Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.
Think about using it yourselves!
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Joseph and His Friend A Story of Pennsylvania by Bayard Taylor
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Joseph, a young man, marries a wealthy woman just as he is discovering an even more powerful love with his new friend Philip and must contend with the revelation of his wife's manipulative nature as well as his increasing feelings for Philip.
Joseph and His Friend has been deemed the "first gay novel" in America. It has also been noted for its enigmatic treatment of homosexuality. Roger Austen notes "In the nineteenth century, Bayard Taylor had written that the reader who did not feel 'cryptic forces' at play in Joseph and His Friend would hardly be interested in the external movement of his novel."
I PROCURED THIS BOOK FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG.
My Review: I love the straight-people arguments about how "gay" things weren't really A Thing in historical time! Alexander and Hephaistion? Besties! Achilles and Patroclus? Companions! Naomi and Ruth? Dutiful daughter-in-law! They really don't mean that. They mean "y'all creepy little losers aren't real and if you try harder you'll be just like me" so, since we won't do that, it's easy to hate us guilt-free. (Lest we be in any doubt, "I accept you, just not the sins you're committing" is hateful, judgmental rejection, like the horrifying "I love you anyway" that good christians love to emit.)
This is the story of a man who marries a horrible, manipulative woman, figures out she's awful, and confronts her with a demand that she change. Instead, she has a hissy fit and dies. (Good riddance to bad rubbish.) The way he figures out she's bad news is the love of a good man. He is involved in a train wreck (literal this time) and is nursed back to health by Philip. The good, kind, caring, nurturing Philip delivers everything Joseph has thirsted for. Their strong loving bond gives Joseph the strength to face down all of Society as his beady-eyed, small-souled religious-nut community suspects he is the cause of his revolting wife's death.
As soon as Joseph leaves these awful, judgmental church-goers and spends some more time in The Wilderness, the first place he returns to is Philip. "Ooops," thought Bayard Taylor, "that won't do," (or it was said to him) and hey-presto Joseph is suddenly, without the slightest reason, in love with Philip's sister who has barely appeared before this. As kludges go, this one's pretty awkward but doesn't shock me. Especially revealing of the nature of it as kludge is the extended meditation Philip runs through where he laments the fact that Joseph will be "take{n} further from my heart"; he determines, though, that it's really all for the best and he'll be vicariously happy in their marriage. Note: he doesn't at any time think "now I'll go get me one of those marriage things" or think about how he's happy his sister has such a good man; he mourns his own loss and sets up a lifetime of pining for what she ghosted out from under his nose.
Why I kept going despite the very serious problems with this book is simple: the American nineteenth century wasn't all that tolerant of Others. We're racist now, but these folks had just fought a war five years before it came out to determine if chattel slavery was going to remain legal. The whole thing, just by existing, is a shock to the social system. The author acknowledges as much in his preface:
To those who prefer quiet pictures of life to startling incidents, the attempt to illustrate the development of character to the mysteries of an elaborate plot, and the presentation of men and women in their mixed strength and weakness to the painting of wholly virtuous ideals and wholly evil examples: who are as interested in seeing moral and intellectual forces at work in a simple country community as on a more conspicuous place of human action: who believe in the truth and tenderness of man's love for man, as of man's love for woman: who recognize the trouble which confused ideals of life and the lack of high and intellect culture bring upon a great portion of our country population,–to all such, no explanation of this volume is necessary. Others will not read it.
Borrow it from the library, download it for free. Not a book you'll want to re-read absent a real fascination with queerness in the nineteenth century.
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The Boystown Prequels: Two Nick Nowak Novellas by Marshall Thornton
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Lambda award-winning Boystown Mystery series follows the cases of former police officer turned private investigator Nick Nowak. Set in Chicago during the early 1980s, Nowak is haunted by his abrupt departure from the CPD and the end of his relationship with librarian Daniel Laverty. The Boystown Prequels includes:
Little Boy Dead
Former Chicago police officer turned private investigator, Nick Nowak is haunted by a traumatic break-up and his abrupt departure from the department after being gay-bashed. It's fall 1979 and Nick has just received his P.I. license but has no clients. Short on funds, he takes a temporary job as a driver for Film Fest Chicago. In a very short time, Nick deals with stalking fans, a crowd of protesters, and a critic’s stolen wallet that leads to murder.
