Been another long one, friends. I’ve been trying to stay on top of some really gnarly transphobic bullshit in my state, as well as working and trying to make art — but here we are! I also have a piece in the latest issue of this cool zine, so there’s that. But we’re here to talk about books!

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The cover, which is lovely and also shows the diacritics I don’t know how to add here.

First up this month was the audiobook of Zoraida Cordova’s adult debut, The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina. While the novel follows both the titular Orquidea and many of her family members, it finds its center in Marimar and Rey, two of her grandchildren, as they are first summoned back to Four Rivers, a tiny town in the midwestern United States, and then given gifts by the matriarch herself, who they find in the process of transforming into a tree. But something sinister besets the family, and the cousins will have to untangle the webs of Orquidea’s life and loves in order to save the remaining branches of the family tree. Ranging in setting from mid-century Ecuador to contemporary New York City, mixing in a host of social issues and family entanglements and estrangements, the characters and the magic to which they are heirs remains the focus. I loved Cordova’s YA work — specifically the Brooklyn Brujas series, which I wrote about here and here — and the strengths she built there are ably displayed in this novel. I’m excited to see her expand into adult territory, and quite taken with this novel specifically.

I followed it with the ebook of Danez Smith’s rightly-lauded Homie, about which I heard a fair bit on its release in 2020, but which I shamefully neglected to read until now. After having lukewarm — at best — feelings about the last book of poetry I read, Homie was a cold shower, a hot rain: Smith’s use of language, at once colloquial and extraordinarily intentional, is truly electric. Their treatment of queerness, racism, and indeed language itself was never less than thrilling; the occasional ventures into concrete forms (the off-kilter set of “Rose,” especially) were rewarding and enticing. I’m kicking myself, now, for not reading it sooner, for not allowing myself to enjoy the real gift Smith has given to English language users. It’s been about a month now since I devoured this collection, and I’m still excited about it. Every good thing you may have heard about Homie is one hundred percent true, and I will move on before I poison you against it by praising it too highly.

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham in the 1946 film, directed by David Lean; image from here.

Here is where I finally finished Great Expectations, one of my mother’s favorite Dickens novels, which I also read in ebook form. I had been picking at it here and there, in between things, for something like a month by this time; that fact alone says a lot about how I felt about it. I assume we all know that Pip, a boy of the working class, is whisked off to be a gentleman through the good offices of an unknown benefactor, and to Pip — for better or worse — the story clings. But while my mother loves the novel and its 1946 film adaptation, often quoting Miss Havisham’s numinous pronouncements (“Mice have gnawed at it, but sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me!”), I cannot say I share the sentiment. True to form, Dickens pulls many disparate threads together at the end of the novel, and I couldn’t help but feel that he picked the absolute least interesting person involved in the tangled situation at the novel’s core to follow. And perhaps unfairly, I kept comparing it to the Dickens novels I have loved, especially Bleak House, which are characterized by several narrators and a more explicit fantastical element. Great Expectations certainly has its moments, especially when Dickens gives in to his more gothic proclivities, but for me? It was fine. You know. Fine.

And now we come to another book long in the reading: Jean-Francois Lyotard’s so-called “evil book,” Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. It took a very long time in large part because Cameron and I read it out loud, ideally as quickly as possible, and then taking a little time at the end of each section to talk about what Lyotard was saying — which made the whole thing more comprehensible, but did limit how much of it either of us could get through at once. I must note, first of all, that while I’m not familiar with Lyotard’s French, I can only guess that it is difficult at best; Grant’s translation was clear and fluid, allowing Lyotard’s incredible, flowing sentences and concept construction to shine. And I have to say, I think philosophy benefits by being unapologetically, enthusiastically horny, as Libidinal Economy often is. But it has to be: Lyotard builds his writing on desires, flying over the “libidinal band,” and outlines how desire may be twisted to serve the death drive that powers capitalism. And it’s unfair at best, downright malign at worst, to claim that the book is in any way pro-capitalist — as Cameron noted recently, people do love to confuse a writer describing what is with what the author thinks ought to be, and Lyotard ends with as much hope as, I think, he could muster at the time. It’s a fucking trip, but one well worth taking.

