If it's Wednesday, there must be reading
Dec. 7th, 2022 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitMy schedule has changed and my days off are now Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I'm going to try and do these Wednesday reading posts.
Just finished: My re-read of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin books through Blue at the Mizzen--I've never read the last, unfinished one. I always enjoy them, but I found myself thinking "wow, this is more homophobic than I remembered" more often than was comfortable. For example, in my memory the Ledward & Wray stuff only takes up a couple of books, but in fact that plotline extends over 8 books! And both their villainy and their downfall are clearly textually linked to their queerness; they operate by seducing and blackmailing powerful men, their motive seems to be partially the Code Napoleon's decriminalization of sodomy, and their eventual death is linked to their affair with the Sultan's lover (who himself meets a gruesome, literally punitive fate). It's true that O'Brian includes several positive queer male characters (the series has no non-straight women), but they share one common trait: they're celibate. Queer men who have sex with other men are always portrayed in much more negative ways. And the positive queer characters get fewer, and the negative ones more frequent, as the series goes on. So that was disheartening. There's still a lot about the books that I love, and no doubt I'll re-read them again, but I didn't get as much joy from them as I was hoping for.
Also just finished K.J. Charles's Masters in this Hall, a Christmas m/m romance novella just released a few days ago. It's fine, it's typical of Charles's recent work: well-researched, competently written, all a bit thin (especially on characterization) and formulaic, but enjoyable. I found the side characters more engaging that the main ones, which is often my experience, across media and genres.
Currently reading: Being in the mood for queer or queer-coded sea stories, I'm making about my fourth attempt at Moby Dick. Last time I got a bit past the point where the narrative focus shifts from Ishmael and Queequeg to Ahab; I'm not there yet so I'm still in the part that I like. I enjoy Ishmael's wry humor and queerness much more than Ahab's extremely serious intention to attack and dethroneGod the whale, so we'll see if I manage to get past my disappointment this time.
I'm also reading Screams from the Dark, a horror short fiction collection about monsters, edited by Ellen Datlow. It, too, is fine. Some good (Fran Wilde's "The Midway," Priya Sharma's "The Ghost of a Flea, Chikodili Emelumadu's "The Special One," Gemma Files' "Wet Red Grin"), most okay, only one terrible ("Flaming Teeth," by Garry Kilworth, which imo is so clumsy it shouldn't even have been publishable, much less featured in a Datlow anthology). I only skimmed Joyce Carol Oates's story, because Joyce Carol Oates, but it struck me as exploitive. Anyway, I'm only about halfway through and a lot of the bigger name writers are in the second half, so there may be better things to come.
Reading next: Maybe the latest Best Horror of the Year, maybe Waubgeshig Rice's The Moon of the Crusted Snow, which is an apocalyptic novel set in an Ojibwe community in Canada. I grew up in an Ojibwe community in Minnesota (I'm not Indigenous, but my stepfather was) and I'm deeply curious to see what Rice, an own-voices writer, has to say.
As always, I'm taking recs for genre stories about queer men, preferably written by queer men. (Genre fiction, especially sff, by and about queer women seems to be enjoying a boom. It depresses me that the queer male equivalent seems to be stuck in a pattern where queer male writers look down on genre, and male genre writers won't write queer men, although a number of them seem happy to write f/f.)
Just finished: My re-read of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin books through Blue at the Mizzen--I've never read the last, unfinished one. I always enjoy them, but I found myself thinking "wow, this is more homophobic than I remembered" more often than was comfortable. For example, in my memory the Ledward & Wray stuff only takes up a couple of books, but in fact that plotline extends over 8 books! And both their villainy and their downfall are clearly textually linked to their queerness; they operate by seducing and blackmailing powerful men, their motive seems to be partially the Code Napoleon's decriminalization of sodomy, and their eventual death is linked to their affair with the Sultan's lover (who himself meets a gruesome, literally punitive fate). It's true that O'Brian includes several positive queer male characters (the series has no non-straight women), but they share one common trait: they're celibate. Queer men who have sex with other men are always portrayed in much more negative ways. And the positive queer characters get fewer, and the negative ones more frequent, as the series goes on. So that was disheartening. There's still a lot about the books that I love, and no doubt I'll re-read them again, but I didn't get as much joy from them as I was hoping for.
