Edgar's Book Round-Up, October 2024
Enough has been said about the outcome of the US election, so I will not spend more time on it. As they say in LOST, “Whatever happened, happened” — and besides, the work remains. Gaza still needs esims, and the importance of working locally to change whatever you can for the better is critical (here are some groups local to me who are doing incredible and important work). It’s also Trans Day of Remembrance, so maybe get ahead of that and do something nice for your trans friends while they’re here. Anyway, links go to Bookshop.
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They did the cover art themself, too! It looks so cool!
This round-up leads off with John Elizabeth Stintzi’s Vanishing Monuments, their first novel, which was loaned to me by the author themself. We follow Alani Baum, a nonbinary photographer and instructor at an art school who receives word that their mother’s dementia has progressed to such an extent that she is in hospice; Alani drops everything to return to Winnipeg, to reckon with their mother, their childhood home — and their own past. Stintzi, themself an artistic polymath, makes notable use of ekphrasis as a means of building Alani’s character: in describing their work and their processes, Stintzi offers a window into a character who seems to take themself by surprise on a regular basis. Alani’s gender odyssey, detailed in flashbacks as they explored femininity and masculinity at different times and different places, felt very real. Stintzi balances several parallel motives beautifully: the Monument Against Fascism; Alani’s mother’s worsening condition; their explorations into a memory palace that is and is not their childhood home. I will also note, as an aside, that Stintzi’s treatment of the experience of getting rid of stuff from your childhood home was very, very, very true to life. Having thoroughly enjoyed both Vanishing Monuments and Bad Houses, I am really looking forward to digging in to the rest of Stinzi’s work.
I next finished the audiobook of Before They Are Hanged, the second book in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. As mentioned previously, I am making my way through Abercrombie’s oeuvre in preparation for finally jumping in to new stuff, and I plan to discuss the First Law as a whole in (it transpires) my next book round-up. I will note, though, that this is a pretty incredible second novel in a trilogy — a notoriously difficult space to occupy.
Not pictured: the lovely texture of library laminate.
Imogen Binnie’s contemporary classic Nevada, which I got from my beloved Kansas City Public Library, was the next print book I finished. The novel follows Maria, who, in slow motion, blows up her life in New York and road trips alone out to the titular state, where she meets a young man who reminds her of herself before she transitioned — but genuinely, the plot is not the point here. The point is Maria — or Binnie’s, it’s hard to draw a particular line — makes some very funny, very astute observations about transness in general, transfemininity in particular, as well as the myriad ways self-consciousness eats you alive. I was surprised by how early-aughts it felt, despite having been released in 2014, and specifically how much like Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics it was. It’s worth noting, too, that Binnie’s afterword for the edition linked above provides some fun context, as well as her own view of what the novel means now — insofar as a novel “means” things, as I’m sure Binnie or Maria would be quick to point out. There’s a reason I’ve been hearing good things about this one for a long time: it earns those kudos.
It took several tries to not have the very clear reflection of my face and phone obscure the cover art.
Having been a Hark! a Vagrant fan for many years — I still have a Hark! tee-shirt, even — I was delighted to find Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands at a nearby branch of the library when I went in to pick up a hold, and of course took it home with me, and then blazed through it very quickly. Beaton’s graphic memoir of her youthful decision to take work in the Canadian oil sands charts her experiences with the work and her eventual decision to leave, bearing witness to a universally catastrophic practice in a pretty literal way: she doesn’t excuse herself or the people she worked with, but she does lay bare the disastrous human cost to the workers, eventually choosing to leave when she learned more about the even worse damage that oil sands extraction was doing to the environment and the violence against First Nations people that brought it under corporate control. As I expected, her linework is charming, capturing expressions efficiently, but it’s especially in her depiction of landscape that I was pleasantly surprised. The contrast between the fluid lines, graceful in their varying weights, that she uses to portray her home province of Cape Breton, as well as an interlude working at a historical site, and the way she portrays the oil camps is striking, the latter rendered in a kind of sidelong, sketchy tangle reminiscent more of Matta than of Beaton’s usual work. It was incredible.
Next up, in audiobook form, was Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer. If that sounds like it’ll be Behind the Bastards for the NPR set, that is absolutely accurate. Mayer capably outlines the means by which the various billionaire funders of things like the Tea Party garnered their ill-gotten gains; perhaps unavoidably, her narrative often centers around the Koch brothers and their fucked-up little family. More interesting than the weird psychology of these ghouls, to me at least, was Mayer’s breakdown of how changes to nonprofit law facilitated the hoarding of all that wealth. It was also enlightening for me, as someone who was a homeschooled teenager during the Bush II years, to learn more about just how astroturfed the Tea Party “movement” was. Mayer’s dry humor keeps her otherwise-infuriating long-form reportage bearable, wryly commenting on how many of these guys view themselves as “self-made” despite being the heirs of, in general, a generation or two’s worth of vicious wealth accumulation. I feel equally comfortable recommending this to my more radical, progressive friends and my mainline-Democrat mother-in-law — which is no mean feat.
