Edgar's Book Round-Up, February 2022

I have learned nothing from my mistakes, so we’re still monthly! I’m running an average of three books a week somehow? The historical events keep coming hot and fast, so do what you can, recognize when you can’t do anything, and use the latter time to read some books. Or something. I don’t fucking know. Links go to our Bookshop.

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The cover, which was also a major component in deciding to read this one.

We lead off this round-up with Mona Awad’s All’s Well. I’ll admit, I snagged this audiobook from the library because it was (1) available and (2) looked like a keyboard smash of stuff I was going to like anyway. I mean: Miranda, our heroine, had her acting career ended in a bad fall, which also left her in constant pain (and with an attendant disregard for exactly how much of any given painkiller you should take), steadily alienating her friends and, even worse, her students. But when she meets three mysterious strangers, she finds the student-forced production of Macbeth she almost had to direct transformed as if by magic into her dream Shakespeare project: All’s Well That Ends Well. Of course, Miranda is by turns sympathetic, obnoxiously self-pitying, and totally self-absorbed; in her increasingly delirious joy at the magical strangers’ gifts, she rationalizes and dismisses her own bad behavior; she’s a fucking treat to watch, if you, like me, already like unlikeable leads. Awad’s prose, too, was lovely, crisp and cool without ever allowing us out of Miranda’s truly awful headspace. I’m very excited to read more of her work, and it was a memorable start to the month.

I next finished, in ebook form, Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor. Following on Akata Witch and Akata Warrior, it did a fantastic job of tying up some of the threads left dangling by the first two books (discussed here), while leaving enough undone to allow for a return to the characters. I stand by what I said of the first two books, and will once again note that the series is a complete delight, the characters developing in interesting ways, the setting gaining depth with every novel. This Tor review offers some more detailed notes on this specific volume, which also reminded me of how much I love Okorafor’s construction of Nsibidi, the writing system of the Leopard People. I don’t know if there are plans for subsequent volumes, but I would certainly welcome them if they arrived. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

This is actually the revised edition, not the one I read, but I’m a sucker for this kind of illustration.

The first print book in this round-up is Edwin Gentzler’s Contemporary Translation Theories, which I got the last time I was at the KU libraries. I assumed from the title that it would an eat-your-vegetables sort of proposition, with good information but prose like corn chips left out for three days. To my delight, this was not the case: Gentzler writes like someone who loves this shit, and while trying to maintain academic distance for the purposes of explanation, has some Opinions about the subject. We do spend a lot of time on Ezra Pound — whose terrible politics become even more annoying when contrasted with his pretty good, or at least interesting, opinions on translation — but even more interesting is Gentzler’s discussion of poststructuralist approaches to the topic. It’s worth noting, as an aside, that I say all this with the caveat that Gentzler is still very much operating in an academic mode, and as such, any thrilling surprises in style are more like tasting notes about whiskey — I might pick up cloves and chocolate, but it’s still whiskey, and if you already don’t like whiskey, this one won’t magically taste like a syrupy liqueur. I definitely enjoyed it, though.

Next up, and back-to-back, we’ve got The First Sister and The Second Rebel by Linden A. Lewis, which I read in audiobook form. And I do want to note that the audiobook is very good: all the readers were top-notch. Also worth noting is the fact that these books, too, were very much My Shit, hitting a nice sweet spot between the well-defined space opera of the Expanse and the chaotic, sword-wielding queers of the Locked Tomb. The novels follow several narrators — the increasingly unstable “First Sister” of the Juno, the semi-disgraced duellist Lito, and Hiro, Lito’s former partner, among others — as they are swept up in the seemingly-endless war between the Geans (Earth and Mars) and the Icarii (Mercury and Venus), and the rising tide of rebellion from the oppressed Asters, as the AI once banished to the outer limits of the solar system waits in the wings. Honestly, because I read these so close together, I don’t quite recall what was in the first book and what was in the second, but I’m really excited for volume three, which is ostensibly due out later this year. Queer and full of adventure, it’s quite the story, and Lewis is definitely one to watch.

The cover, which I think does a pretty good job of representing the contents.

Sort of casually, and almost by accident, I ended up reading H. Melt’s There Are Trans People Here, which I picked up on a whim when I stopped by Wise Blood to collect another book I’d ordered, and do some browsing. I was not familiar with Melt’s work, but There Are Trans People Here certainly made an impression on me — and, largely, a positive one. The collection is almost self-consciously timely and allusive: “At the Dream Job,” for example, refers to Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir of an abusive queer relationship, but the “dream job” of the title is instead a feminist bookstore at which the speaker’s gender is regularly erased; Chelsea Manning features fairly heavily; the back matter, with a list of references and a study guide(!), makes up roughly ten percent of the book’s total page count. Which is all cool and fun, but is it good? On balance, generally, I’d say yes, but with some caveats. Melt’s “Trans Day of Revenge,” for example, takes its title from the unbeatable EP, and song, by short-lived punk phenoms G.L.O.S.S. — but where the inspiration is raw, hard-hitting and angry, Melt imagines that:

playgrounds will be full
of trans children laughing
learning & loving
isn’t that the best
revenge.

Which is lovely, of course, as a sentiment, but to set up the comparison with G.L.O.S.S.’s anthemic track is to invite disappointment. Melt’s reliance on the semi-precious cut of so much of contemporary free verse is also understandable — and well-executed, don’t get me wrong — but runs the risk of mawkishness, just a hair too earnest when contrasted with the often-biting referents, and especially when accompanied by black-and-white collages of noted trans people. I genuinely enjoyed reading the collection, but it never quite delivered on what I thought it promised.

