I’ve been reading a number of good books for review lately (see list at the end of this post) that I can’t write about here, but have also enjoyed a great deal of genre fiction recently so I thought I’d share a few titles with y’all.

Cross, Kady. The Girl in the Steel Corset (Harlequin Teen, 2011). I’ve been enjoying works under Cross’ various pseudonyms (see also: Kate Cross, Kate Locke) but I think this series of YA adventures set in the same steampunk universe as her Kate Cross novels may be my favorite. Here we follow a merry band of teenage misfits (again, no identified queers, alas) with mutant powers as they wrestle with romance, politics, and the eternal adolescent questions of where they come from and where their place in the larger world might be.

Gleason, Colleen. The Clockwork Scarab (Chronicle, 2013). First installment in a steampunk YA series featuring Miss Mina Holmes (daughter of Mycroft, consulting detective) and Miss Evaline Stoker (sister of Bram, vampire hunter) in a steam-powered alternate London, the plot of Clockwork turns on an Egyptology club somehow involved in the murder of several society girls in apparent suicide. Delightfully fast-paced fun with a high degree of sexual tension between the two heroines I hopewish — though don’t expect — the author will follow through upon.

Holmberg, Charlie. The Paper Magician (47North, 2014). A quiet little magician-in-training story with disquieting undertones, Paper Magician introduces us to a world in which individual magic is channeled through specific substances: paper, metal, glass. We follow the coming-of-age (and romantic) adventures of Ceony Twill and her troubled mentor Emery Thane as they are forced to confront malevolent magicians from Thane’s past.

Joyce, Graham. Some Kind of Fairy Tale (Doubleday, 2012). A haunting stolen child narrative set in rural England, Joyce’s novel turns on the reappearance of Tara one the doorstep of her childhood home twenty years after she vanished — but no older, and with an outlandish story about a stranger on a horse and a wild, libertine land. While the novel is beautifully and compellingly written, overall I was disappointed in the way Some Kind of Fairy Tale turned on Tara’s manic pixie dream girl status: She becomes the catalyst for change (good or ill) in the lives of half a dozen men, but remains herself a martyred cipher.

Lafferty, Mur. The Shambling Guide to New York City (Orbit, 2013). On our inaugural visit to PapercutsJP — the new neighborhood bookshop — Hanna bought me this lighthearted story about an intrepid travel writer on the rebound who stumbles into an unlikely opportunity: editing travel guides for monsters the coterie. Lafferty has followed her first book up with a sequel set in New Orleans and has hinted at a third set in Boston — sign me up!

Mantchev, Lisa. Ticker (Skyscape, 2014). A young woman with a heart defect saved by a surgeon who implants a clockwork “ticker” in her chest; the surgeon now on trial for murderously unethical practices; an infernal device gone off in the family factory; Penny Farthing’s brilliant parents gone missing — the events and players are all connected, but can Penny unravel the intrigue before it’s too late? A rare genre novel that isn’t blatantly sequel-hunting, Ticker is an excellent one-off from the author of the Theatre Illuminata series.

Reviewing Elsewhere This Spring

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Duke University Press, 2012). ~ NEA News

Hartman, Andrew. The War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015). ~ Library Journal

Yoshino, Kenji. Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial (Crown, 2015) ~ Library Journal

Here’s a peek at the books I read between mid-November and the end of the year. Exceeding my own expectations of finishing 2013 roughly 10% short of my goal of reading 104 books (two books per week), I actually came in at 102 by midnight on December 31st. Thanks to the polar vortex, I’ve started this year’s challenge at a good clip — more on the ones I haven’t yet reviewed in March.

I’m hovering at 10% behind on my GoodReads goal of 104 books for the year, which means I’m on track to accomplish 90% of my annual reading goal (go me!). Here’s what I’ve been reading since the last installment of subject/verdict in mid-August.

Presented in order read.

Haskell, Molly. My Brother, My Sister: Story of a Transformation (Viking, 2013). As readers of this blog are already aware, this is a memoir by film critic Molly Haskell about her experience during her sister’s transition from her gender assigned at birth (male) to her experienced gender (female). I was not impressed.