The first audiobook to grace this round-up — my ratio was skewed this last month — is Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow. A dear friend had recommended it highly, but I took a little time getting to it, largely because there were about a million holds on it at the library. And rightly so: the plot follows Zetian, a young woman spurred by rage at the death of her sister in the gendered piloting systems of a giant mech, as she becomes an “iron widow,” one of the few women who kill their male copilots as the mechs do battle against the strange monsters that have ravaged Huaxia. Needless to say, it’s a great ride, with extremely rich worldbuilding; no punches were pulled in giving these people problems and making them very morally gray in their solutions, but it’s impossible not to root for them. I pass along my friend’s recommendation, for sure.

Up next was Tana French’s The Likeness, the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series. It happened to be available when I was in between ebooks, so I snagged it. This one pivots away from Rob, the protagonist of In the Woods (discussed briefly here), to his former partner Cassie; still shaken by the disaster that was the case at the center of the first book, she’s drawn back into weird shit by the discovery of a dead woman who (1) looks eerily like her and (2) has taken up one of the aliases Cassie used when she was undercover — so Cassie is sent into the belly of the beast, to impersonate the dead girl and try to learn who she was and why she was killed. Functionally, The Likeness ends up being a weird combination of dark academia and cop story, though to French’s credit, she makes it work. Honestly, though, I’m still measuring her work against The Witch Elm, and so far no other has surpassed it, though this one did have some incredible passages about the eeriness of impersonating your own doppelganger.

The only other print book in this round up is Philip Ridley’s In the Eyes of Mr. Fury, in the 2016 expanded reissue from Valancourt Press. I wanted to read it both because I didn’t know the new version existed until recently and the 1989 edition — which is much shorter — is a life-long favorite of mine, but also because I intend to write about it at greater length in the nearish future. So I’ll be brief: if you’re at all interested in queer magical realism (British flavor), you really need to read this book. It is every bit as beautiful to me now as it was when I first read it in my teens, and the new edition expands the story and the text in ways that are truly perfect.

The cover of the first edition, which really gets it in a way I feel subsequent covers don’t, from Wikipedia.

But I read Dune finally! Frank Herbert’s science-fantasy classic has been recommended to me for most of my life, and having really enjoyed the latest film version of the first half of the novel, I figured I would give it a shot. I’m afraid I didn’t love it as much as many of my friends and loved ones do: I appreciated what it was doing, but Herbert’s execution was frankly deeply fucking weird. It got a lot better in the second half — and perhaps the problem was simply that I had an idea of what the first half was like because of the movie — but that first half was rough, especially because of the way Herbert used an omniscient narration to somehow suck all the tension out of the room. I did enjoy Herbert’s inventiveness with respect to language and naming conventions, as well as the influence of Dune on the kind of weird, unsettling sci-fi art I love (as well as Gentlemen Broncos). I think there may also be an argument that Dune is in a meaningful way a retelling of The Aeneid, a thought that only occurred to me towards the end of the novel and made me like it in retrospect a great deal more than I did initially.

I closed out the month with Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, about which I had heard vague good things (I open and skim many links to many book reviews and listicles). And honestly, the premise sold me pretty thoroughly: Mickey, in an attempt to escape from his debts, joins a planet-colonizing mission as their expendable, but when he makes it back from an encounter with one of the creatures already living on the planet — and shouldn’t have — the already-deteriorating mission is threatened with annihilation from within. I’ll admit, I found Mickey’s narration tough to take initially (you know those guys who really like Deadpool but are neither queer enough nor smart enough to measure up to their purported hero? Like that), but soon I was embroiled in the plot, as well as Ashton’s lively future history, which was both funny and horribly plausible. I also enjoyed the frequent reminders of why an “expendable” is even a role in a mission like this — if they can just reprint him, which, in the story, they can, he can be sent into conditions that would destroy a drone in seconds, but he won’t die for an hour or more — and how that’s worked out for his past iterations. Anyway, it might be made into a movie, so we’ll see what happens there.

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That’s it for March. Feel free to follow Cameron and me on Twitter.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, March 2022