Austen novels. It was really, really great.

Books Read (in order of how I read them)

Whipping Girl (Julia Serano, 2007, transgender, lesbian, nonfiction)

Nevada (reread, Imogen Binnie, 2013, transgender, lesbian, fiction)

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the World (Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 2012, gay, fiction)

A Safe Girl To Love (Casey Plett, 2014, transgender, lesbian, fiction)

Fun Home (Alison Bechdel, 2007, lesbian, nonfiction)

Are You My Mother? (Alison Bechdel, 2012, lesbian, nonfiction)

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (Kabi Nagata, 2017, lesbian, nonfiction)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Emily M. Danforth, 2012, lesbian, fiction)

Crossing (Deirdre McCloskey, 1999, transgender, nonfiction)

Annie on My Mind (Nancy Garden, 1982, fiction)

Hunter’s Way (Hunter #1, Gerri Hill, 2005, lesbian, fiction)

Behind the Pine Curtain (Gerri Hill, 2006, lesbian, fiction)

In the Name of the Father (Hunter #2, Gerri Hill, 2007, lesbian, fiction)

Partners (Hunter #3, Gerri Hill, 2008, lesbian, fiction)

Something in the Wine (Jae, 2012, lesbian, fiction)

Too Close to Touch (Georgia Beers, 2006, lesbian, fiction)

How Sweet It Is (Melissa Brayden, 2013, lesbian, fiction)

Mine (Georgia Beers, 2007, lesbian, fiction)

The Blue Place (Aud Torvingen #1, Nicola Griffith,1999, lesbian, fiction)

Stay (Aud Torvingen #2, Nicola Griffith, 2003, lesbian, fiction)

Cluster 3: Bujold

Last year, I had the wonderful experience of discovering my favourite author, Lois McMaster Bujold. Over several months I read her ongoing 16-book series The Vorkosigan Saga from start to finish, and loved almost every moment.* Bujold has a very different style to Terry Pratchett. She isn’t present as a narrator in the same way Pratchett is; rather, everything happens through the perspective of her characters. But her characters are incredible, and real, in a way I’ve not seen before.

This year I explored the two other series she has in print: The Chalion/World of the Five Gods series, and the Sharing Knife series. In the Chalion series, Bujold takes a whole bunch of ideas from various religions and myths about how gods potentially act upon the world and combines them with regional conflict and compelling individual struggle. It’s less ambitious in a worldbulding sense relative to, say, A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, but far more ambitious philosophically. And with far, far more satisfying personal and narrative conclusions.

While the last book (The Hallowed Hunt) is still wonderful in an absolute sense it’s just not as compelling as the first two entries. Bujold twists the religious and spiritual framework she explores in the first two books but the stories of personal development and romantic love underpinning the main plot are less compelling. The main character and his romantic interest are underdeveloped relative to what Bujold is capable of.

I read the Sharing Knife series immediately after I finished the Chalion series, and I was initially worried it would suffer from similar problems. The series is a tale of how two radically different people from two very different cultural backgrounds fall in love and deal with the consequences of their pairing being seen as illegitimate;**while also playing a key role in preventing the destruction of both cultures from an in-vanquishable existential threat. At times, the huge experience, age and power gap in the romantic pairing felt too unbalanced. Dawn is around 20, while her partner Dag is 55. Because Dag is a Lakewalker and not an ordinary person from a normal background like Fawn, he has a bunch of straight-up very fucking cool supernatural skills. As such, he does the majority of the work fighting the enemies of the couple, and the existential threats Malices. This leaves Fawn feeling a little unnecessary at times and a little like a bland “romantic interest” for Dag.

Still, I must stress this really only a minor complaint. Fawn isn’t a bad character by any means; it’s just Bujold has written noticeably more dynamic female characters before, like Cordelia in Shards of Honour. Plus, I’m not really the target audience; I don’t find the classic female fantasy of “strong, independent man to protect and take care of me” very appealing. I suspect if I was less gay I’d find the couple more along the lines of #relationshipgoals rather than #thatpowerimbalancescaresme. This was still one of the few heterosexual romances I actually enjoyed reading about and journeying with. Overall, the series works, and Fawn and Dag’s pairing works.

*If you’re interested, I’d recommend starting with Shards of Honour. The series as a whole is sci-fi, but with way, way more emphasis on character development and personal relationships than sci-fi typically features.

**That description makes it sound like Romeo and Juliet but it really is nothing like Romeo and Juliet.

Books Read (in order of how I read them)

The Curse of Chalion (Chalion #1, 2003)

Paladin of Souls (Chalion #2, 2005)

The Hallowed Hunt (Chalion #3, 2006)

Beguilement/Legacy (The Sharing Knife #1–2, 2006–7)

Passage/Horizon (The Sharing Knife #3–4, 2008–9)