The Male Hysteric

My therapist wanted me to read Andrea Long Chu's Females for a while and on my way to buy it online something totally wacky happened. I stumbled upon a reddit post about this critical review of the book by a trans woman. The review seems pretty typical, praising Chu for being interesting while at the same time critical of her perspectives and cast them as misogynist, absurd, projecting, nonsense, a "harmful" narrative to trans people, and generally un-transfeminist... essentially a pretty shallow reading of it and closely toeing the "party line" of public-facing transgender narrative at the time it was written, back in 2019.

This would all be quite unremarkable, except in the interim, the book critic has since detransitioned, claims he was "immersed in transgender ideology" which encouraged him to transition because of his "autogynephilia" and has even converted to Catholicism. Andrea Long Chu, meanwhile, is still Andrea Long Chu-ing.

Yes I have been reading, no I have not been very good at recording them. So I’m only going to post some short things about each of these.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was a reread for me, and a part of why it took me so damn long was because I was taking notes. I was also going to go through all the backmatter, but I got distracted, and now I figure that all of this has been delayed enough that I will talk about it anyway. What can I say? It was way better the second time around because I actually knew what was going on. I feel like The Locked Tomb books are the types of books that get better on reread and you might just have to go on vibes through the first read, which may be a flaw or strength, depending on how you read. I’m still going through the GTN read on Frontline Fifth and am going to try to reread Harrow before getting through their HTN read, though I’m unsure if I will do notes on that one, even though it probably needs it more.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik was interesting, but also a book that felt like it went on for too long for what it was, though a part of the problem was probably that I borrowed it from the library as an ebook so the return time was very strict. But if you actually pick it up at a library, it’s a very fat volume! I did enjoy it, though. One thing it did was that it was very direct about the casual terror of being a Jew in the old country which is just… when you have the fantasy fairy stories based in Europe is always absent? Reading it was very familiar, like, yes, yes, the horrors, we know the horrors, and then it dawned on me that no, the vast majority of the writers and readers of these kinds of books (maybe not this one, but fairy stories in general) do not. And that realization was kind of upsetting. But this isn’t Novik’s fault.

Dr. No by Percival Everett was… a very silly book. I picked it up at a bookstore because it was on the counter along with the promotional materials for James, which is having a moment right now but I didn’t think was my kind of thing but Dr. No from the summary absolutely did seem like my kind of thing, or at least I was kind of obligated to read it because I’m also writing about people studying math getting into trouble. I guess I had kind of assumed that James was a serious book, and therefore this would be a different book, it was very goofy, and not exactly in a way I was into (I don't read enough spy thrillers to be into a parody of them I think), but it was still a quick read which isn’t something I can say of a lot of the other books I’ve read lately. I’m left wondering if James is also a goofy book. I mean I guess Twain was considered a humorist but I never found him that funny.

First book of 2025 read! My challenge for this year is 12 novels in 2025, and I’m making progress on that, so at least one good thing happening. I started this book late last year as one of my writing buddies suggested it to me as a possible “comp” for a book I needed comparisons for and it really, I think, is a good comparison, in many ways, except I find Ishiguro to be pretty humorless in this book and my novel is… not like that. However, keeping this in mind, my reading of this book was probably poisoned in that I was looking at it for a certain purpose so that purpose was always in the back of my head and I may not have such a good idea of it on its own. It’s not a book that I would have picked up on its own.

The Buried Giant is a book about an elderly couple traveling in post-Arthurian England to meet their son, who lives in another village, while the country is shrouded with a mysterious mist that causes people to forget things. It might be a small thing and more indicative of what I read but I appreciated the main characters being elderly. This may be less true of literary fiction but… there aren’t terribly many elderly protagonists out there, at least in comparison to more youthful ones. I think in general most writers tend to write ages they’ve already experienced. The friend who recommended it to me also talked about how they hated the way Ishiguro writes dialogue and honestly I did not notice it. Or, well, it’s less that I did not notice it, but noticed that it did not seem bad read out loud by the narrator, in the same way Shakespeare is better read out loud by someone who actually knows what they’re doing rather than awkwardly stumbled over by a first-time reader. Not that I think Ishiguro is that brilliant, but there’s something to his dialogue that probably would not come through in the strictly written text, or the reader David Horovitch is very talented. But considering The Buried Giant is a novel, this would probably be considered a flaw.

It's been a while since I posted about a book I've read, hasn't it? And I suppose I'm still on track to get my 10 by the end of the year.

And finally one that I just unabashedly really liked.