As if that weren’t grim enough — but then, this is the October round-up; ‘tis the season for scary shit — I followed it with the audiobook of Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless. While I know I don’t often comment on the voice actors who read the audiobooks, I do want to note that Nicky Endress did an absolutely phenomenal job on this one, using their full vocal range to great effect and bringing an arch fragility to the main narration that really made the audiobook a singular experience. And that’s saying something, because the novel is something else. We follow Alice, a trans woman, and Ila, her ex who is, at the novel’s start, a TERF, as they try to salvage their lives from the lingering aftereffects of one night in a haunted house. (The house is also an intermittent narrator.) Like so many of the novels I enjoy the most, this one does also suffer in summary: it’s no mere ghost that haunts the house, but rather the very spirit of racist cisheteropatriarchy that victimized our main characters, and will continue to victimize others unless they can get their shit together; it’s a haunted house novel but the spirit is the fascist mindset, and it wreaks rather more havoc than a few bumps in the night. Rumfitt really leans into the “hang on tight and spit on me” of it all, to her credit. It’s also really, really funny. If you have a strong stomach and a penchant for (1) leftist theory and (2) being on the internet too much, it’s a must read.
Another audiobook — I believe I was deep into trying to finish Statius’ Thebaid, which will be on the next round-up — followed: Somewhere Beyond the Sea by T. J. Klune. Readers may recall that I quite liked House in the Cerulean Sea when I read it several years ago, and Klune now revisits the same characters a little while later, this time centering his narrative around Arthur Parnassus, the Professor-X-alike who operates an orphanage for ostensibly dangerous magical children. But while House… offered a cuter if not kinder world in the midst of a rather dark time, the times have been staying dark, and much of what made House… charming has curdled for me somewhat. Somewhere… again treats of a visit by a government inspector to Arthur’s orphanage, and Arthur’s own difficulties in bringing a suit against the state for the mistreatment he suffered as a magical youth. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for this one, but I found the children annoying, the analysis facile, and dedication to trans people bordering on insulting. I should probably stop reading Klune’s novels for a while, given how deeply mixed my feeling shave been about them, but I am nothing if not a glutton for punishment. And I will say: if you’re a Professor X stan, this one may land better for you than it did for me.
In any case, I’ve got one more audiobook on this round up, and it too was quite good: Nico Lang’s American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, read by Vico Ortiz. Lang, who is themself nonbinary and has done some stellar work on the trans-kids beat, here offers essentially case studies of eight trans and nonbinary teenagers. While some factors are per force very similar — all of the kids profiled have at least one parent who is more or less supportive, for example — Lang does a good job of drawing from across race, class, and geography, profiling subjects from red and blue states of all different genders. They also go out of their way to paint full portraits of their subjects: the teens we meet here are never just their transness — no trans person ever is — but rather fully-embodied young people with aspirations and interests that have nothing to do with what is, essentially, an accident of birth. Lang also makes sure to note when and how their transness is forced to the fore in their lives, especially by anti-trans legislation. It’s a shame that Lang is, essentially, preaching to the choir, because their profiles of these kids are incredibly moving and kind, and I do genuinely think that if some of the people who have other “opinions” about whether or not trans kids “should” transition or not would change their tune in reading this.
Can you tell I took this photo at the book drop? I very much did take this photo at the book drop.
We close this round-up with Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar, which I got from the library at the same time as Ducks. Long-time readers will recall how much I’ve enjoyed Bardugo’s work in the past, and I was pretty primed to like this one. The novel centers around Luzia, a scullion in a struggling household in Madrid in the early seventeenth century, and the exponentially rippling effects her decision to seize a little more for herself by using her magic in front of her mistress. All well and good, but that’s sort of beside the point: with The Familiar, Bardugo has moved into a new literary level. Her leveraging of the setting, her management of the magic in the story — braiding, as it does, elements of Spanish Catholicism, conversos, and hermetic esotericism — and the simple force of her storytelling here is next level. While in the past I’ve compared Bardugo, at least mentally, more to her contemporary fantasy or YA fantasy counterparts, with The Familiar she’s batting against stuff like Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, and to my delight, she’s holding up to it quite well. It was a delightful novel, and one that shows Bardugo to her best advantage. I can only hope she continues on this path.
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