Black Dahlia, Red Rose (by Piu Eatwell)

I read The Emperor of All Maladies thinking it would qualify as "investigative nonfiction by a POC" but it's really not investigative. So I decided to try again with this book about the Black Dahlia murder by Piu Eatwell.

I've read a few Black Dahlia books and they are always kind of terrible. (I read the Black Dahlia Avenger, although Google barely indexes my blog so I can't find it anymore.) This one is better than average and presents a theory of the case that I personally find persuasive.  Although the consulting psychiatrist does sound like a quack, it seems that Leslie Dillon knew facts of the case that only the killer would know, plus there is a ton of circumstantial evidence tying him to Elizabeth Short and to the murder. Case closed? 

Whereabouts (by Jhumpa Lahiri)

Whereabouts is another Camp ToB selection. It's a novella by Jhumpa Lahiri originally written in Italian and translated by her.  There isn't much of a plot, per se, more a series of vignettes from the life of a melancholy narrator, living in an Italian city.

There's something spare and meditative about this very interior story. Something about it resonated despite the fact that not a lot happens; I enjoyed spending time in this richly drawn world.

Jay’s Gay Agenda (by Jason June)

Yes it's more queer YA! Who would have guessed.

This was cute, full of bad choices that felt very plausibly teenagery and a main conflict with his supposed "BFF" that didn't need to exist, but hey, teenagers.  People on Goodreads are very up in arms about what is considered cHeATiNg and I guess their teenage love lives weren't as messy as mine.

The main character is likeable and I enjoyed the lack of drama in both coming out and moving to the "queer heaven" of Seattle, but he talks about his own erection almost as much as he uses the word "frack" instead of fuck; both are annoying. Best author photo ever, though.

Eligible (by Curtis Sittenfeld)

I thought this "modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice" would be a fun choice for the RHC category of books set in the Midwest (it's set in Cincinnati).  (As a side note, I consider the Midwest to be
Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. But actually now that I look at a map, none of those are in the western half of the country.  Maybe it should be called the Mideast?) 

Eligible is a breezy read, funny in parts, quite clever in parts, but also uncomfortable at times. Racism, fatphobia and bigotry are used as punchlines and the Black and trans characters are very tokenistic. I feel like Sittenfeld had good intentions but it's cringey in the execution.  The ending also feels very rushed (strange considering how long the book is; I think she maybe is adhering a bit too faithfully to the pacing of the original) and in 2013, I don't think two characters are going to decide to get married before they even have begun dating each other, so some of the modernization needed work.  

(Also one of the best characters is named Ham, short for Hamilton, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it's because Wickham has been split into two characters here, and the other one is named Jasper Wick. Duh. )

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (by Siddhartha Mukherjee)

In my head this was going to be a Read Harder Challenge book, but I ultimately realized it doesn't qualify as "investigative journalism" so it actually doesn't fit any of the categories. Still, a challenging read, since it's dense with scientific information and jumps around in time somewhat. I enjoyed the deep dive into cancer genetics and the history of cancer treatment; not so much the time jumps, which made an already dense book more difficult to parse.

As a side note, I've always known that the father of one of our friends had a Nobel prize for something or other. But now I fully understand what he got it for and why his discovery of reverse trancriptase (aka retroviruses) was so important. I also have to say on a personal level that when Mukherjee is taking about risk factors for cancer, he mentions obesity, but more specifically in the context of genetics. That is, people who are genetically predisposed to obesity may be genetically predisposed to certain types of cancer.  This feels much better to me than "you eat too much and this will probably give you cancer," which is the message I have absorbed without even realizing it.

Anyway, glad that (even if it doesn't "count" for anything) I read this! Ironically, my backup choice for "investigative journalism by a POC" is turning out to be an extremely easy read, so at least I feel like I've done some Reading Harder with this one.

Summertime Queer YA Readathon

Ah yes, queer YA, my favorite! This started out as a post about one book but then I immediately finished another one. (I looked up a list of best queer YA from spring 2021 and my library had like seven of the books on the list available.) So as long as I'm on this streak, I'll just keep updating here.

Cool for the Summer (by Dahlia Adler)

 This one was so good. It reminded me a lot of my young adult take on Persuasion but it's done so well.* The romance is hot, the characters are great, the bisexual representation is great, it's just really fun and delightful. 

