2023 read #33: My Beloved Brontosaurus by Riley Black.

My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs by Riley Black

241 pages

Published 2013

Read from March 25 to March 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

A pretty conventional “dinosaurs aren’t like what they used to be!” pop science book, largely along the same lines as Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. While Black’s writing is in casual pop science mode here, and not trying to do anything fancy, it has a slight edge edge over Brusatte’s here’s-one-for-the-normies prose. Brontosaurus feels more informative and confident in the cognitive abilities of its audience, overall. There are chapters on dinosaur diseases and parasites, for example, rather than “here’s a whole chapter about T. rex!”

However, science often moves fast; ten years after publication, My Beloved Brontosaurus feels juuuust out of date enough to make me question if it was worth reading. The title itself, for example—a reference to how the genus Brontosaurus was subsumed into Apatosaurus, a metaphor to encapsulate the gulf between pop culture perceptions and ever-evolving dino science, the way that childhood’s kitschy dinosaurs were erased by refined understanding—was rendered obsolete in 2015, when a new study suggested that Brontosaurus was likely its own distinct, valid genus after all. (In all fairness to Black, she does mention a “rumor” of the then-ongoing study in the epilogue.)

Painless but inessential, that’s the vibe I’ll give it. And it’s about dinosaurs, so that always gets a generous rating from me.

2023 read #32: The Four Profound Weaves by R. B. Lemberg.

The Four Profound Weaves by R. B. Lemberg

179 pages

Published 2020

Read from March 24 to March 25

Rating: 5 out of 5

This book throws you in at the deep end of its world and its magic, and is all the better for it. Lemberg weaves exposition and conceptual brilliance into their narration with such ease that I immediately let myself go into the dream-logic of cloths woven from change, wanderlust, hope, and death. It all made deep intuitive sense. The magic within this book, within this world, was palpable, hungry, too brilliant to encompass in mere words on the page.

Thrumming beneath and within all of this magic is a statement of resistance, of resilience, of injustices so great that not even the gods could ever fully remedy them. It is a tale of queer hope, loss, fear, joy, ferocity, and endurance. It is a story that repudiates power, repudiates those who would wield that power to stifle change and force conformity, stagnation, conservativism.

Few stories have ever given me this sense of the potential of fantasy as a toolkit for allegorical storytelling; N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became is on this same level, but there aren't many others. We need more stories like this. More tales into which we can weave our own stories in our present bleak inflection point of history.

2023 read #31: The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia.

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

190 pages

Published 2022

Read from March 20 to March 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Though short, this novel brims with complicated questions and offers no easy answers or clear victories. Colonialism, empire, immigration, what it means to be from a culture that had once subjugated others but had subsequently been subjugated itself—all of them weighty topics, but layered still further with questions of medical ethics and balancing the needs of your community against the needs of your family. And all of it is set in a lush queer-normative culture rich with flavor and color and humanity.

My one complaint with Qilwa is its prose, which isn’t objectionable, really, but feels a bit workmanlike and clunky at times. At any rate, it took a while for the writing to click with my brain. Perhaps that’s on me and my ADHD-wrung attention span more than on Jamnia and their prose. I certainly wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone!

2023 read #30: Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

334 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 14 to March 19

Rating: 3 out of 5

The current moment has seen the fascist movement manufacturing genocidal outrage toward trans and other queer people just living their lives. Part of this astroturfed sentiment has involved programming rightwing tools on the internet to parrot "No one ever thought about gender before the last five years!" It doesn't count for much as a protest against the vast crush of fascism afflicting my nation, but as a tiny fuck-you I decided to finally read Orlando.

My partner R introduced me to the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton, which is fantastic and -- if I'm being honest -- superior to the book. It took me a while to vibe with the book. It has an antique feel I wasn't expecting from modernist lit, though that is part of its literary satire. Woolf toys with mores of gender and sexuality, equally in her own time and in the various eras that Orlando is said to live through. But there's a further element of satire against literature, the literary canon, the English custom of elevating men of "genius" into said canon. If you go into Orlando expecting sexy genderfluid adventures in piracy, you'd be much better off with some modern queer YA.

Much of Orlando hasn't aged well, particularly its casual 1920s racism. There are some delightfully dry lampoons of sex and gender conventions, but they're buried in much more expansive satires of literary worthies and the romance of poetry. Nonetheless, it's edifying to see a writer in the 1920s with a more sophisticated understanding of sex and gender -- and the very different definitions of each -- than present-day reactionaries could ever hope to achieve. Let's all hope that the modern fascists' attempt to speed-run the 1930s will end in their full humiliating defeat, and quickly.