McGuire, Seanan. Chimes at Midnight (DAW Books, 2013). The seventh installment in the October Daye series (my personal favorite of Seanan McGuire’s many projects) centers around the trafficking of faerie fruit and the overthrow of a kingdom. Toby and company naturally save the day, with the introduction of several delightful new characters, including a fae librarian!

Joyce, Kathryn. The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (PublicAffairs, 2013). The author of Quiverfull returns to the topic of family formation and religious belief in her latest work on the adoption industry. While The Child Catchers is not a wholesale condemnation of modern adoption practices, it does challenge all of us to cast a critical eye on the rescue narrative that sanctifies adoptive parents and the industry that serves them — often at the expense of children and birth parents.

Erzen, Tanya. Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love It (Beacon Press, 2012). Erzen is a compassionate and insightful ethnologist of American subcultures, having last cast her eye on the experience of Christian women and men who participate in ex-gay ministries. In Fanpire she explores the fan experience of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels and the associated films, holding us to account for too-easy a dismissal of female fans.

McCarthy, Molly. The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). This excellent cultural and material history of personal record-keeping traces the development of the daily planner from Colonial almanacs through advertisement-laden Wanamaker planners popular into the mid-twentieth century. McCarthy skilfully blends in-depth research with a lively storytelling voice to produce a thought-provoking read.

Baumgardner, Jennifer and Madeline Kunin, eds. We Do! American Leaders Who Believe in Marriage Equality (Akashic Books, 2013). This brief collection of primary source documents (speeches, testimony, op-ed articles, interviews) tours through the history of American political leaders and social activists speaking out in favor of marriage equality. Beginning with a stump speech of Harvey Milk’s from 1977 and President Bill Clinton’s mea culpa regarding DOMA, penned in 2013, this collection would be a useful one for current affairs classes or adult study groups to discuss. Its brevity will be frustrating to the historians (many pieces are heavily excerpted), and it was strangely lacking in gender diversity. Out of 33 pieces, only eight were by women (including two appearances by Hillary Clinton). While the women they picked were undeniably well-spoken, high-profile leaders I can’t help but wonder why the imbalance — women like E.J. Graff and Urvashi Vaid were conspicuously absent. (Full disclosure: Early Reviewer copy from LibraryThing)

Jenkins, Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of the Eighties in America (Oxford University Press, 2006). This history of the long 1970s makes the argument that Reagan’s presidency was not the radical, reactionary break many view it to be but in fact built upon a number of conservative (often fearful) American impulses that have their roots in the decade before. I appreciated his re-examination of what have become historical commonplaces, but felt at times he over-reached the evidence and/or justified the conservative response without fairly considering voices of dissent.

Sandage, Scott. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Harvard University Press, 2005). Sandage traces the development of “the loser” as a character type in America, tying it to the nineteenth-century shift from an economy where low-risk conservation of family assets gave way to the ideal of endlessly-upward mobility: the opportunity of great gains also opened up the possibility for extreme loss. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Sandage convincingly argues that Americans more and more ascribed economic failure as an innate character flaw rather than an inevitability of the larger system — though individuals would continue to push back against this hegemonic model.

Yglasias, Matthew. The Rent is Too Damn High: What to Do About It and Why It Matters More Than You Think (Simon & Schuster, 2012). This slim e-book makes the argument that most American housing policy — particularly zoning regulations and rent controls — have only conspired to increase rather than decrease the astronomical rents in areas where the majority of Americans are drawn by economic opportunity (Boston, New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco…). I remain skeptical of his optimism in the housing market to solve this problem (freed from regulations, he argues, they would build more high-density housing in high-demand areas and help bring the middle class back from the suburbs),  but I appreciate his thoughtful and well-argued analysis.

Roose, Kevin. The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (Grand Central Publishing, 2009). When, as an undergraduate at Brown University, Roose decided to attend Liberty University as an unconventional off-campus semester many of his family and friends thought he was going to regret that decision: why spend a semester with religious fundamentalist evangelicals? Roose persevered, and wrote a soul-searching and at times quite funny (without being cruel) book about the subject that is generous to its conservative-Christian subjects without, I did not think, ultimately excusing the real harm their values can end up directly or indirectly supporting.