Of course, I got it when I was actually picking up John Darnielle’s Devil House. Darnielle is, of course, the Mountain Goats guy — but as one of the bookstore employees noted, it’s easier to get excited about a new Darnielle novel than about new Mountain Goats material, at this point. It’s a credit to Darnielle’s abilities as a writer, because Mountain Goats are tough to beat, but his capacity for character study and story energy is, if anything, coming to outclass his ability to write catchy, gut-wrenching tunes. Here, he turns to the tropes of true crime: Gage, a fairly successful true crime writer, moves into a building where a terrible murder happened at the height of the satanic panic, aiming to tell the tale of what really happened in the abandoned porn store. But the novel is haunted by Gage’s breakout work, and by what happens when vulnerable people collide in moments of intensity, and by which stories can even be told. At the risk of giving too much away, I’ll stop there, but it’s a worthy successor to Darnielle’s previous works, which I also liked a lot.

Which brings me to the penultimate day of the month, on which, after crowded weekend, I finally got to finish some books that had been lingering in the “I could just sit down and knock this out” zone for days. I’m sure we’ve all been there: that last [whatever number of pages], bookmark clinging to the spine, the itchy annoyance of doing other stuff when I’ve got stuff to read. I say all this because I don’t recall the exact order in which I finished these on that particular day (and yeah, I know it was only a couple days ago, but I barely remember December at this point).

The cover, which is also fine. It’s fine!

So I’ll lead off with Mary Oliver’s House of Light. In the interests of full disclosure, I did not come to this collection in good faith; I came to it with the vague sense that I didn’t really like the handful of decontextualized lines that get passed around (and, of course, memeified) and wanted to know what I was sensing that rubbed me the wrong way, so I got the ebook from the library and found the fuck out. And like, I get what the draw might be: Oliver’s delocalized pastoralism, her general sense of “spirituality,” and her digestible approach to punctuation and line construction could definitely hit just right, in a certain frame of mind. But, as is probably obvious, I was not in that frame of mind, and it resolutely did not land for me. As Oliver says, in “The Gift”:

…mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.

Her solemnity in the face of nature is fine, but the nature she describes could be almost anywhere in the northeast quadrant of the U.S. — except for a few poems set elsewhere, which were not improved by the remove, most notably in one about being in an airport and watching a woman clean out the trashcans, which Oliver reports as if talking about one of the herons or geese or whatever. So that’s kind of… not great. Also not great is her insistence on a very present but uninterrogated poetic speaker: the “I” is ever-present and comments on everything, but without a sense of interiority; a very good camera, set up on a timer. And these elements combined absolutely set my teeth on edge. If I may: let the soft animal of your body love what it loves — but mine does not love this. (Watch me have to walk this back at some point.)

Up next (or, you know, at some point that day) was Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell. Working down the ladder of intensity from suicide cults to MLMs and “cult fitness,” Montell analyzes how “cult” groups use language to form in-group bonds, stall propensity for critical thinking, and isolate their members or ostracize former members. Montell, herself a linguist and the daughter of a Synanon escapee (who is himself a neurologist) marshals the tools of sociolinguistics in an easy, readable way, peppering the text with personal anecdotes that are well-balanced by credible sources. Personally, I especially appreciated her analyses of the uses of thought-stopping cliches, both in cultish groups and in the general population. It was fun, and I’d definitely recommend it if you, too, have been bombarded by friends reaching out about essential oils and weight-loss schemes.

The cover. On reflection, I like the pinkness of the sky a lot.

The audiobook that had been lingering at, like, half an hour for way too long was Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby. Recommended by my favorite bookstagrammer (and personal friend, for full disclosure), Razorblade Tears tells the story of two men, one Black, one white, both formerly incarcerated, who band together to find answers in the deaths of their sons, who were married. Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack — Buddy Lee’s good-ol’-boy attitude to race, his and Ike’s feelings about their dead sons specifically and homosexuality in general, the Virginia setting and all that that entails — and some of that unpacking slows the first quarter of the novel. But once the story clicks to the top of that first drop on the roller coaster, it runs its course with gathering intensity, the characters gaining depth as the plot in which they are embroiled gains complexity. I’ll definitely be looking for more of Cosby’s work.

I know it throws off my rhythm of image placement; I don’t particularly care. This cover is fucking unbeatable.

I’ll close this round-up with a book I have been looking forward to since it was first announced almost two years ago: Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. For clarity, I’ve been in contact with Gretchen for a very long time, and have followed her writing more or less since she’s been making it available. So I knew I was in for some uncomfortably visceral horror, which the synopsis of the novel confirmed: a testosterone-borne plague has turned everyone with too much T in their system into a ravening monster; the novel follows two trans women as they harvest unprocessed estrogen from the monsters’ testicles in order to survive — but it’s the other women out there they need to worry about. If that all sounds unbearably gross, let me stress that it’s way nastier than whatever you’re thinking. The specifics of the plague are truly grody, and pretty much any awful thing any human can do to another happens, in excruciating detail, on the page, in Gretchen’s crisp yet sensuous prose. But terrible things become less terrible without contrast, and there are both incredibly funny moments along with tender, vulnerable ones, and, in a pleasant surprise, some closely-observed and often moving nature writing. I was always going to say this, but I am saying it anyway: if you can, please read this book. It’s so fucking good.

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