*My first YA novel was set in Hollywood and I just found out she has a Hollywood series too. Dahlia might be my young adult twin?

Hani and Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating (by Adiba Jaigirdir)

Oh my gosh I loved this. Reminded me a bit of Amelia Westlake Was Never Here in terms of the character dynamics, with fabulous bisexual representation (yet again!) and a great representation of Hani and Ishu's cultures.  (I particularly loved the portrayal of Hani, a Muslim whose parents are originally from Bangladesh.)

I follow Jaigirdir on Instagram where she is also very charming and delightful.  I hope this book is the massive hit it deserves to be.

Between Perfect and Real (by Ray Stoeve)

This is a coming-of-age narrative about a trans boy coming to terms with his trans identity. Dean is portrayed realistically; including, I thought, in true teenage fashion, having a lack of grace towards others who have a hard time adjusting to his transition but do their best.  But I wonder if Stoeve intends us to read Dean that way or if he's portraying all these other characters as firmly in the wrong for every misstep. 

This comes to a head with Zoe, his girlfriend, who makes many mistakes (some truly bad, like outing him to their friends) but then breaks up with him because she's a lesbian. I am happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, but it seems valid for Zoe to decide she can't date a trans man because she is not attracted to men. Something about the way her character is treated didn't sit right with me.  But anyway, I enjoyed Dean's story and him as a character, for sure.

Written in the Stars (by Alexandria Bellefleur)

I wanted to like this more than I did. The characters are charming and I love that this is a F/F romance (with bisexual rep) but the plot didn't quite work for me.  Supposedly this is about fake dating (and I love that trope) but they drop that ruse really fast.  Basically everything you think will be an obstacle for our couple isn't; when we finally do get to the "oh no everything has gone wrong" moment, it doesn't quite ring true.  Also I wasn't surprised when fanfiction came up as a topic because the sex scenes were full of tropes from fanfic.  

Anyway maybe I'm not a big enough romance fan; I know a lot of people loved this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

“I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates

This was my pick for "a book you’ve been intimidated to read."  For a long time, I couldn't bear to look back at the tragedy of Obama giving way to Donald Trump. I still can't read about the 2016 election.  The pain is still too raw; even with Joe Biden now being in the White House, the spectre of Trump still lingers. But I got this book, a paperback copy no less, and decided this would be the one.

This is a collection of Coates's Atlantic essays, one each for the eight years of the Obama presidency, with an introduction contextualizing the essay, ruminating on what Coates wishes he might have done differently and the impact each essay had on his career . The Wikipedia page links to the essays themselves. My favorite was "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" and I also thought "The First White President" (presented as an epilogue) was illuminating. It punctures the myth of the "white working class" that we (white people) like to "blame" for Trump.  

Coates published this in 2017, a dark time for the country, and it ends in a place of semi-despair. (Even before we knew how very bad Trump would be, how close we came to outright fascism, how many people would die in a pandemic.) I would like to believe that Coates despairs a little less now. He criticizes Joe Biden's prison policies a lot, for example, but Biden has put racial justice at the center of his agenda in a way that I am not sure Coates would have predicted in 2017.

Nonetheless, this was a confronting and frankly depressing read, and it took me a while to get through it.  I'm going to read What White People Can Do Next and try to focus on the continued resistance that, as Coates says, must be in some respects its own reward.

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job (by Kikuko Tsumura)

There's something about Japanese novels in translation that I just love; I'm not sure if it's the language or something about the approach to writing, but it's utterly delightful. This particularly reminded me of Convenience Store Woman because it's both specific and interior.  

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job documents a series of quirky temp jobs held by a woman in her 30s who has burned out of her previous career and moved back in with her parents. We don't find out until the end what her career was, but it's kind of beside the point. We just enjoy getting to know each of these workplaces and each of her roles: writing advertisements for a bus company, for example, or composing trivia for cracker packaging.

One of my favorites of the year so far (along with another Japanese novel in translation, Breasts and Eggs). 

Felix Ever After (by Kacen Callender)

A young adult romance featuring a young transmasculine artist, Felix Love. For some reason this one didn't gel for me. I would have stopped reading but I'm behind on my book count for the year so I went ahead and finished it.  For me, the central romance didn't work and there were too many implausibilities, but this is a beloved book, and wonderful representation for trans kids (especially Black trans kids) who don't see themselves represented in young adult romance very often, if ever. So the trans YA fan in your life would probably love this!