Satel, Sally and Scott Lilienfeld. Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (Basic Books, 2013). This brief book examines the growing trend of attributing all matter of social phenomenon — from crime to business administration — to brain chemistry as “proved” by fMRI imaging. While fMRI scans have value, the authors argue, too often their highly-qualified results are taken as “proof” of things they prove not at all: their cautionary warning should be well-heeded.

Johnson, Colin. Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Temple University Press, 2013). Too often, histories of non-normative sexuality focus on urban centers, suggesting that rural America is a place of repression in which few “queer folks” survive — let alone thrive. Johnson re-frames the story of queer American sexuality in the twentieth century with a series of case studies in rural sexual expression, offering us an under-explored piece of the puzzle of human sexual variety across the sweep of time and place.

Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin: 2012). Canadian economic journalist Chrystia Freeland offers both a window into and critique of the lives of those whose wealth puts them in the 1% of the 1% — and how they understand their position of power and privilege relative to the rest of us. While Plutocrats offers no easy answers to the global problem of hyper-stratification, it does offer a compelling argument that we ignore the accumulation of extreme wealth in the hands of a few at our own peril.

Morgan, Keith, Elizabeth Hope Cushing, and Roger Reed. Community by Design: The Olmsted Firm and the Development of Brookline, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). In my haphazard quest to learn more about the history of my adopted habitat, I picked up this volume at the Brookline Public Library: Morgan, Cushing and Reed explore the Olmstead firm’s influence in the development of one of Boston’s oldest and most illustrious “suburb” villages (now surrounded on three sides by the city of Boston itself). More analysis could have been given to the class-consciousness woven into community development in the village, but overall it was a pleasure to get a better sense of how and when the neighborhoods we walk through every day came to be.

Mantel, Henriette, ed. No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood (Seal Press, 2013). As someone who will not (life-altering unknowns aside) be parenting, I approached this anthology with both interest and trepidation: too often, women are interrogated endlessly (in a way men are not) about their reproductive lives — would this be another wince-inducing platform for the same? Like all anthologies, this one varies wildly from wince-inducing to humorous to insightful; while I didn’t find myself experiencing any new insights, I do appreciate the attempt to normalize non-parents as part of the human family.

Serano, Julia. Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (Seal Press, 2013). By now, Julia Serano is on my “automatic buy” list, and her latest work — a compilation of previously-published pieces and new sections elaborating on the arguments those pieces are fumbling toward — was well worth the self-indulgence. While at times her experiences of feminist- and queer-community exclusion made me want to suggest different friends, I also recognize that the identity-based “us” and “them” dynamics she incisively identifies and suggests alternatives to are systemic social justice activism problems.

McGuire, Seanan. Indexing (Kindle Serial, 2013). I gave this foray into novel serialization a try through our Kindle, with wholly satisfactory results. Seanan McGuire’s lighthearted dark-and-heavy-if-you-squint tale of a crime-fighting unit who mop up after fairy tale “memetic incursions” introduces a whole new and compelling cast of characters to her repertoire — looking forward to future installments!

Jordan, Pete. In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist (Harper Perennial, 2013). When Pete Jordan and his wife, both avid cyclists, move to Amsterdam so Pete can complete an urban planning degree, they fall in love with the city and its cycling culture — Pete’s wife even apprentices as a bike mechanic and eventually opens her own bike shop. In the City of Bikes weaves this personal story together with a fascinating history of cycling culture in Amsterdam — and the Netherlands more broadly: a must-read for any cyclist in your life.

Knight, Sarah Kemble. The Journal of Madam Knight (D. R. Godine, 1971). In 1704, Boston businesswoman Sarah Knight traveled on horseback from Boston to New London, Connecticut, and on to New York City, to settle the estates of her brother and brother-in-law; pon her return she wrote up her experiences in a diary first published in 1825. Knight is one of the subjects of a series of encyclopedia articles I am writing this fall, and her diary was intriguing background research for her biographical entry.

Williams, Susan Reynolds. Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Another biographical entry for the encyclopedia, Alice Morse Earle was a nineteenth-century historian of American social and material history; Williams her most recent and comprehensive biographer. Despite the “assigned reading” aspect of picking up this title, I enjoyed the thoughtful exploration of a Gilded Age woman writer and the context in which she practice historical research and analysis.

