false 32 206 68 true 5676136 read 2 true 3261065 currently-reading 139 true 3261064 to-read 40 false 3316605 novels 25 false 3328472 queer-fiction 20 false 3316009 queer-lammy-stonewall 15 false 3316570 memoir-auto-bio-history 12 false 3315991 young-adult 9 false 3517769 stories 7 false 3328510 nonfiction-other 6 false 3726620 science 6 false 4943539 to-buy 5 false 3316267 orange-booker-shortlist 4 false 5596204 queer-other 4 false 3316653 anthology-essays 3 false 3316636 class-ethnicity 3 false 3316667 writing-publishing 2 false 6333657 hurston-wright-shortlist 2 false 4102491 poetry 1 false 3946588 plays http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/69185030 Holding Pattern: Stories (Paperback) by Jeffery Renard Allen
bookshelves: currently-reading, hurston-wright-shortlist, stories
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/72412353 to: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hardcover) by Gabriel García Márquez
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/32033279 to: Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir (Hardcover) by Lillian Faderman
I've known for years that Lillian Faderman is a distinguished scholar of LGBT history, but I didn't know she practically single-handedly founded LGBT studies, thanks to the power she had when she became as a university vice-president in her early 30s. I've known for years that Lillian Faderman paid her own way through college by working in burlesque, but I didn't know that she had a long career in acting and soft-core porn, starting as a child, trying to "rescue" her mother from back-breaking labor.

This book is for everyone who was the first in their family to go to college. And for every woman who was ever enmeshed with her mother. And for everyone interested in the 20th-century experience of Jewish immigrants in New York. And for sex workers and people interested in the sociology of sex work. And for everyone in mixed-class relationships and those interested in thinking about class. And for everyone interested in Horatio Alger-type stories. What a life! What a book! ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60838317 to: The Creamsickle (Paperback) by Rhiannon Argo
It’s unusual to encounter literary lesbian fiction that's also a guilty pleasure, but both terms apply fairly to this book. The Creamsickle itself is full of trash--it's an unheated, lopsided flophouse in the Mission district of San Francisco that has an "ever-revolving door." Over the years, it’s been occupied by revolutionaries, "hippie fags and fairies," grunge lesbians, and now The Crew, three 20-something skateboarding bois who have made the house their "ultimate bachelor pad." Their procession of lovers are not mere lipsticks lesbians but "fierce girls," the "tough bunch of femmes with razor heels and sharp tongues" who can handle the neighborhood. The novel is more about queer family--creating it and maintaining it--than about individual relationships, and the house plays a Mansfield Park-like role in the story. The Creamsickle is available in paperback ($14.95) and as an e-book ($10.95) from www.bellabooks.com.

Poetry-loving Georgie is the most romantic and also the most sensible of the three bois. We meet her when she’s lovesick over a heroin-addicted girl, but she’s smart and strong enough to move on soon. She makes wise-beyond-her-years observations about herself and her friends, often wry or hilarious, like this one that made me LOL heartily in recognition (of myself and a previous partner): "Soda was the ultimate subletter of hearts......the first three months Soda was the best live-in lover a girl could possibly have. She usually didn’t have a job so whatever girl she was currently f*cking became her part-time employment. Girls would try to promote her to full time or permanent status, but she made sure to keep herself at entry level." Georgie’s literal transformation in the novel comes when, unemployed and broke, she adopts an outwardly femme identity and warily takes a job dancing in a strip club.

People in my demographic (50-ish, suburbanite) may need to read this novel with a cyberdictionary of urban slang and a cyberglossary of skateboarding terms at hand. (My favorite new word, which I did manage to figure out on my own, is bromance, for a butch/butch relationship.) The effort was worth it to me in order to get inside a world of young queer women who divide themselves into bois and girls, tops and bottoms—except when they don’t. Georgie sets a good example for readers in acknowledging that she doesn’t understand all the family dynamics, notably the feelings of my favorite character, a friend of hers who is considering transitioning (becoming more fully biologically male). I appreciated her discussions with that friend and from other characters who have conversations along the lines of "I don’t get dating a transboy. I mean, what’s the difference from a man?"

Most of these characters are working poor and are just getting launched in life. For example, the official end of Georgie’s relationships is simply "the divvying up of the sex toys," and in an 8-speaker argument about same-sex marriage, no one comes close to imagining why most older couples want it. But the only thing that made me feel apart from the characters was their constant alcohol and drug abuse, which after a while just seems sad and boring. Georgie is not an addict, though, and she relieves the irritation with self-aware comments like "I find a direct link to the amount of coke everyone is doing to how dramatic they all are being."

