Book Report: Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Nevada is a story of Maria, a thirty-ish trans woman living in Brooklyn and working a shitty job in a bookstore, getting fucked up and riding her bike around town trying to figure out a way to break up with her girlfriend, Stacy. Then Stacy breaks up with her, Maria gets fired, and then Maria borrow-steals Stacy's car and ends up in Star City, Nevada, a few weeks later. She meets James, who is 20, works at Wal-Mart, is distant and kind of terrible to his too-good-for-him girlfriend and jerks off to porn involving men who are turned into women by magic. Maria sees a lot of herself in James, and decides that the reason for her quest is to help him overcome his gender issues. She convinces him to go on a road trip to Reno with her. However, she's totally condescending and monologue-y to him on the trip, and he ditches her and has his girlfriend come pick him up.

I enjoyed the book a lot more when Maria was just fucking up her own life and not projecting her fucked-upness onto others. She seemed like a cool person for the first half of the book, making mistakes and being emotionally withdrawn from her relationships, but at least enjoying who she was and what she was doing on her own time. Maybe she should have just stayed where she was.

Book Report: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

I requested this book from the library because the titular story was highly recommended by a writer at Deadspin. I enjoyed that one, but I have to say that I enjoyed most of the rest of the stories in the book even more. I read The Parable of the Sower last year, and I didn't mind it, but I can't say that I was drawn in. After reading these stories, I think that I am a bigger fan of Butler's short stories than her novel-length work. My favorite of the stories was "Amnesty," a story of a woman who was abducted by alien invaders who look like big haystacks (I pictured them looking kind of like Gossamer - I looked it up - the hair monster from Looney Tunes) and completely subdue the human race. The aliens don't initially have a way to communicate with earthlings, so they perform a bunch of experiments on them and hurt and kill many of them as part of their research. However, they can connect with humans by enveloping them in their bodies, a process which has comforting effects on both the aliens and humans. Anyway, the woman becomes more or less an employee of the aliens, attempting to train new humans to act as translators between aliens and earthlings. It's a pretty great story! And there are others that I enjoyed nearly as much! There are also a couple of essays about Butler's writing process, which I could see being very helpful to others trying to follow the path that she blazed.

Book Report: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

Longtime readers of this blog (haha, just kidding, there are none) may be tiring of the ongoing saga of the Boneshaker Science Book Club, but I regret to inform you that there have been a couple more twists! And turns! So, I was all set to pull the plug on the club last month, but then three people other than me showed up for the discussion of Reason for Hope, by Jane Goodall, and it was really nice to talk through the book, and I felt like everyone got something out of it. A biology teacher from Brooklyn Park named Lindsey had just randomly found the event on Facebook, had coincidentally been listening to the audiobook, and seemed to really enjoy the discussion. She suggested The Hidden Life of Trees for a subsequent club, and since I didn't have any better ideas, I totally went for it. There wasn't a paperback option available, but it was available on both audiobook and from the library, so there were lower-cost options. I ordered four copies, since we hadn't sold more than two or three of the book club selection for months, and they immediately sold out. I ordered four more copies, and they sold out again. Meanwhile, the Hennepin County Public Library went from having several copies available for loan to having 30 people on the waiting list, almost overnight. And there are several people who said they'd go to the event on Facebook, plus like 90 people interested. I'm really curious to see how many people show up on Saturday. It'll probably be just me and Nick like in November, but I could be pleasantly surprised.

Anyhow, this is a very interesting book. If I would describe my favorite kind of pop-science book, it would be: full of fun facts. And The Hidden Life of Trees has many fun facts! I had no idea that growing up in an old-growth forest had such an effect on the life of the trees contained within. I guess that it's nothing for beech trees (which I don't even know for sure if I would recognize) to live for 400-500 years, growing very slowly and because of that, being more resistant to pests, weather, etc. If I could summarize the theme of the book, it would be that trees need a community in order to reach their full potential, and I'm not sure if there are very many habitats that exist any more in which that can happen. Which is unfortunate, but there's not really any way to un-ring that bell. The old growth forests are few and far between, and you can't really re-create that habitat. Still, there's a lot of things to be learned from that idealized arrangement.

Book Report: A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

A Cure for Suicide is more than a bit too twee for my taste. In its defense, it's structured unusually, with lots of white space on each page, so even though it's a thick-ish book, I felt like I was a really fast reader as I tore through it. It's set in the near future where people who want to commit suicide are given the option to take an injection and basically get their brain wiped. Then, they re-learn how to do everything, basically, under the care of a personal-life-coach-or-equivalent while living in a huge house in a rural community. First off, the Republic (as the one world government is called in this book) doesn't seem to be concerned about keeping health care costs in line at all. And it was never made clear to me what the advantage was of basically giving people brain damage instead of just letting them kill themselves. It's not a clear upgrade, imho. There are some elements of 1984 as the protagonist betrays a fellow treatment-getter, but then it turns out at the end that maybe he didn't after all?

Anyway, there was a particular type of book or short story that I really enjoyed when I was in college: a boy is sad and struggling, and he meets a girl who's obviously too good and together for him, but she sees something in him that no one else can see (probably not even him!), and they, against all odds, become a couple (finally, someone gets him!), and then something tragic happens before their pairing is revealed to be actually not-the-best. A tinge of sadness is always present, which just makes it that much more poignant. I was too young for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to have a name, but that was definitely my thing. The example I remember best is "Testimony of Pilot" by Barry Hannah. We also would have accepted the doomed romance in All the King's Men. I can't say that I'm embarrassed to have enjoyed those stories, but they definitely doesn't touch me in the way that it did when I was young and (even more) awkward, and was really looking for a relationship that would make a good story more than, you know, a good relationship. There's also some misogyny lurking in all that over-sensitivity, I'm afraid. I was a sexually frustrated and very pretentious young man. Anyway, A Cure for Suicide has one of these types of stories as its final act, which leads in to why the protagonist wanted to end it all at the beginning of the book. That story is the best part of the book, but that's damning with faint praise, I'm afraid.

Book Report: A Safe Girl to Love by Casey Plett

I hadn't really been around trans folks much at all before moving to Minneapolis, and that's one of many areas that I still have a lot of room to grow in my knowledge of and empathy toward. Lauren Theisen, who's trans and writes for Deadspin, recommended this book, and it's great and unsettling and beautiful and heartbreaking and all that. Casey Plett wrote this collection of stories, which is set in many different places across our great continent, from Portland to Winnipeg to what's probably Fargo (uncredited) to Brooklyn, and shit is hard everywhere for trans people. Sex is brutal even when that's not what they want, and work sucks, and even when you're trying to carve out a little community with like-minded people, a lot of those people are terrible. And parents can be awful, too.

Book Report: Vacationland by John Hodgman

I love John Hodgman thoroughly and more or less un-self-consciously. If you also enjoy John Hodgman, then you will love Vacationland, because it is peak John Hodgman. He inherits a vacation home in western Massachusetts from his mother, and then buys a vacation home in Maine with his I'm-a-PC TV money, and lives in Park Slope, but somehow doesn't come off as an asshole. As I mentioned, I'm totally in the bag for him, so your results may vary, but I loved every minute of this book and knocked it out in a couple of days.