Smith, Fran and Sheila Himmel. Changing the Way We Die: Compassionate End of Life Care and the Hospice Movement (Viva Editions, 2013). This slim volume written by two journalists explores the recent history and current practices of the hospice movement in America: non-profit and (more recently) for-profit organizations that assist individuals and their families experience holistic end-of-life palliative care. As an historian, I longed for deeper analysis of hospice’s emergence in the mid-twentieth century, but overall this is a quick read that offers much food for thought and pointers for further research and contemplation.

Bronski, Michael, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico. “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: and 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People (Beacon Press, 2013).  This quick read does not attempt any original or overarching argument, but rather repackages pro-LGBT talking points in plain language myth-and-discussion format, perhaps with the notion of offering a useful reading selection for an adult reading group or Sunday school series. I found the format slightly unwieldy, given the way anti-sexual-diversity scare stories build upon and reinforce one another symbiotically, but appreciate how nuanced and inclusive the authors nevertheless managed to be in their explanatory sections within the necessary limitations of the project.

Weil, Francois. Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Harvard University Press, 2013). If there was one avenue into genealogy that was guaranteed to spark my interest, it would be a cultural historical analysis of the practice of family genealogy in America — and Weil’s detailed study did not disappoint. Weil explores the genealogical practices of Americans from the Colonial period to the late 20th century, neatly walking the tightrope of tension between genealogy-as-pedigree (a practice that seeks to reinforce privilege) and genealogy-as-identity (an assertion of more democratic familial allegiance or curiosity).

Bush, Karen, Louise Machinist and Jean McQuillian. My House, Our House: Living Far Better for Less in a Cooperative Household (St. Lynn’s Press, 2013). This how-to guide tells the story of three women approaching retirement who decided to pool their resources and become householders in common. While their story did not offer me anything I didn’t already know about cooperative housing opportunities and trends, it is always useful to read about cooperative housing schemes that have proven successful — another blueprint to keep in our back pockets for the future.

Whew! That’s all folks … stay tuned in January for the next installment. Meanwhile, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

In which I use my forehead to hold my place while typing. Like you do.

Here’s another installment of subject/verdict, wherein I discipline myself to be concise in my literary commentary. Since the beginning of April I’ve read the following books.

Briggs, Patricia. Frost Burned (Ace Books, 2013). Mercy Thompson Series, #7. The continuing adventures of shapeshifter Mercy Thompson, now married to werewolf Adam Hauptman, as a group of mercenaries kidnap her pack on Thanksgiving Day and Mercy has to call in the assistance of all her human and supernatural allies to get them back. Those of you (like me) who worried the series might grind to a halt with the success of the marriage plot, worry no more — and go enjoy the ever-expanding boundaries of this alternate universe.

Carriger, Gail. The Parasol Protectorate series, #1-5 (Orbit Books, 2009-2012). A delicious steampunk universe of vampires, werewolves, and soulless preternaturals delicately co-existing in Victorian London while soulless spinster Alexia Terribotti juggles social engagements, the attentions of an amorous (or possibly hostile) werewolf, and the friendship of effete vampire — not to mention attempts on her life! These were a rip-roaring read for early summer, and I’m looking forward to picking up the first in her new series, Etiquette & Espionage.

Dyhouse, Carol. Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (Zed Books, 2013). English historian of young women’s lives Carol Dyhouse (Univ. of Sussex) seeks to synthesize over thirty years of research in this brisk survey history, beginning with the moral panic over the mythical “white slave” trade (late 19th-early 20th century) and ending with turn-of-the-twenty-first-century anxieties about the sexualization of young girls. Dyhouse’s aim is breadth (within a British context) rather than depth, and historians of the subject might well bypass this text in favor of Dyhouse’s scholarly work on women, education, and feminism — still, Girl Trouble is an enjoyable read with a useful-looking bibliography. [Received as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.]

Holiday, Ellen. Small Miracles (Dreamspinners, 2012). A writer friend of ours, whose pen name is Ellen Holiday, has written this charming Cinderella-style piece of m/m erotica novella in which a down-and-out young man runs into a handsome prince at a bar and has to decide whether to let their one-night stand turn into something more lasting — and figure out how to do so on equal terms.