Also just finished K.J. Charles's Masters in this Hall, a Christmas m/m romance novella just released a few days ago. It's fine, it's typical of Charles's recent work: well-researched, competently written, all a bit thin (especially on characterization) and formulaic, but enjoyable. I found the side characters more engaging that the main ones, which is often my experience, across media and genres.
Currently reading: Being in the mood for queer or queer-coded sea stories, I'm making about my fourth attempt at Moby Dick. Last time I got a bit past the point where the narrative focus shifts from Ishmael and Queequeg to Ahab; I'm not there yet so I'm still in the part that I like. I enjoy Ishmael's wry humor and queerness much more than Ahab's extremely serious intention to attack and dethrone
I'm also reading Screams from the Dark, a horror short fiction collection about monsters, edited by Ellen Datlow. It, too, is fine. Some good (Fran Wilde's "The Midway," Priya Sharma's "The Ghost of a Flea, Chikodili Emelumadu's "The Special One," Gemma Files' "Wet Red Grin"), most okay, only one terrible ("Flaming Teeth," by Garry Kilworth, which imo is so clumsy it shouldn't even have been publishable, much less featured in a Datlow anthology). I only skimmed Joyce Carol Oates's story, because Joyce Carol Oates, but it struck me as exploitive. Anyway, I'm only about halfway through and a lot of the bigger name writers are in the second half, so there may be better things to come.
Reading next: Maybe the latest Best Horror of the Year, maybe Waubgeshig Rice's The Moon of the Crusted Snow, which is an apocalyptic novel set in an Ojibwe community in Canada. I grew up in an Ojibwe community in Minnesota (I'm not Indigenous, but my stepfather was) and I'm deeply curious to see what Rice, an own-voices writer, has to say.
As always, I'm taking recs for genre stories about queer men, preferably written by queer men. (Genre fiction, especially sff, by and about queer women seems to be enjoying a boom. It depresses me that the queer male equivalent seems to be stuck in a pattern where queer male writers look down on genre, and male genre writers won't write queer men, although a number of them seem happy to write f/f.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-07 09:05 pm (UTC)I assume I have already recommended you Chaz Brenchley's Bitter Waters (2014)? It is my favorite of his books. Author definitely queer, characters likewise. In general I would check out Lethe Press, which publishes a lot of queer men writing genre fiction about queer men.
Ditto Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire: Ninefox Gambit (2016), Raven Stratagem (2017), Revenant Gun (2018), plus the pendant collection Hexarchate Stories (2019). The series protagonist Shuos Jedao is, like his author, a queer man; hardly anyone in the series is straight across a range of genders. The premise is political science fantasy in a dystopian star empire, so there is a high body count, so perhaps hold off if you are not up for queer characters coming to bad ends at all right now, but it is absolutely not a case of burying gays. I love these books; I always wanted the sequel trilogy that Lee mooted writing before he got into YA/MG. He has said often that his heart lies with twisty, dark political fiction and I am hoping that someday he gets to return to it.
I can't remember if I have already recommended you Joel Lane, who died in 2013 and left a concentrated, influential body of weird and horror fiction. I can't speak to his novels or poetry, but Where Furnaces Burn (2012) is an incredible cycle of weird crime fiction and I have recently enjoyed The Anniversary of Never (2015); the other two I've read are The Earth Wire and Other Stories (1994) and The Lost District and Other Stories (2006), both of which I would, if you like his work, recommend. His characters are not universally queer men, but the prevailing sensibility of his stories is queer, and just as often his characters are.
I unironically like Moby Dick, so I hope that eventually it works for you.