Little Boy Afraid
It’s winter 1980, private investigator Nick Nowak gets one of his first jobs working for an openly-gay senate candidate. Allan Grimley has been receiving death threats, a lot of them, and it’s Nick’s job to keep him alive until the election. As he protects Grimley from increasing dangers, his friendship with bartender Ross deepens.
Both stories have been sold previously.
I GOT THESE STORIES AS AN AMAZON KINDLE PROMOTION.
My Review: An exercise in nostalgia. I was totally sucked in by the idea of something set at the end of the Carter era, the last gasp of good government in the USA before the vile plutocrats distracted the stupid with a religious revival meeting and the leftists with pointless internecine-fighting nonsense.
Nick Nowak doesn't care about that, he cares about rent and gas for his Duster:
...and a man in his bed who will go away in (ideally before) the morning. He's coping with the serious problem of post-Outing shunning, a Polish Catholic family of cops whose lives he's ruined by daring not to conform, a new career as a private investigator that means he intersects with them and their like-minded bigots a lot, and an empty place in his life where his boyfriend (who buggered right off rather than deal with him anymore) once was.These novellas are quite sexually explicit, and deeply unsafe for straight readers. Younger readers (than I am, say under 50) won't necessarily feel comfortable with Vaseline and barebacking. The stories they're telling are to my taste...Nick will gladly ignore your power stance, or use it to aim a solid kick to your boys if you try to cow him...so it was a few hours pleasantly spent.
Get your very own here (non-affiliate Amazon link).
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The Lodger, That Summer by Levi Huxton
Rating: 3.5* of five, rounded up for asking better questions than one could expect.
FINALIST FOR THE 34th LAMMY AWARD—BEST LGBTQ EROTICA!
The Publisher Says: It’s a hot summer Down Under and everyone’s got sex on the mind.
Eighteen year-old James has had a tough year. Having lost his mum to cancer and fought through grief to finish high school, he’s now got secret desires to contend with.
It’s Christmas in Sydney, and he’s ready to cast his worries aside for the summer holidays, a time of poolside parties, bush walks and ocean swims. But who is the seductive young man who’s moved into the spare room?
In this steamy coming-of-age novel, James and the men around him discover transformative new desires with the power to up-end lives or, possibly, unlock a brighter future.
I GOT THIS STORY AS AN AMAZON KINDLE PROMOTION.
My Review: Definitely not straight people safe. We're well and truly into the erotica shelf of the shop, all of it making itself useful despite flinging revolting w-bombs everywhere.
If the Star Trek mantra, "infinite diversity in infinite combinations," is meaningful to you, this story will please and possibly surprise you. There are minor inconsistent details...ages...but honestly it's just not worth getting into a swivet about.
Pleasant diversion. Give it a whirl.
Get yours at Amazon (non-affiliate link) now!
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Who Killed Tom Thomson?: The Truth about the Murder of One of the 20th Century's Most Famous Artists by John Little
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Tom Thomson was Canada's Vincent van Gogh. He painted for a period of five years before meeting his untimely death in a remote wilderness lake in July 1917. He was buried in an unofficial grave close to the lake where his body was found. About eight hours after he was buried, the coroner arrived but never examined the body and ruled his death accidental due to drowning. A day and a half later, Thomson's family hired an undertaker to exhume the body and move it to the family plot about 100 miles away. This undertaker refused all help, and only worked at night.
In 1956, John Little's father and three other men, influenced by the story of an old park ranger who never believed Thomson's body was moved by the undertaker, dug up what was supposed to be the original, empty grave. To their surprise, the grave still contained a body, and the skull revealed a head wound that matched the same location noted by the men who pulled his corpse from the water in 1917. The finding sent shockwaves across the nation and began a mystery that continues to this day.
In Who Killed Tom Thomson? John Little continues the sixty-year relationship his family has had with Tom Thomson and his fate by teaming up with two high-ranking Ontario provincial police homicide detectives. For the first time, they provide a forensic scientific opinion as to how Thomson met his death, and where his body is buried. Little draws upon his father's research, plus recently released archival material, as well as his own thirty-year investigation. He and his colleagues prove that Thomson was murdered, and set forth two persons of interest who may have killed Tom Thomson.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Wondering who Tom Thomson was?