McGuire, Seanan. Midnight Blue-Light Special (Daw, 2013). InCryptids #3. New York’s cryptid population is under threat from zealous … As you’ve figured out by now, I’m back on something of a genre fiction kick, and was delighted to see that Seanan McGuire had a new installment of her InCryptids series out this spring — Midnight did not disappoint!

(Since doing the screencap above, I’ve also been catching up on Seanan McGuire’s short fiction, much of which is available for free download at her website. Definitely worth checking out!)

Passett, Joanne. Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanne Howard Foster (Da Capo, 2008). Jeanne Howard Foster was the first librarian at the Kinsey Institute and author of the first known bibliography of literature featuring themes of passion between women: Sex Variant Women in Literature, first self-published 1956, then re-discovered by the emerging lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s. This excellent biography is attuned to the incredible revolutions in gender and sexual history which Foster lived through, born in 1895 and living to age eighty-five — she came of age in the era of passionate female friendship, experienced the pathologizing of lesbianism during the interwar years, and in retirement found herself the heroine of a new generation of dykes.

Riley, Naomi Schaefer. ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America (Oxford University Press, 2013). Though prompted by personal experience within a Jewish-Christian marriage, Riley’s exploration of interfaith marriages is grounded in a nationwide survey she conducted of over two thousand interfaith couples and several hundred in-depth interviews. Overall, I was impressed by her thoughtful analysis and believe the study is a solid contribution to the field, though I was struck by her pessimism and sense of struggle: her overall fear that interfaith marriage will dilute religious traditions and lead to greater unhappiness for couples and less religious identity and grounding for their children. [Received as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway.]

Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Youn, editors. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press, 2013). Touted in many reviews as something new in the feminist discourse around moving-image pornography, The Feminist Porn Book actually builds on (and explicitly acknowledges) decades of pro-sexual-explicit-imagery feminist scholarship, activism, and performance. I particularly enjoyed the contributions by Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood, Sinnamon Love, Dylan Ryan, Ingrid Ryberg, and Tobi Hill-Meyer … though really there wasn’t a weak piece among them (and how often can you say that about anthologies?).

Next up: to finish Best Sex Writing 2013, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Journeys that Opened Up the World: Women, Student Christian Movements and Social Justice, 1955-1975 and Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in the Age of Conservatism. Catch up with my reviews in the next edition of subject/verdict!

Teazle likes to help me with my book reviews.

Despite the fact that my GoodReads reading goal is judging me fiercely (I’m a woeful books behind so far this year!), I have read a fair number of titles since January 1st that I simply haven’t had the chance to blog about. And those books, too, are judging me for the lack of reviews. Because time is short, here are my two-line summaries of the stuff I’ve been reading — one sentence for content, the other for my “verdict.” I hope those thoughts spur some of you to add a title or two to your “to read” list!

A couple of titles will get actual honest-to-god reviews in the fullness of time, and I’ve noted which ones those be.

Bell, Leslie C. Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom (University of California Press, 2013). Sociologist and psychotherapist Bell explores contemporary sex and relationship patterns among a group of young women in the Bay Area as a way of identifying larger themes of change and struggle in our half-finished revolution in gender role expectations and sexual mores. While necessarily limited in its scope, Hard to Get is refreshingly non-judgy about young women’s sexual practices and while Bell doesn’t articulate her findings in quite this way, I would argue that her subjects’ relationship success is strongly correlated with the degree of gender independence they and their sexual-romantic partners enjoy. [Review to come.]

Berebitsky, Julie. Sex in the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (Yale University Press, 2012). Historian Berebitsky has written an insightful and entertaining history of wanted and unwanted (hetero)sexual expression in white collar settings, 1860s to the present. Beginning with the entrance of women into office work, Berebitsky explores how the newly-heterosocial white collar workspace led to a reconceptualizing of the office as a space for flirtation, romance, and exploitation, as well as attempts to police heterosexual interaction in complex and evolving ways.