Argo avoids all the mistakes that too many lesbian writers make with regard to sex—-saving it for one or two "dramatic" scenes, only alluding to it, describing it almost clinically, or ignoring it altogether. References to sex start on page 1, and Argo often covers a lot of ground in a single sentence that contains the verb f*ck. The book’s only major flaw is disjointedness. Some of it reads like performance pieces or stories strung together, with girls appearing on the scene and leaving again with no strong narrative thread. However, this didn’t keep me from staying keenly interested in what happens to the 3 main characters and to the house. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/31966487 to: The Girls (Paperback) by Lori Lansens
This is the story of multiple extraordinary loves--the love of the conjoined twins for each other despite the major and minor annoyances they cause each other, the love of their adoptive parents for them, and the love of their parents for each other. Yet the book doesn't have a drop of saccharine. It's so meticulously researched and well imagined that it's hard to remember it's fiction, particularly because the twins repeatedly muse about what it means for a conjoined twin to write "auto"biography. Lansens does an excellent job of giving each woman her own chapters (Rose is a true writer; Ruby is a more occasional contributor), her own voice, and her own life story. Might be of particular interest to people with disabilities and those who care about them. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/31966487 Faith's review of The Girls
by Lori Lansens

The story of multiple extraordinary loves--the love between the conjoined twins, the love between them and their adoptive parents, the love between their parents--and it doesn't have a drop of saccharine. So meticulously researched and well imagined, it's hard to remember that it's fiction--especially when the sisters keep musing what it means for a conjoined twin to write an "auto"biography. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/67453659 to: The White Tiger (Hardcover) by Aravind Adiga
Debut author Adiga is (or was) a journalist who lives in Mumbai. "I spend a lot of my time loitering about train stations, or bus stands, or servants' quarters and slums, and I listen and talk to the people around me," he says in the back-of-the-book interview. "There's a kind of continuous murmur or growl beneath middle-class life in India, and this noise never gets recorded." In particular, Adiga emphasizes in the interview that the economic injustice and corruption in India are just as bad as he describes. In this way the book is similar to A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, although it's not nearly as grim.

The conceit of this epistolary novel is that the narrator, Balram, is writing to the premier of China, who is due to visit India. Balram knows that the premier will receive a sanitized view of the country, and he's writing to set the record straighter. This choice of an audience allows Adiga some delicious comparisons between the 2 superpowers-to-be, culminating in Balram's cocksure observation that "White men will be finished within my lifetime......in twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we'll rule the whole world."

I can't understand the commercial reviewers quoted in the book who call the novel "black comedy" or "satire." I agree with John Burdett: "There is a new Muse stalking global narrative: brown, angry, hilarious, half-educated, rustic-urban, iconoclastic, paan-spitting......Adiga is a global Gorky, a modern Kipling who grew up, and grew up mad."
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/59230376 to: History of Gay People in Alcoholics Anonymous: From the Beginning (Haworth Series in Family and Consumer Issues in Health) by Audrey Borden
This book is a treasure and I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in AA history, queer or not. I learned some wonderful facts, notably that the Third Tradition ("The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking") came about after a gay man asked to join a group, during AA's second year, and all hell broke loose.

Borden gives a history that shows how treatment for alcoholism and "treatment" for homosexuality once overlapped, including the grimmest measures such as shock treatment and eugenics. The bulk of the book, though, is based on her interviews of 29 LGBT AA members, mostly in large cities, who came into meetings between 1961 and 1981. The best of these interviews describe "what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now." I wish that Borden had solicited some Big Book-style full-fledged stories. Most interviewees concentate on how they found AA meetings, and/or other gay people in AA, and built sober gay communities.

I enjoyed reading about how the first homosexual groups formed, the fight to have homosexual meetings listed in the World Directory, the fight to publish a conference-approved pamphlet for gay and lesbian alcoholics, and Borden's speculations about why "Alcoholics Together" formed in Los Angeles, which was a separate organization limited to homosexual alcoholics.

The book is scholarly enough to include endnotes and a bibliography but successfully written for a general audience. Thanks for sharing, Audrey.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/60838207 The Heart's Traffic by Ching-In Chen
bookshelves: queer-fiction, to-read
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