I actually have been clawing some reading (and more writing) time back into my schedule. Largely by waking up at 4:15am so that I can either shoehorn an hour of writing time in before yoga (on Monday/Wednesday) or be showered/made-up/dressed/dog-walked-and-fed/dishwasher-emptied by 6 so that I can write from 6-8 and read from 8-9, before work at 9:30 (Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, with a third yoga class on Thursday nights). Is this sustainable long-term? I mean probably not, but quite possibly it doesn't need to be, since once the house is done and the dog's a little older my life will hopefully become more low-key. And both of those are things that WILL happen, as I have to remind myself every hour on the hour. ANYWAY, here are some things I've been reading!
I picked up
Manuel Muñoz's The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue collection while
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greywash and I were on our road trip down through the Central Valley and then back up the coast of California, and then continued to graze on it when we got back. These are extremely finely-crafted stories, but/and they are also unremittingly bleak: quiet, grief-soaked, superbly-observed portraits of queer (specifically gay-male) Latinx life in small Central Valley towns. And I mean
small: those with a context for the geography will understand what I mean when I say that for many characters in this collection Bakersfield is conceived of as a big city, Fresno is an almost overwhelming metropolis, and even Kettleman City has a whiff of the cosmopolitan about it. Muñoz's is not a vision that romanticizes or even recuperates small town life: most of his narrators have either left the Valley and then had to return due to family tragedy or financial setbacks, or they dream of leaving or are trying to leave, and those who don't are living a painfully circumscribed, claustrophobic existence. This is also a collection obsessed with grief and mourning; almost all the stories deal with the aftermath of deaths either figurative, literal or both.
So it's not light reading, and even if I wasn't so strapped for time right now I think I'd have taken the approach I did, of reading a story here and a story there over the course of several weeks rather than powering through cover to cover. That said, they're such finely-crafted little gems of works, and deeply human, and there were all these little moments that I keep thinking about, a week after finishing it. In one story, the main character's long-term boyfriend has left him and moved to San Francisco; a year later the ex-boyfriend returns with his current boyfriend, because his (the ex's) father is dying. In one flashback scene, the narrator remembers visiting his ex's parents the day after the split: the parents are monolingual Spanish speakers with moral objections to their son's homosexuality, but with whom the main character has gradually developed a relationship over many years, including acting as their English-Spanish translator and interpreter when one was needed. He remembers the father speechifying about how disgraceful it was when one spouse leaves or cheats on the other after many years—the mother nodding along even though everyone present knows that her husband has his own mistress of long standing. All the triangulations of loyalty and disloyalty, choosing to love and not-choosing to love, the subtleties of what constitute family ties, and the often-inadequate expressions of all this—it's
so incisively rendered, in so few words; and I keep coming back to it in my mind and kind of aching with it. That's a particularly transcendent moment, but the entire collection is similarly affecting and well-wrought. I highly recommend it in small doses.
Then I palate-cleansed with
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War, which
oulfis recommended to me as an entry point to sci-fi, a genre I often struggle with. My library hold came in and I zipped through it in a couple of days: an extremely clever, hopeful little novella about sapphic spies on opposite sides in a war across time and space, who strike up an unusual correspondence and then fall in love. Some of the prose in this was a little clunky and/or purple, self-consciously shooting for something it didn't quite pull off; but the premise was so fun and the execution so energetic and charming that I didn't care. I would say this is "sci fi" to the same extent that, e.g., shippy fanfic in a canon involving a detective could be said to fall into the "mystery" genre: there is a futuristic sci-fi-ish concept, but most of the ins and outs of the war, the societies these women live in, the other people they know, etc. etc., are going on incidentally in the background, while the relationship between the two spies is heavily foregrounded. One catches glimpses of various missions as the agents infiltrate times and places, nudging civilizations and histories this way or that, but the larger whys and wherefores of each mission, let alone the war or world as a whole, feature barely at all—they're only present to the extent that they support the developing relationship. What the novella cares about is being a clever epistolary spy v. spy love story, which it does well. As such, I found it a lot easier going than most sci fi! Ahahaha. Well spotted, oulfis, it was a good starting point for the world-building-averse. :-)
In my Tu/Th/Fri post-writing morning hour, which I've set aside for writing-project-related research reading, I've been making my way through
K. David Harrison's When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, which is extremely sobering (especially since it was written in 2006, so some of the moribund languages he discusses are now almost certainly extinct) but also fascinating. I excerpted a
bit from this this other day and may well want to preserve more of it. It does come from a white, discipline-of-sociology perspective, with the assumptions and training that that implies—and let's not fail to mention that I'm reading it in English!—but Harrison makes an effort to include case studies of individual speakers of these languages with whom he has actually worked and lived, including their own words about the experience of language death. And he brings up quite a few issues that wouldn't have occurred to me, but which I think will be really useful in writing the story for which I'm reading this book (an explicitly anticolonialist Margo/Fen
Magicians short story the idea for which randomly bit me in the shower one morning, and which I hope to start work on after I finish my MHHE fic, now about 75% drafted). After I finish up the Harrison, the plan is to return to research reading for my original-fiction novel, starting with a return to
Eric Thomas Chester's The Wobblies in their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era.
Lastly, I just started
Emma Cline's The Girls and
Claudia Salazar Jiménez's Blood of the Dawn. The former is a holdover from the reading I downloaded for our roadtrip—it's a fictionalized version of the Manson cult, moved disconcertingly north to the Bay (but the narrator's grandmother was still a movie star? And it's hot in early June? This novel is geographically confusing; it really seems like it should just... be set in LA)—the latter something I read about on
Asymptote. Will report back! Maybe! I miss interacting on the internet and feel much more human when I can eke out time to read, so here's hoping.
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