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Date: 2022-12-11 03:23 am (UTC)I'm pretty sure I have a copy of Lane's The Lost District among my ebooks, and Where Furnaces Burn sounds very much like my kind of thing. (I've long been a fan of crime fiction, but in recent years I find it harder to want to read even semi-mimetic fiction about law enforcement. So I've been increasingly curious about crime + other genres.)
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Date: 2022-12-13 12:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, it very deliberately drops you in at the deep end with a tonne of baffling science/maths/magic technobabble. If you let it wash over you nd settle for getting the rough gist of what's happening initially, you may find you can pick up a lot of what it means by osmosis (and also the "maths" is actually "a wizard did it").
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Date: 2022-12-07 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-11 03:32 am (UTC)Thanks!
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Date: 2022-12-07 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 02:42 pm (UTC)I've read the book before but signed up to the Substack just to participate in the experience.
Also I highly highly rec the wonderful Moby Dick Energy as another aid to digesting the book -- it hasn't updated in a while, but did get up to chapter 57 and it's delightful and fascinating:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/moby-dick-energy-a-moby-dick-podcast/id1495749127
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Date: 2022-12-08 05:37 pm (UTC)"Moby Dick Energy" - I am *cackling*, what a title!
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Date: 2022-12-11 03:39 am (UTC)I've heard of the podcast (I think I follow at least one of the creators on Twitter) but never listened to it. If you wouldn't mind, could you give me a sense of the ratio of informative to silly/chatty? I have noped out of a lot of podcasts due to chattiness.
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Date: 2022-12-11 12:19 pm (UTC)BUT it's pretty focused on the book. IIRC it's rare for things to wander off into discussions of tech problems or whatever (there are some bits discussing contemporary politics at the time of the ep, but usually in ways that resonate with the book).
And it's very informative in a range of ways -- she has a different guest per ep, including Melville scholars, historians and cetologists, and some terrifying smart people like Adam Serwer and Grace Lavery, and isn't afraid to go deep on the literary analysis. Strong on discussions of race, overall queer perspective.
IIRC, the first time I listened it felt a bit too much like one of these podcasts where the host endlessly giggles and apologizes for how bad they are at podcasting. But then it settled and did not grate on me.
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Date: 2022-12-11 03:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 07:44 pm (UTC)Ones with queer male leads include:
The Department of Truth (dark urban fantasy), in which a gay FBI agent/academic expert in conspiratorial thinking has an encounter he can't explain and is recruited into a shadowy government agency that claims to be trying to protect the integrity of reality.
The Nice House on the Lake (contemporary science fiction/horror), which has four queer male characters in its ensemble cast but is predominantly structured around one who's invited his favourite people to a lake house for a vacation just before an apocalyptic event happens.
WYND, a more YA high fantasy offering about a teenage boy who has to go on the run with his sister, crush, and crush's boyfriend after his magical heritage starts to become physically apparent in a city where magic is outlawed.
And I don't know how perfectly they stand on their if you don't read Something Is Killing the Children (dark urban fantasy about a secret order of monster hunters with a female lead), but the spin-off series House of Slaughter features a supporting queer male character from SIKtC as the lead in its first arc and will be featuring his boyfriend as the lead in its third arc.
Switching gears, I think you've mentioned liking Hellblazer. If you haven't read Tom Taylor's three-part Rise and Fall series from a couple of years ago, it's a lot of fun. It's not the darkest or most sophisticated take on Hellblazer - in particular, it's a bit of a lighter, less toothy update to John's origin story - but it leans into John's bisexuality and has a great little buddy cop romance between him and the First of the Fallen.
Additionally, I don't know how Chip Zdarsky identifies, but I've seen at least one comment on his social media that implies he's bi and he writes a fair bit of m/m. If you like goofier, funny science fiction, Kaptara is the story of a gay exobotanist who crash-lands on a fantastical planet reminiscent of the He-Man universe, isn't at all inclined to go home again, but has to embark on a reluctant hero's journey with the captain of the guard he's vibing with in order to save Earth.
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Date: 2022-12-08 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-08 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-11 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-12 05:44 am (UTC)