December 2017-ish Reading

Unearthed in a gmail draft! Books I read a year ago:

Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (Victoria Sweet) (2017): Nonfiction memoir / call to consider that American health care is good at crisis intervention and terrible at creating situations where patients avoid crisis, especially in the era of managed care. Sweet traces her path from college through her early practice of medicine, with anecdotes of the encroachment of modern health care on the doctor's ability to provide cohesive long term care for the most vulnerable patients. An enjoyable stop on my path seeking a history of 20th and 21st century medicine.

Spinning (Tillie Walden) (2017): Graphic novel / memoir mostly about figure skating. The focus is on the author's experiences with singles?/synchro figure skating, while dealing with the other forces of adolescence: family, friendships (and loneliness), and love, emphasis on lesbians. Spinning does a good job expressing the feeling of the author's experiences. It's more a narrative of experience than a reflection on those feelings and events. Which isn't a bad thing, it's important to testify that things happened in your life. But the narrative voice doesn't have a lot of interest in doing the big picture: the homogeneity of synchro costumes and the girlfriend's mother who breaks up the young couple; the SAT tutor who assaults Tillie and the sexualization inherent in women's (girls') skintight, short-skirted staking costumes, the makeup masks on the ice and the sense of disconnection or isolation. They're there, they're stated. The overwhelming impression is of disconnection, even of event from event.

Not Your Sidekick (C.B. Lee) (2016): YA with LGBT and superpowers. Jess Tran's parents are heroes, her sister is in hero school, her brother is a budding mad scientist. But by 17, Jess hasn't manifested any powers, and at her age is unlikely to. What she does with this leads to her entanglement in the mystery of disappearing villains, a discovery about one of her closest friends, a lot of yearning for longtime crush Abby Jones, and the discovery that some of the comforting truths of her life might not be all that true.

( Spoilers. )

Recent Reading

L. A. Hall's Comfortable Courtesan series: these were the perfect travel stories for me! I read the first three novels, The Comfortable Courtesan, Rustick Exile, and A Change of Station while exploring Oxford and London. The fictional memoirs of a Regency era courtesan, Madame Clorinda Cathcart, who gradually enters into a stable triad with her two darlings, the Scottish F-s, helps a number of her circle out of troubles via social contrivances, has need of a contrivance or two herself, and records these incidences and others in a delightful and unique voice that was very appealing when I was both enjoying and afflicted by travel brain. I wanted to bawl when [spoiler] [redacted] in the most sudden and shocking fashion. It was excellent! The fourth and fifth novels, Old Enemies, New Problems and Dramatick Rivalry, I read once I was back in the States. I'm holding off on the rest of the series until I'm in need of a soothing and relatively sensible read. The series was (is?) posted as a serial at the_comfortable_courtesan; if ebook is more your speed, DRM-free copies are cheaply available.

My hold on an electronic copy of Rogue Protocol, the third Murderbot novella (2018), came in while I was traveling, and thanks to the miracle of wifi, I was able to download and read it on the way home. A month later, Exit Strategy (2018) (Martha Wells) came to me in hardcover. Rogue Protocol features Murderbot exploring another sketchy GrayCris site, and interacting with humans who had a human bot; Exit Strategy has Murderbot trying to deliver the info it's found to Dr. Mensah and the humans of Preservation.

Because I am predictable, I will share my favorite exchange in Exit Strategy:

That was Gurathin. I don't like him. "I don't like you."
"I know."
He sounded like he thought it was funny. "That is not funny."
"I'm going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent."
"Fuck you."
"Let's make that sixty percent."

Ah, Gurathin, continuing my long tradition of "funny sarcastic fictional characters who I would hate in real life."

If you haven't read the first two novellas, I would start with All Systems Red. The four novellas are fast reads, and if you like the first, it's very likely you'll like them all. If you are all caught up, it's reliably stated Wells has been signed for a Murderbot novel, so watch for that sometime down the road.

My search for a romance novel I like, versus a story with a romance on the side, continues with a stop for In for a Penny (Rose Lerner) (2010). Well! That was certainly a 21st century take on the Regency romance. Young woman of the merchant class marries the first impoverished rake who asks. The author tries to convince me a previously repressed young woman is discovering sensuality in her marriage, while the rake strives to reform. The Evil Village Vicar, the Rake's Former Mistress, Benthal Green, and a number of other Regency romance hallmarks make an appearance. If you like regency romances, but find this unpolished, apparently Lerner's later novels improve.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two: The Official Playscript of the Original West End Production (J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany) (2017): the time-tripping adventures of Harry and Draco's sons, who are touched by the ongoing grief of Amos Diggory, get their hands on a super-Time-Turner, and resolve to fix Cedric Diggory's death. It does not go to plan; not the boys', not the person using them for their own family ends; and not the parents who struggle to give their children what they need (or, in Harry's case, what they think they need). Reading the playscript satisfied my completionist streak and did not ignite in me a great need to see the five hours of live performance. I am certain the onstage special effects are amazing, but five hours is a lot of theater time.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Alison Bechdel) (2006): Coming out, closeted parent... the title is a play on the obvious and on a shortening of "funeral home", the author's father's family business. The narrative loops around Alison Bechdel's father's death, strongly felt by most around him to be suicide; bouncing back to the author's childhood, and up to college, and through themes of gender, identity & etc along the way. This was recommended to me way back in the day, and given my own experiences with complex family relationships, I can see why, but this didn't speak too directly to my own family challenges. Rather, it powerfully illuminated one specific family and one experience of identity.

Intensive Care: A Doctor's Journal (John F. Murray, MD) (2000): Nonfiction. A diary of one month of morning rounds in San Francisco General Hospital's Intensive Care Unit. AZT is a thing, but HIV's still a killer. Electronic medical records are a thing of the future, as indirectly nodded to by an anaphylaxis screwup. Lack of advance directives is a challenge. Drug use among the marginal members of society is a problem. ICU patients are intubated and extubated; sometimes reintubated. Infections start, spread, are battled with antibiotics; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And more often than anyone would like, patients die, sometimes after drawn-out interventions. The matter-of-fact tone interspersed with extended thoughts from the author on the cases he sees mixes his observations with his feelings about the patients and families he cares for and interacts with; the nurses, residents, interns, and volunteers he works with; and the state of the hospital, and health care in general. It's a mashup that makes me want to reread the book with more attention to how medical decisions helped and didn't help patients. I did appreciate the contrast of surgeons ("often wrong, but never in doubt") with internists ("don't just do something, stand there"). The brief history of the medical ventilator - linked to polio outbreaks, and paralyzed lungs - was enlightening to me, as I'd never thought to ask about the development of ventilators, or their impact on intensive care.

Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (Janet Mock) (2014): Memoir of a Hawaiian trans woman of color. Mock's journey through transitioning is the frame of this memoir, but the narrative is woven through her experiences as a mixed-race Hawaiian, growing up in poverty, moving between different parents and homes, and the relationships that she experienced. There's a striking compassion for a younger Janet Mock, and for the people around her, trying to make the best of their own sometimes difficult situations. It's intelligently written, though I took my sweet time getting through it, which makes me wonder whether Mock's gift might be essay length. I'm excited to read more of her work and find out.