So, I got a kobo for my birthday, a Libra Color, and I thought that probably what I would end up mostly doing is reading library books and possibly downloaded fanfiction on it. While I was at my brother's house I was mostly doing proof-of-concept with the Kobo's nice ability to browse Libby catalogues natively and I came across the book Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis and the cover intrigued me and the blurb was off the wall and there was no waitlist unlike many of the other books I had been looking at, so I grabbed it and... well.

Sometimes there are books that are made for you and you find them. It's a bizarre concept -- a 19th century Prussian scientist laying the groundwork to build perfect soldiers from dogs, and those dogs finally being created in the modern day, rebelling against their masters and joining high society in New York -- yet the outcome feels more honest than many books given its handling of ambivalence in a way that is not overwrought, which feels rare these days. It's hard to describe, I think, or maybe I'm not good at writing books. But you should read it.

I have still been reading, just not writing much about what I've been reading. I really don't have too much to say about these books and they were mostly research for the novel I am not writing.

The Lady Has A Past by Amanda Quick is a romance novel set in the 1930s with supernatural elements, and neither of these were clear to me at the outset, which I think would have improved the experience. I guess my main thing is that I did not like the love interest and he did not improve over time, which is a massive flaw in a romance book, but I'm sure he would be to someone else's taste.

Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgeway could not be more different. It's a recent book about cops and criminals in Ireland and it's... well, I was recommended it because it did not have a plot, and that was exactly as advertised, it did not have a plot going through. It felt more like reading a collection of loosely-connected short stories, some of which were better than others, and every time I actually liked a character I got to be full of dread because I had the feeling something awful was going to happen to them because, in the book, a lot of awful things happen to a lot of people. It wasn't terrible but I'm not sure who I would even begin to recommend it to.

I am still reading, though the new book is taking a while. I got a lot of reading done over my vacation, but that was two weeks ago by now and it's hard to insert back in the feeling of having nothing else to do at a cabin on the North Shore besides sit on a chilly beach and read into one's normal every day life. My partner manages to read much more than me but he's... motivated, I guess is the word. And even with how much he reads he still acquires them faster than he can read them so it's not like that problem ever actually goes away if you read faster.

Anyway, it's only June. I am still on track to get my 10 books read, I think.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is actually a reread for me (or relisten, on audio) and I decided to give it another go because I thought that it might be relevant to my next writing project. It's short and I am unsure if it's a "novel" but I'm counting it anyway. But even while reading it, I felt like there wasn't a lot of meat to it, which is unfortunate. There was definitely the scaffolding of the intrigue plot, which I guess to me took secondary importance. There was the plot of Murderbot's development as a, person, I suppose? Which is definitely the main plot. However it felt weird that a huge emphasis on Murderbot's media consumption as being a part of its relateability, and yet we are starved for details on this media except that it's a soap opera and there are certain stereotypes present. We get a scrap of the actual plot like, once. What Murderbot actually enjoys about these serials is very vague despite their overwhelming importance to it. And to me, that's just... very odd. I would almost expect the soap opera plot to be like a tertiary plot, for how much of a motivator it is for Murderbot. As it is, it mostly feels like "trust me bro."

Then again, there are tons of books in this series. Maybe the actual serial content gets fleshed out later. I don't know. Don't show your entire hand right away, I guess?

Going to be honest I'm a little disturbed that my first Christmas in Minneapolis for a while and it's... rainy. Not snowy, no. It's raining outside. There's something seriously wrong with that.

Anyway, to make my brother's gift to me simple I asked him to just take me out to a movie on Christmas and we went to see The Boy and The Heron which is a movie that leaves much to think about, but also, my brother somehow found tickets to a subbed showing rather than a dubbed showing, and I was particularly looking forward to hearing Robert Pattinson as the gray heron and I didn't get that. I'm not sure if my brother was just not paying attention when he bought the tickets or what...

I guess on the movie -- it was very Miyazaki. I guess what's interesting from a Western perspective is that Western aesthetic is a sign of the exotic otherworldly here in a pretty straightforward way. Like I know a lot of anime will pull from western stuff as it's exotic in a way that tends to fly under the radar to westerners, but this one... didn't? Or maybe I am just seeing something differently than I did before.

Either way. I am still trying for a new username. I've started typing up the novel again as I have over a hundred pages to type up. I don't think it's really close to done, though. I feel like it's mostly cathartic at this point. Though I dream of publication, it's possible that this is too personal... or too much like garbage. Whatever.

