Hello, yes, I know, I know you were wanting to hear about my favorite books for the entire year, and perhaps I will provide that in 2026. However, I have noticed to my sorrow that books publishing in the third quarter of any year are woefully overlooked in Best-of lists. As a structural matter there is not much we can do about this. Time is still finite, despite my best efforts, and the number of books published in October that you can read by December is simply fewer than the number of books published in January that you can read by…
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Heated Rivalry, AKA the gay hockey show, has been getting a lot of buzz for its explicit(-ish) sex scenes, and a lot of that buzz has been coming from viewers and critics whose experience with the romance genre is such that they are charmed by the novelty of the two protagonists calling each other by their surnames. This is to me immensely sweet, like a video of a baby having their first taste of ice cream or kimchi and falling into paroxysms of elation. I am happy for everyone who is experiencing romance genre conventions for the very first time…
Leave a CommentChildren The precipitating incident of Wearing the Lion is that Heracles, possessed by a fury that Hera has sent, kills his three sons. The specter of family annihilation is raised, only to be immediately batted aside. “This wasn’t you,” Heracles’s wife assures him. The entire engine of the plot is finding out who is responsible, because for sure we know it wasn’t Heracles. It’s kind of the fury, but she really didn’t want to do it. It’s mostly Hera, because she ordered the fury (“Take the power Zeus gave him, and make him destroy himself”), but the order was vague…
Leave a CommentWhen I started reading romance novels, about twelve years ago, I asked for recommendations and only read the romance novels that people told me were the best ones out there. This was great as a reading project — some of those early authors remain some of my faves today! — but gave me a skewed sense of the proportion of novels in the genre I should expect to truly excel. Now that I am more conversant in the genre, and reading new releases as they come out, I’m encountering a higher proportion of mediocre books. In particular, I have been feeling…
Leave a CommentOkay, I am trying to do this more, because there’s a lot of good stuff to read on the internet, and I want to share it with y’all. Here are some things I’ve read and enjoyed this week. Also, there are a lot of protests around the country tomorrow — if you have the time and the bandwidth, check and see if there’s one near you! Apparently my beloved, very insane Doctor Odyssey is on the bubble for renewal, so please watch it! It’s so silly and such a goofy, fun reset for my brain every week. It’s about a…
Leave a CommentI’ve been thinking lately about the role of book reviews and book reviewers, and happily for me, some smart people have been saying smart things on this topic. Charlie Jane Anders wrote a blog post entitled “What Are Book Critics For?”, considering the tension between critic as flaw-finder and critic as cheerleader. My pal Renay considered the incentives, and more often the disincentives, to reviewing books in an era where the boundaries between reader, reviewer, and author are porous to nonexistent. Renay writes: To have a deeper discourse, we also need to talk to and with each other, not simply…
Leave a CommentHere are some things I have been reading; perhaps you, too, will enjoy them! Colonial Williamsburg has become a space for truly complex, careful conversations about American history. In America, the arts depend on charitable giving; that’s not ideal. “The Death of the Fuck”: on puritanism and sex scenes in books. I found this article fascinating — it’s about how the modern world assumes we want everything to be speedier and more efficient, but that’s not actually what we want all the time! God, I miss Blockbuster. Meredith Shiner reflects on the high holy days, Palestinian lives, and that one…
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Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Moderation, Elaine Castillo
So Elaine Castillo is a literary fiction writer (who, I believe, has written a bunch of fanfiction in her life; I can just sense it; I know she has), and this installment of Anatomy of a Sex Scene draws on her second novel, Moderation. I’m going out on a leetle bit of a limb here: This sex scene isn’t a scene where the two characters have sex. TWIST, I’m full of surprises. Rather, it’s a scene where our protagonist, Girlie, has a sudden, very sharp fantasy about sex. I thought the writer did a remarkably good job with it, enough…
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