He was a founding member, if a posthumous one, of The Group of Seven Canadian artists. It is not too much to say that Thomson's untimely, and long mysterious, death was a major catalyst in the Group of Seven (then called "the Algonquin School") emerging from obscurity to claim a place in the world artistic establishment.
That does rather make solving the mystery surrounding Thomson's death problematic. Especially for the family, who (via eldest sibling George Thomson) visited the area where Tom's body was discovered and spoke to his contacts there; as well as the letters Tom had sent home, we can feel sure that George felt clear in his mind about what Tom's death involved. And he forcefully, from the day he got there to the day he died, shut down speculation about "what really happened." The Official Story, however, made not one whit of sense. The author, son of a man whose involvement in the case began accidentally almost forty years after Thomson's death, tells a thoroughly researched and forensically vetted story about the death that, had the family not refused to cooperate with a routine exhumation and DNA test, would've made the world's headline machine whir into life.
I think, having read this tendentious tome, that the author and his trained detectives and forensic experts are correct about the outlines of the case, and probably have the final solution covered in their several options as detailed in the book. So it seems like a safe bet that someone in Thomson's remaining family already knows what the truth is and doesn't want it told, OR doesn't want the mysterious cachet that adheres to Tom Thomson's name and thus his work (and their patrimony) to be even slightly dispelled.
A Kindle copy is only $2.99, cheap at twice that price. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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My Perfect Cousin by Colin O'Sullivan
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Rural Ireland in the late 1980s and, stuck in a rut in a small unnamed village, are sixteen-year-old cousins Laura and Kevin. The close cousins and constant companions ache to abscond to somewhere bigger, better, more exciting, where they are free to do what they want to do, free to become who they really are.
But things are holding them back. As well as having to cope with family tragedies, the troubled, music-obsessed teens must also negotiate the tricky terrain of burgeoning sexuality, the pitfalls of adolescence, and issues of homosexuality that seem, confusingly, to impinge upon them.
And then there is Laura’s own serious affliction, epilepsy, which comes and goes when she least expects it. Only cousin Kevin knows how to handle this tricky situation, or handle her: with gentleness, with sympathy, and with maybe just a little too much in the way of love and affection.
The months and the spiraling family crises serve only to bring them closer together: but how close is too close?
And then there is the strange matter of the nearby pond: this small body of water keeps drawing them near. Laura is convinced that something lurks down there, but Kevin eschews, putting it all down to the psychological trauma she is going through. Are they prepared for whatever secrets might come bubbling to the surface, monsters real or imagined that could come rising from the depths?
Colin O’Sullivan returns to a familiar (and formative) Irish setting with this punchy novel that grows in pace page by page. 1980s references abound, not only with music giants of the time, Boy George, Madonna et al, but also the politics of Gorbachev and Reagan, literal and figurative walls that are about to be torn down and imminent societal changes. Although rooted in the past, this fraught and frantic work is startlingly relevant and makes us consider today’s current affairs.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: CW: Homophobia, homophobic violence, family secrets
I don't think I've spent more than a few minutes since finishing this book, for the second time, wondering why Author O'Sullivan chose the vocabulary he did in telling the tale (several reviewers elsewhere have mentioned the archness or preciousness of it). I've spent *hours* wondering why Kevin and his, um, personality flaws occurred to him....
But second time that it is, this read was deeply offensive to me. When Kevin, its main character, was revealed as such a homophobe I lost connection to the narrative. I came to understand the reasons, but there will never be an excuse. Why, then, read it twice? I had squads of cousins. I never once, in my entire life, considered fucking one of them...not even trying! Here are Kevin and Laura doing the wild thing and they dare to be homophobic?! So I wanted to make sure I read the book for the first time, again (meaning after a good gap). Several years on, my outrage dimmed and my interest warmed up in this bitter, angry boy and this cagey, clever girl inside their deeply Verboten cocoon. I can definitely see that the vocabulary is a stylistic choice to enhance a mood, disseminate an atmosphere, and it works very well at that. I ended up liking the idea of the book while being really angered and not a little repulsed by several of its facets. Still...Art. Art gets to do what it must to make its point, and nothing that is not Art could evoke such visceral emotional responses in my tired old-man's soul.