So, some updates:

I’ve finished The Once And Future King by T. H. White on audiobook, all 33 hours. My understanding is that it’s a compilation of all of his Arthurian novels, which are based off of Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, which is itself meant to be something of a compilation of all Arthurian tales up to the point it was written. It was heavy-handed to say the least (but probably not as much as the originals, lol), and I was enjoying it until the conclusion of the grail quest and then it seemed to fall off quickly. The last few hours was particularly weak and moralizing, so I guess if you’re interested in reading it yourself I’d almost recommend just reading the Lancelot books and skipping Arthur entirely.

I have not getting any further on Parzival and am realizing I’m going to need to read some Tristan and probably Le Morte D’Arthur itself, which brings me to…

I am still working on the Arthurian Cupbearer Twinks fic, though it’s been going slowly for many reasons — I estimate I have about 5,000 words of it written, even though it’s not all typed. It’s evolved significantly since its inception and I *may* have something approaching a coherent story even though I really do need to figure out an outline at some point, and it definitely needs a proper title.

If anyone is interested in this project and wants to be involved in say, beta-reading or something, please feel free to contact me.

Back when I was a child, like elementary school age, I was obsessed with Sailor Moon for... some reason. And honestly it's weird, not because it's weird for any child to be obsessed with Sailor Moon, but more because throughout all of that time, I did not have any access to the main route that everyone else consumed the series at the time, as in the mid-nineties anime. I saw maybe a grand total of two or three episodes -- because my family didn't have cable, but I had some disposable income, I read all volumes of the original manga, had some of the novelizations, some weird art books, and some toys.

So as an all grown up to treat myself I got for Christmas the Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Vol 1 Eternal Edition -- yes, the large, glossy, sparkly version. I picked up this version rather than the smaller, cheaper volumes because this one apparently has a better translation, and, most importantly, more color pages. When I was a kid, most of the reason I liked Sailor Moon was the colors, so those big, glossy, dreamlike spreads in the middle of the book? The most important thing.

Anyway, rereading it has been a trip. One thing I remembered but am constantly surprised by is the way Takeuchi draws out her storytelling. It's not bad, per se, but the way characters, heads, dialogue boxes and screen tone drift through voids with extremely limited background and anchoring makes the whole comic seem like it's being told through a dreamlike state, something that doesn't seem to be reproducible in a cartoon. I remember trying to copy the style when I was drawing as a kid and it... not working out. But still, if you're someone who wants to draw comics but struggles with backgrounds Sailor Moon's success might be worth studying.

Now that I'm older, and it may be partly a product of the times, some things read very differently. Like, I'm sorry to say, but Mamoru is a high schooler who walks around during the day in a tuxedo and is flirting with a middle schooler -- he is That Guy. It's way more interesting now that Queen Beryl's lackeys are men who disguise themselves as women to enact their evil schemes, and they don't do it to do things that are barred off from men, like scientists and prep school teachers. If the original translation of these comics had not been so terrible (I was literally reading the original mixx comix versions, before the US had any idea whatsoever how to translate these) and I had been paying marginally more attention, I'm sure that Usagi disguising herself as a groom would have awakened something in me. As it was, even now, I did a double-take.

Anyway, lastly, a lot of the technology used in these beginning Sailor Moon chapters feels so... old. In the back of the book it has notes on how CDs and video rental stores work because kids these days don't have experience with these things. They have to have special wristwatch communicators while these days every fourteen year old is going to have their own cell phone. Probably most interestingly is that it seems to make an assumption, a prediction, in the supposedly advanced technology that the Sailor Scouts have access to that it gets majorly wrong. Every device they use has its own function, whereas modern computers are always narrowing down to one device that can do all things.

Anyway. Will I get the next one? probably. When? I have no idea. It was enough of an ordeal getting this one at curbside at the independent bookstore and these volumes are a whopping $28 each, which is a lot for an afternoon's worth of nostalgia.

I just finished the book Same Same by Peter Mendelsund and I am not sure if I enjoyed it. I bought it because the cover caught my eye and the blurb sounded intriguing:

So from the blurb it sounds like a magical realism novel about the insufferable world of the people who do TED talks, cool. It’s a thick tome, 483 pages long, and I picked it up because it looked like one of those literary-like books where there would be a lot of words but not much action and because I had been going through a lot of shit in my life (and let’s be real, when am I never going through a lot of shit in my life), I thought it would be a bit of a breather. I guess it delivered, because that’s mostly what it was, but I really wish it was, well, better? Maybe more character focused, having a bit more candy flavor than pure textual flourish to keep me interested because I don’t think I was that invested until I got to maybe the final quarter of the book.

However I find that this book has a major problem. This problem is not anywhere within the covers of the book itself; rather the problem is that this book was shelved in science fiction and fantasy in every bookstore I’ve seen it, and it’s not a science fiction or fantasy book.

( Spoilers Below )