2023 read #29: Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 2 by Itaru Kinoshita.

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 2 by Itaru Kinoshita

Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara

Translated by John Neal

196 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read March 14

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 1 bears the rare distinction of being one of the few good works of dinosaur fiction. It accomplishes this by keeping things simple. Our human characters are caretakers at a dinosaur sanctuary. Light drama from their lives intersects with the day-to-day business of keeping dinosaurs alive and happy and the zoo financially solvent. The dinosaurs are beautifully drawn and distinct characters in their own right. That’s all there is to it, and that’s all the story needs. It works beautifully.

For the most part, Volume 2 successfully continues the vibe from the first volume. I liked it maybe a tad less this time around, if only because much of the wider cast gets shortchanged, mostly in favor of the central pair, Suzume and Kaidou. One chapter shifts gears entirely, following a random high school boy and his quest to find the self confidence to ask his crush out on a second date to Enoshima Dinoland. One of my favorite human characters from the first book, Kirishima, receives less two pages this time around; another fave, Torikai, appears in one panel and doesn’t speak at all. (I am slightly mollified, but only slightly, that the two of them get their own pages in the bonus manga at the end of the book.) While the first book’s charm remains, this volume felt slightly lacking.

All that aside, this was still better than almost every dinosaur book out there. I can’t wait for Volume 3!

2023 read #28: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

125 pages

Published 2020

Read from March 13 to March 14

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while. The Empress of Salt and Fortune was brilliant, a compact and intricately layered puzzlebox of myth and memory. Tiger, however, is merely delightful. Where Empress plunged an ideological sword into the heart of monarchy, Tiger is more about the art of storytelling, particularly about how the comfort and preferences of the audience alter what is told and remembered, that prejudice determines acceptable “truth.”

The structure here is looser: where Empress felt like a novella-length short story, dense with subtle inferences, Tiger feels like a sliver from an epic novel, a brief glimpse of an unfolding wonder of mammoths and ghosts, tigers and scholars, satisfying but only a morsel. Any time spent in the world of the Singing Hills Cycle, however, is excellent.

2023 read #27: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

148 pages

Published 2021

Read from March 12 to March 13

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

This book commonly gets described as “solarpunk cottagecore.” It’s a fair descriptor, but it’s only a taste of how luxurious and inviting a read this is.

Let’s be honest: our world is a mess right now. The climate is collapsing into chaos. Capitalism is burning everything down in the name of quarterly dividends; one way or another its days are numbered, and the people who benefit from that system know it. So the rest of us must endure the rise of fascism (always the last gambit of capitalism in collapse) and astroturfed moral panics about our very rights and our very existence. It’s a tough time to be poor, to be queer. I know that firsthand. I can only learn from Black, Indigenous, Latine, Jewish, Arab, Asian, African, and various other people how difficult things are when you aren’t white.

All of this is going on, all the time, inescapably. You can’t shut it off. You can’t go into the other room and close the door. You’re just in it.

So an optimistic book about a sustainable society, a book that climaxes with emotional vulnerability over a cup of tea? It broke me down. I wept over that cup of tea in a way I never would have expected. A book like this won’t stop fascism in its tracks, but a little time and space for respite is just as necessary.

2023 read #26: The Dodo Heart Museum by Kelly Weber.

The Dodo Heart Museum: A Fabulist Shadow Box by Kelly Weber

35 pages

Published 2021

Read March 12

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes I think I’m a pretty good writer. I’ve been published a handful of really cool places. My stories and poems have gotten modest praise, a handful of Pushcart nominations, and even earned me a few hundred bucks over the years. Every now and then I waver, though, and feel that my writing lacks substance, misses the depth of ideas and language I truly wish I could explore.

This slender chapbook made me feel completely outclassed as a writer. It feels part oldschool zine, full of collages and drawings and found images, and part document from an unraveling reality. The book opens with instructions on how to tear it apart and reassemble it into a new whole ordered by the wind. What seems at first to be the fictional review of a fantastic poetry collection distorts and fractures into a poem itself; the writer of this fabulous collection swallows her parents backstage. A dictionary defines the verb form of goldenrod and adjective sense of jar. Women grow the teeth of musk deer and permit snow to inhabit their throat. Girls follow creatures into the forest in the dark. Language is full of perils here; folk tales are spun through keyholes. Fragments, a hoard of small secret words, repeat themselves in new orders and disorders: glass and sugar, pearl and blue.