Boylan, Jennifer Finney. Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (Crown, 2013). A raw feeling memoir about parenting as a transgender person, Stuck in the Middle combines first-person narrative with transcripts of interviews Boylan conducted with friends and acquaintances about fatherhood, motherhood, and parent-child relationships. While I felt it could have used a stronger editorial hand and guiding purpose, I particularly appreciated the interview sections. [Reviewed in slightly more depth at LibraryThing.]

Brownson, James V. Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships (W. B. Eerdman’s, 2013). Brownson, a New Testament theologian, grounds his case for the inclusion of same-sex sexuality within the realm of Christian sexual ethics in a close reading of the Biblical texts from a historically-minded, broad-themes perspective. While he often concedes too much to anti-gay conservatives, in my opinion, and draws too little on the work of queer and feminist theologians who have gone before him, hopefully his skillful and compassionate hermeneutics will encourage some to rethink their faith-based condemnation of homosexuality. [Full disclosure: Jim is the father of a good friend of mine, and holds a faculty position at Western Theological Seminary named for my late grandfather James I. Cook, who I feel confident would approve of this book.]

Corvino, John. What’s Wrong With Homosexuality? (Oxford University Press, 2013). Corvino’s apologetic on the subject of homosexuality is at once personal, grounded in his own experience as a gay man, and theoretical, drawing on his training as a professor of philosophy and ethics. I appreciated that Corvino thoughtfully acknowledged his focus on gay male sexuality, and while I doubt his arguments will convince anyone with an emotional-personal stake in animosity toward queer folks it is enjoyable to have someone so articulate on our side. [To be reviewed.]

Grogan, Jennifer. Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013). In a book I devoutly wish I could have read while crafting my thesis, cultural historian Jennifer Grogan explores the origins, insights, and effects of one of the partial revolutions of mid-twentieth-century America: the humanist psychologists’ campaign to re-form the practice of psychology and the modern concept of the human Self. Grogan is a skillful historian and writer who manages to write with deep sympathy for her subject without glossing over the limitations of her subjects’ vision and practice.

Kipnis, Laura. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Grover Press, 1996). In the wake of the “porn wars” of the 1980s and the resurgence of moral panic around sexual expression, Kipnis, a professor of media studies, pushed back against the conflation of fiction and reality in Bound and Gagged: how acceptable or tenable is it to police peoples’ fantasies, and to what extent is it fair to assume that peoples’ fantasies translate into real-world desires? In case-study fashion, Kipnis points to the way America in the mid-90s was (and still is) appallingly comfortable policing the imagination, particularly where sex is concerned.

Lepore, Jill. The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton University Press, 2013). Historian and masterful essayist Jill Lepore offers, in her latest book, a series of essays that first appeared in the New Yorker on various topics on American history. All revolving in some way around the printed word and the narratives we tell to make meaning of our lives, The Story of America explores how we have made sense of being American during the first 24 decades of our nation’s youthful existance.

Pleck, Elizabeth M. Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation after the Sexual Revolution (University of Chicago, 2012). Historian of human development Elizabeth Pleck explores an under-studied aspect of the mid-twentieth-century’s “sexual revolution”: the rise in cohabitation by sexually-intimate yet unmarried partners, and the continued discrimination unmarried couples face in our marriage promotion-happy nation. Roughly chronological in its organization, Not Just Roommates begins with the persecution of cohabiting interracial couples in the early 1960s and ends with activism around domestic partnership registration as a marriage alternative — laying out a convincing case for discrimination against the unmarried as pervasive and harmful in the lives of many. [Review to come.]

Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012). Urban planner Jeff Speck offers lessons from several decades of experience redesigning urban core areas on how to make our major metropolitan areas more environmentally sustainable and conducive to human well-being. While I quibble with some of his minor points (for example he finds extensive green spaces boring), his overall vision of a “walkable” urban environment is one I can get behind, and reading this book has prompted me to be more mindful of my own built environment — and proud of how walkable our Allston-Brighton-Brookline-Back Bay area of Boston truly is!

Tea, Michelle, ed. Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (Seal Press,  2003). This powerful anthology offers up diverse voices of women who experienced a working class, and sometimes destitute, childhood. Contributors’ stories range from stomach-turning accounts of abuse and neglect at the hands of healthcare providers to lighthearted tales bordering on the “we were poor but never knew it” to deeply thoughtful reflections on what it means to escape poverty even as you watch your parents continue to struggle: highly recommended.

Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (University of California Press, 1989). Pioneering scholar in the field of pornography studies, film studies professor Linda Williams explores “hard core” moving image pornography through the lens of film conventions, asking how it might be understood as a genre in its own right (my favorite chapter was the one that explored pornographic film as a sister-genre to the movie musical, a bare-bones narrative punctuated by sexual “numbers”). While some of her observations feel outdated in this age of the Internet, and I’d argue she concedes too much to the anti-porn feminists, Williams’ work is still key in the field and offers much food for thought.

I’ve been reading lots lately, without a lot of time to write substantial review posts. So here’s another one of those massive “stuff I’ve been reading” posts that I find myself obliged to write several times a year. Alpha by author because I’m organizational that way at times. It’s the librarian thing.

Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). So I’ve read a bit of Marx and generally think of myself as a socialist-minded leftist — when I think of myself in those types of political terms at all. But I’m not really all that clear about what makes Marxism unique among all of the other theories and practices of socialism and communism that exist in the world. Which is where Eagleton’s theory-heavy but still readable primer on Marxism was worth the read. Also he works in the phrase “a pathological obsession with penguins” and explains why this is perhaps not relevant to the class struggle. Mr. Eagleton, sir, I’d say you win all the things if this turn of phrase didn’t seem ill-conceived given the subject at hand.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love With Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hale’s history explores the different conduits by which white middle class Americans came to identify with “outsiders” between the 1950s and the 1980s, beginning with the publication of Catcher in the Rye and ending with an examination of Randall Terry’s anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue.  I found a lot of interesting stuff here, particularly Hale’s inclusion of conservative as well as liberal sources — white Civil Rights activists and folk musicians are well-trod ground, but the Jesus freaks are an under-explored phenomenon.  My one frustration with Hale’s treatment is that she tends to talk in broad general categories — i.e. “white middle class Americans” and “outsiders” without acknowledging that despite economic and racial privileges, not all white, middle-class folks were appropriating outsider identity — there were a lot of ways to experience marginalization in postwar America, and I feel those complications get short-shift. I would also have been pleased to see more in-depth discussion of the process by which flirtation with outsider identity prompted many white and middle-class people to actually become marginal outsiders in deed as well as word. Still — a truly thought-provoking recent read.

Maguire, Seanan. Rosemary and Rue (New York: Daw, 2009) and A Local Habitation (2010). Rosemary and Habitation are the first two volumes in a series of novels about changeling October “Toby” Daye, San Francisco-based private investigator and knight pledged to Daoine Sidhe Duke Sylvester Torquill of the Summerlands. You can tick off a lot of urban fantasy boxes for this series, and in addition to the satisfaction of the familiar Maguire consistently digs a little deeper into her stories and characters than strictly demanded in one’s popcorn fiction. There are no easy answers few heroes or villains without a whiff of moral dubiousness. I already have the third installment on order at the Brookline Public Library!

Moreno, Jonathan D. The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2011). This was an advance review book I snagged via Early Reviewers on Library Thing. Moreno is a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and I suspect this primer was meant to serve as a classroom text, introducing students to key controversies at the intersection of biology (particularly human biology) and politics. It suffers from many of the shortcomings that other such introductory texts suffer from: summary treatment of thorny questions due to space limitations, a limited number of citations, and strongly-worded assertions meant (I assume) to provoke discussion for which scant evidence is given. I felt like the book suffered from poor organization — the text seemed to jump back and forth between historical narrative and issue-based sections, with little transition. The brevity of the text itself might be offset to great effect by the inclusion of a narrative bibliography or “further reading” section, neither of which were in evidence in the uncorrected proof. I’d argue that more valuable contributions to the field have been made by such authors as Michelle Goldberg (The Means of Reproduction) and Debora L. Spar (The Baby Business) — though granted, my knowledge in this area leans heavily toward reproductive technologies as well as the broader the right to bodily autonomy and health decision-making.