The trade paper edition is $16.77 from Amazon. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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Gay Like Me: A Father Writes to His Son by Richie Jackson
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: In this poignant and timely love letter to his son, producer Richie Jackson reflects on his experiences as a gay man in America and the progress and setbacks of LGBTQ citizens over the past fifty years.
"My son is kind, responsible, and hardworking. He is ready for college. He is not ready to be a gay man living in America."
When Richie Jackson's eighteen-year-old son born through surrogacy came out to him, the successful theater, television, and film producer, now in his fifties, was compelled to reflect on his experiences and share his wisdom on life for LGBTQ Americans over the past half-century.
Gay Like Me is a celebration of gay identity and a sorrowful warning. Jackson looks back at his own progress and growth as a gay man coming of age through decades of political and cultural change. We've come a long way since Stonewall, he marvels: discrimination is now outlawed in most states, gay men and women can marry, and drugs can protect against AIDS and mitigate its effects.
Jackson's son lives in a newly liberated America. Yet nothing can be taken for granted. Bigotry and hatred still exist, nurtured by a president whose divisive, manipulative language exacerbates fear of "The Other," drawing support and votes for excluding minorities and anyone who can be labelled "an outsider." A newly constituted Supreme Court with a conservative tilt could revoke laws and turn the clock back years. Gay identity can be worn with pride, but gay citizens cannot be complacent Jackson warns; they must always be vigilant that their gains are fragile.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates did in Between the World and Me, Jackson offers a response to our anxious and uncertain times. An intimate, personal exploration of our most troubling questions and profound concerns—about issues such as human rights, equality, justice—Gay Like Me is a book for all who care about tolerance, diversity, and social progress. Angry, proud, fierce, tender, it is powerful letter of love from a father to a son that holds lasting insight for us all.
I GOT THIS BOOK AS AN AMAZON KINDLE PROMOTION.
My Review: I'm afraid this isn't my kindest review.
Your cotton is down, Miss Richie. A wealthy white man using WEB DuBois quotes to bring up points in the QUILTBAG struggle needs to cross a high bar of interrogating his privilege, acknowledging his appropriation and justifying it, and not speaking to the son he conceived through surrogacy and raised in the world where that simply *is* as though that is the world his son will inherit. Much has changed since Stonewall. But much that has changed seems not to have made a mark on the author...or the publisher. Between the World and Me does not inhabit the same ZIP code as this book, any more than the authors do.
Now for the parts I can relate to, and acknowledge as positive: This is a good and solid rumination on the trajectory of the movement for 2SLGBTQIA+ to be fully included in the politics and culture of this country. I'm glad this gay dad is writing to his gay son about his life, and his work to make the world more inclusive. I simply wish that he had been more aware of what did not get dome and who was not included, and asked his son to advance the work already done. Sadly it was left as "this is your dad" and that, in the 2020s, is just not enough.
NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE. (non-affiliate Amazon link)
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Madder: A Memoir in Weeds by Marco Wilkinson
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Madder, matter, mater—a weed, a state of mind, a material, a meaning, a mother. Poet and horticulturist Marco Wilkinson searches for the roots of myths and memories among plant families and family trees.
"My life, these weeds." Marco Wilkinson's intimate vignettes of intergenerational migration, queer sexuality, and willful forgetting use the language of plants as both structure and metaphor—particularly weeds: invisible yet ubiquitous, unwanted yet abundant, out-of-place yet flourishing. Madder combines meditations on nature with memories of Wilkinson's Rhode Island childhood and glimpses of his maternal family's life in Uruguay. The son of a fierce immigrant mother who tried to erase his absent father from their lives, Wilkinson investigates his heritage with a mixture of anger and empathy as he wrestles with the ambiguity of the past. Using a verdant iconography rich with wordplay and symbolism, Wilkinson offers a mesmerizing portrait of finding belonging in an uprooted world.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: It's one of the wonderful things about reading memoirs that, as we voyeuristically peer into the writer's personal life, we also learn, experience anew or for the first time, that special glory of Life that Author Wilkinson describes thus: "Finally the freedom of being, not being seen." It's a genuine pleasure that the genre has in greater abundance than most all the books I read in so many other genres. Marco has led a really surprising life, son of a single Uruguayan mother whose character clearly formed his observant, detail-oriented self as well as the art he can't help but produce.