Any one of these prose poems and strange hints of fabulism could be quoted at length and speak Weber’s brilliance better than any line I could write here: “Now she stands beneath the branches, breathing. Now the small white branches are like the shape of her lungs full of air.”

2023 read #25: Fair Play by Tove Jansson.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

Translated by Thomas Teal

Introduction by Ali Smith

107 pages

Published 1989 (English translation published 2007)

Read March 10

Rating: 4 out of 5

A novel, a fictionalized memoir, a string of vignettes that reveal more in what isn't said than in what is. Like Jansson's The Summer Book, the stories here sketch the domestic joys and prickly squabbles of two characters pushing and pulling on the gravitational lines of their need for attachment and space.

Here, the central pair are based on Tove and her partner (or "companion"), the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. The two reside in separate apartments at opposite ends of one floor, share their summers in an island cottage, travel and gather into older age together. Their love is shown in silhouette around their cranky exchanges and need for space away from one another. To speak it would be superfluous.

As one would expect from Jansson, the imagery is precise as the shadows in northern summer, showing more than it tells.

2023 read #24: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Afterword by Jeanette Winterson

154 pages

Published 1977

Read March 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

I've wanted to read this book for years. I first learned about it in the works of Robert Macfarlane, who in all his books has been a tireless evangelist for The Living Mountain. Unsurprisingly, he appears to have been instrumental in bringing it back into print. Characteristically rambling and allusive, Macfarlane’s introductory essay insists on preparing the way for Shepherd’s words for almost thirty pages, including references -- nearly a third as long as Shepherd's entire text.

It would be difficult for any book to live up to that kind of fevered promotion. The Living Mountain, however, is an impressive book. The neglected human art of getting to know a particular place in deep, all-season detail, of finding new perspectives and new revelations in familiar grounds, of finding that Zen-like poise of bodily awareness of the elemental landscape, soars and floods through Shepherd's precise and beautiful prose.

I've never gotten to know a place as well as Shepherd got to know her native Cairngorms, but I've come close to that meditative natural transcendence often enough in the past that my body responded almost physically to her descriptions. It is a gorgeous book, equally at home with the transcendental writings of the early 20th century as it is with the modern British art of landscape essay. 

2023 read #23: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

256 pages

Published 1999

Read from February 25 to March 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

It's been a while since I've read an artsy literary novel, one with Big Ideas and Deft Prose and a pocketful of obscure but important-sounding nominations. I used to read this sort of thing a lot more back when I first got my library card, but even back then, books like this were only an occasional offering, mental roughage to counter my diet of mid-tier fantasy.

Even in the rarified strata of literary fiction, The Intuitionist is an odd one, right on the (completely arbitrary) line between important contemporary literature and allegorical fantasy. In a mid-century city that's basically New York, elevators are imbued with a nearly metaphysical dimension, enabling the literal and spiritual elevation of mankind, opening the realm of verticality and truly modernizing the city. Two rival schools of thought, Empiricism and Intuitionism, coexist uneasily within the world of elevator inspectors. Lila Mae Watson, the first Black woman elevator inspector in the city, is a devout Intuitionist, and gets swept up in what appears to be a burgeoning conflict between the two ideologies for the soul of the city's verticality. The eccentric founder of Intuitionism may, or may not, have written notes on the perfect elevator before he died. But nothing is as it appears.

Not having read much lit fic, especially in recent years, I can only say that this feels like an exemplary first novel: ambitious, lush with its prose, a bit clunky and uneven in spots. Whitehead's exploration of historic and contemporary race and racism is expert, woven intimately through the story and his satirical structure of transcendental elevation. I'm excited to read through the rest of his catalog now.

2023 read #22: Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas.

Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

320 pages

Published 2022

Read from March 1 to March 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

I'm still a novice when it comes to reading graphic stories. I'm learning to pace myself better, to absorb the details and the flow of the artwork instead of just speeding ahead and reading the words, but I'm not there yet.

One thing that particularly struck me about Squire is the expert use of "silent" panels, allowing pose and expression to communicate the hesitation, doubt, and disillusionment of our hero Aiza, as well as the other recruits around her (not to mention the subtle double-dealing of a certain antagonist). The art is exceptional, poised between delicacy and energy, wistfulness and brute motion. It well repays attention and care while reading.

Vague, general spoilers ahead.

The story itself is magnificent, built from the heavy stones of colonialism and complicity, of trying to do what's right for yourself within the confines of empire until you can no longer live with yourself, and must instead do what's right in spite of empire. Even if, in the end, your actions don't amount to much against the great wheel of warfare and exploitation, at the very least you have to do what you can.