| | What I'm reading *
I've always read. While growing up, reading was a refuge when I found life too unpleasant or stressful. Consequently I've bought a lot of books over time as well.
Now that I'm no longer in the rich corporate phase of my life I've rediscovered the library. Dayton's library may be maligned by some but is still a great resource. One type of book I like to read is gay fiction and I was surprised to see a lot of it in the Dayton library's catalog. Plus you can even ask them to buy particular titles, and they will!
Below you can see the five most recent books either that I'm reading or that I've acquired. You can search my books, or you can see all my books. Also my classes page has links back to this page for the books for each class.
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| 2007-07-03 | 1401303641 | Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage | McGreevey, Dina Matos | | | | Of course reading Dina McGreevey's book only just now means I'm a bit behind the news cycle, since she made the rounds a few months ago to get her say about her life with New Jersey's gay former governor Jim McGreevey, but I really had no interest in giving either one of the McGreeveys any of my money, and so I had to wait until my turn to check the book out from the library came up. This book is as good (and as bad) as any ghost-written autobiography rushed out to get a celebrity's (or pseudo-celebrity's) point of view out into the court of public opinion before the public forgets who they were. To hear Mrs. McGreevey tell it, she was utterly in love with Jim McGreevey and didn't see any warning signs, not even, for example, when he had an intermediary propose marriage to her on his behalf. How romantic! Mrs. McGreevey makes a big deal of meeting Pope John Paul II on her honeymoon and how she thought that getting his blessing a good sign about the future of her marriage, never mind that she and her new husband met the pope for about 60 seconds in line with a bunch of other people attending a papal mass — surely if John Paul had known he was meeting a Catholic woman who'd just been married to a divorced Catholic man by an Episcopal priest, he wouldn't have been pleased, would he? Still, whether she was willfully ignorant of signs she should have seen or whether she was blinded by true love, you have to feel a little sorry for her by the end of her tale, when the governor, having announced his gay Americanness and his resignation, practically boots her and her daughter out to fend for themselves. By his own admission he's a liar and an adulterer, so even if Dina exaggerates some, that leaves a lot in her story to believe about him that isn't very nice. I'm listening to the governor's Confession on audiobook now to get the other side of the story. Check back later for a report on that. | | 2007-07-03 | 0679740678 | The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | | | | Apparently this book, while not the first instance ever of alternate historical fiction, was one of the first to sell well. I came across it after having read Fatherland by Robert Harris and searching for more such fiction. Both Harris's and Dick's books contemplate alternate histories in which the Nazis won WWII. In the former, the US stayed out of the war and retained its independence; in Dick's FDR is assassinated early in his term, leaving the country in the throes of the Great Depression and leading to defeat in WWII by Nazi Germany and Japan, who divide America between them. For whatever reason these stories of what might have been interest me, and Dick heightens his readers' interest by including another alternate history novel within his own alternate history novel. That novel within a novel, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, details a world in which Germany and Japan lost WWII, but that world is not our world. It is Grasshopper's author after whom Dick's novel is named, and the novel ends in an encounter with that author in which what is real and what is fiction come into question. The only other work of Dick's with which I'm familiar so far is A Scanner Darkly, the film based on his novel, another work in which what is real is not easy to discern. | | 2007-07-01 | 038505419X | Advise and Consent | Drury, Allen | | | | Advise and Consent I heard of in a review of Fellow Travelers, and so, having just read the latter, I was intrigued enough also to read the former. The books share similarities, both being heavily about Washington politics and the 1950s fear that the twin evils of Communism and homosexuality would destroy America, but, as is natural for two books whose writing is separated by almost 50 years, they are different as well. Fellow Travelers I could not put down, caught up in the story and wanting to know what happens next; Advise and Consent I almost stopped reading because its first section ("Bob Munson's book"), the introduction to Washington wheeling and dealing, just bored me. Knowing part of what would happen later in the book, I plodded forward, and, luckily, sometime in the second section ("Seab Cooley's book") and throughout the third part ("Brigham Anderson's book") I was as caught up by the story as I'd been in Fellow Travelers. A word of warning, however, is that the final parts of the book ("Orrin Knox's book" and following) include page after page which, had I been Drury's editor, I would have urged him just to drop.
Advise and Consent's primary focus is the machinations surrounding the confirmation of a proposed Secretary of State, Bob Leffingwell, unlike Fellow Travelers's focus on witch hunts for Communists and homosexuals. During his confirmation hearings, Leffingwell is accused by a witness of having been part of a Communist cell back in his college days. He denies it, but is he lying? The good upstanding senior Senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson, finds out that he is, but being an honorable man, Anderson gives the President a chance to withdraw the nomination, a bad call on Anderson's part since the President in turns comes across some dirty laundry from Anderson's past and uses it to destroy him.
What was the dirty laundry on Anderson? Apparently the good Mormon, now married with a child, had a homosexual love affair in Honolulu after having served his country in WWII. Advise and Consent, written in the 50s, cannot mention directly, however, the love that dare not speak its name. The Senator who is the President's henchman doesn't accuse Anderson of being a homosexual (the word never even appears in the book), saying instead only that Anderson is "morally unfit." The photo that tipped Anderson's opponents off to his gay love affair is not anything lewd, in one Senator's words, "innocent-appearing," although it bears a gaydar-alerting inscription.
Although Anderson meets the fate that befalls many pre-Stonewall homosexuals in American literature (it can't be too much of a spoiler to reveal he kills himself rather than let disgrace befall him and his family), I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Anderson's senatorial friends showed him, both before and after his suicide. Knowing the allegations against him and that, in Anderson's words, "they may be" true, his friends still vow to support him, and after his death they want to avenge his honor. I was also surprised by Drury's seemingly sympathetic view of homosexuality. In one passage, he has Anderson reflecting on his life and thinking that "he was a good father, a good [...] husband, a good servant, a good Senator, and a good man; and central to all this, in a way he understood thoroughly in his own nature, was the episode in Honolulu." Perhaps not such a radical message only ten years before Stonewall, but not one I expected to find in a book published in 1959.
Read what I thought about Otto Preminger's 1962 film version of this book. | | 2007-06-18 | 0375423486 | Fellow Travelers | Mallon, Thomas | | | | I'd never heard of Thomas Mallon before hearing about this book, one that apparently fits in with Mallon's other works of historical fiction, in which he sets a story he's created amongst actual events. In this case the story is a gay love story of sorts, and it's set in 1950s Washington in the midst of McCarthyism at its height. The book's title, Fellow Travelers, is a term often applied to Communist sympathizers, who were of course Joe McCarthy's primary target, but in this case the term applies more to the novel's protagonist, Hawkins Fuller, a WASPy State Department employee, and his Irish Catholic congressional staffer lover Tim Laughlin, examples of a secondary target of McCarthy's. Mallon does a good job of setting the tone of early 1950s America, and his characters are conveniently but realistically placed to position us amongst the players in the politics of the Army/McCarthy Hearings and subsequent events. I was quickly engrossed by the story, feeling sympathy primarily for Laughlin because of his conflictedness over his Catholicism and his growing love for Fuller. The last third of the novel, after the main activity both with McCarthy's hearings and between Laughlin and Fuller had subsided, I found less compelling, but even so, by the end of the novel I had some sympathy also for Fuller, a product of his culture and times. | | 2007-04-19 | 0807407488 | Aleph Isn't Enough: Hebrew for Adults (Book 2) | Motzkin, Linda | HEB101 | | | This is the second book used in the Hebrew class I'm taking. We don't use it until April 19th. I'll write more about it then. | |
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