Priest, Cherie. Hellbent (New York: Spectra, 2011). I reviewed Bloodshot earlier in the year and was excited when the second installment of the Cheshire Red Reports so close on the heels of volume one. Hopefully there will be many more to come! Hellbent follows the continuing adventures of vampire and thief-for-hire Raylene as she and her chosen family of misfits hustle to keep themselves safe and financially stable in the midst of growing tensions in the vampire community and the appearance of a mentally unstable witch. Totally anticipating volume the third.


Smith, Christian. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). Now over a decade old, this book contains an analysis of over 100 lengthy interviews with self-identified evangelicals from across the nation in which the interviewees were asked to articulate their beliefs about Christian faith and practice as it relates to American political life and culture. Smith’s analysis of the data feels slightly heavy-handed in the “Evangelicals are not all close-minded bigots!” direction, but the data and first-person narratives will still be useful to people seeking to understand the worldviews of American evangelical Christians in the mid-1990s.

Sonnie, Amy and James Tracy. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (New York: Mellville House, 2011). Sonnie and Tracy have taken on the ambitious project of documenting the experiences of a number of white working class community organizers in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City during the 1960s and 70s. They set out to challenge the common assumption that poor and working-class whites of the era were knee-jerk racists who felt efforts to end racial discrimination translated into loss of (white) jobs in already-struggling urban areas. “These men and women understood that ending racism was not a threat or an act of charity,” they argue, “but a part of gaining their own freedom” (5). The extensive research represented in this book is a valuable contribution to the scholarship in this area, and I found it particularly interesting to read in tandem with A Nation of Outsiders, since Sonnie and Tracy chronicle many of the same events, but from the perspective of the outsiders themselves — rather than those who sought to romanticize them.

Taormino, Tristan (ed.). Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica (New York: Cleis Press, 2011). I wrote a review of Take Me There over at Harpyness; you can also read an interview with Tristan Taormino at Lamda Literary. Erotica anthologies are always particularly tricky to review given that the unevenness of any anthology is compounded by the very personal nature of ones likes and dislikes when it comes to sexually explicit material. Suffice to say, there were some stories I liked, some I didn’t, and I’m looking forward to further expansion of the subgenre. In the meantime, may I recommend Julia Serano’s “Small Blue Thing,” “Now, Voyager” by Rahne Alexander, “The Visible Woman” by Rachel K. Zall, and Patrick Califia’s “Big Gifts in Small Boxes” — all of which can be found in Take Me There.

Given my recent travels and the reading time sitting on the airplane affords, my “to be reviewed” pile of books has grown to a critical mass … right when I find myself with a bit less time than I had in the spring to write blog posts. So rather than let the responses I had grow stale, I thought I’d do one massive round-up of “stuff I’ve been reading” to welcome you back from the holiday weekend.

His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire, Book #1) by Naomi Novik (New York: Dell Ray, 2006). A friend of ours has loaned us the first five installments in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, of which the sixth volume is due out this summer. Set in an alternate universe, the world of these novels is that of Regency England and the Napoelonic Wars … only with dragons. Imagine Jane Austen crossed with Horatio Hornblower with a dash of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern universe and you’ve got His Majesty’s Dragon. Though the series, I hasten to say, does not feel derivitive in the least. Temeraire (the main dragon-protagonist) has the most compellingly charming literary voice I’ve come across in ages. I’m only to book three so far (Black Powder War ) but have been thoroughly enjoying the ride.

Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (1937). Who among us failed to go through an L. M. Montgomery phase? Okay, some of you might have skipped it. But I didn’t. I knew Anne of Green Gables since before I could properly read myself, but when I was twelve a friend of mine sat me down and introduced me to the full canon of Montgomery’s work … oh, the romantic agony of it! I fell hard for Emily of New Moon, Kilmeny of the Orchard, for Blue Castle and Along the Shore. Somehow, though, I neglected to read Jane of Lantern Hill and when Hanna found out recently about my dirty little secret she set out to rectify the situation as quickly as possible! It’s the same mix of homoeroticism (“kindred spirits” indeed), sneering rich relatives, fantasies about un-broken families and domesticity (at some points verring toward the disturbingly oedipal!), and salvation-via-rural living, specifically on Prince Edward Island, that we all know and love.