This is a seriously poetic tale of being queer (as we now say) among people who aren't supportive of you. This is a sad tale of being sure there's something wrong with the way the world treats you, the way it talks about you, and not being in touch with any strand of culture that supports the sense you have of yourself. This is the reason the hate-filled rejecters of life's Others want to remove the books and censor the art that includes people they don't like. If you're not one of those people, and—importantly—if you like poetry and/or poetical prose, read this wonderful story of a man coming to accept and shape his sense of himself via the metaphorical garden with its weeds that he's built of and for himself. It's a lovely trip.
For only $14.05, you can follow that non-affiliate link to Amazon for your Kindle version.
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Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blindspot by Jonathan Alexander
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: An archive of personal trauma that addresses how a culture still toxic to queer people can reshape a body
In the summer of 2019, Jonathan Alexander had a minor stroke, what his doctors called an "eye stroke." A small bit of cholesterol came loose from a vein in his neck and instead of shooting into his brain and causing damage, it lodged itself in a branch artery of his retina, resulting in a permanent blindspot in his right eye. In Stroke Book, Alexander recounts both the immediate aftermath of his health crisis, which marked deeper health concerns, as well as his experiences as a queer person subject to medical intervention.
A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously. Queer people often experience psychic and somatic pressures that not only decrease their overall quality of life but can also lead to shorter lifespans. Emerging out of a medical emergency and a need to think and feel that crisis through the author's sexuality, changing sense of dis/ability, and experience of time, Stroke Book invites readers on a personal journey of facing a health crisis while trying to understand how one's sexual identity affects and is affected by that crisis. Pieceing and stitching together his experience in a queered diary form, Alexander's lyrical prose documents his ongoing, unfolding experience in the aftermath of the stroke. Through the fracturing of his text, which almost mirrors his fractured sight post-stroke, the author grapples with his shifted experience of time, weaving in and out, while he tracks the aftermath of what he comes to call his "incident" and meditates on how a history of homophobic encounters can manifest in embodied forms.
The book situates itself within a larger queer tradition of writing—first, about the body, then about the body unbecoming, and then, yet further, about the body ongoing, even in the shadow of death. Stroke Book also documents the complexities of critique and imagination while holding open a space for dreaming, pleasure, intimacy, and the unexpected.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Author Alexander does a lot of thinking. It is all in his prose.
I found myself thinking beyond {others}'s formal approach to the even more particularly queer nature of how I understood my stroke, of how I had been invited by a homophobic culture to think and feel about my body. A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously.
His world includes a husband, Mack, and a bunch of doctors who see him at need. So yes...he's white male privilege on legs. He's loved, employed, and creatively gifted (even works with my dote Michelle Latiolais!); he's able to get a publishing deal, so he's well connected.
None of that matters to cholesterol hanging onto the walls of this one artery, though, and when it takes off and lands in a new place that leaves him partially blind (and him with amblyopia already! PLUS it's his dominant eye that has the stroke!) He lands in that weird place called "chronic illness." And he'll never leave it. As a Queer man, that's a bad, grim journey...so many, many side-paths and so many losses and so much rage against the medical establishment that excuses its homophobia as "concern for patient privacy". But mostly, the fact is, this is a new resident in a community he's circled for decades, since AIDS through some "calculus of divine justice" has been seen as guilty without trial or concern for truth of Deserving It. Whatever bad thing "It" is, the gay men of the world Deserve It.
Not true; never was true; but there it is, like a rock in your panna cotta. Author Alexander asks, as he copes with his new situation as well as his mother's decline into old age, "is this what aging is like?" And answers himself, "Too soon. Always too soon." Amen, Soul Sibling. A-bloody-men!
Buy your hardcover at Fordham University Press's website for $19.95. The Kindle edition is half that price, but the art's so pretty on paper....
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts:
JUNE 2022's PEARL-RULES
It doesn't look like there will be a Pearl-Ruled book...it's the 26th and one hasn't shown up yet, which is *weird* but also quite lovely.
MAY 2022's BURGOINES ARE HERE.
APRIL 2022's BURGOINES ARE HERE.
MARCH 2022's BURGOINES AREN'T.
FEBRUARY 2022's BURGOINES ARE HERE.
JANUARY 2022's BURGOINES ARE HERE.
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