phantomtomato

Two books up this month.

Changing Places by David Lodge

I got this recommendation from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and in true Baader-Meinhof fashion, have since seen it mentioned another handful of times. This is a campus novel about two academics, one British and one American, completing an exchange semester at the other’s university during the sunset of the 1960s. It’s a highly referential novel—both of these characters, and the author, were English professors—and would reward a reader who is deeply situated in classic British literary references and tropes of novelistic structure/form.

It was a good novel but not an enjoyable one. I struggled particularly with the sexism in the story. Both of the professors were at midlife crisis points in their careers and marriages: one’s wife is demanding a divorce which prompts him to accept the exchange, and the other’s lack of career (and thus financial) success is straining his ability to be present for his wife and three children. This is a premise which I expect to deal with gender, especially roles within a marriage/household, and I’m not sensitive to the mere fact of sexism. But in this book I struggled to determine where the characters’ sexism ended—not all of it felt like commentary, and I think that the combination of intentional commentary and unintentional (?) bias made all of it feel intolerable. I guess that the short explanation is that this felt like a book written by a man who thinks that sleeping with students is caddish at worst.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

This was my book club book for Spring 2025. It’s my first piece of sensation fiction—and now I understand the name! The book is a thrilling tale of a young woman who, through a bad marriage, loses both money and identity. It follows the subsequent quest to try and regain them for her. It contains classic tropes like mysterious parentage, an inheritance plot, women wrongfully committed to asylums, identity switch-ups, dastardly foreigners, and more. In 250k words, there is certainly room for all of that! And all the excitement makes the book a snappy read, despite the length.

Unfortunately, this also somewhat decided me on my future with sensation fiction. I would read another novel with a discussion group, but not on my own. I found it challenging to feel a meaningful connection to the characters (positive or negative) as the plot around them was all-consuming. Now that I’ve got those answers, I’ve no interest in continuing to dwell on the characters’ lives or experiences. My favorite two were definitely Marian Holcombe, half-sister of the female romantic lead, and Count Fosco, a villainous Italian with a mysterious background.

Of all it covers, the book has the most interesting things to say about the role of women in English society at that time. Not all great things to say, mind, but the author’s training as a lawyer leads to more care and attention towards the legal complications of the central female character’s situation than one might get from a less-informed writer. There will be a sequence of high melodrama, and then grounding conversations which remind us of what would actually be required to reverse some new horrible circumstance. I do recommend it in that vein—there’s much to consider about why it would be possible for our villains to engineer the disadvantages that they do, above and beyond the usual questions around motives.

But this is paired with the unskippable narration of Marian, a female character forced to embody the “contradictory” (to Collins) roles of proactive agent and, uh, womanhood. At every daring action, she bemoans some womanly quality of weakness in herself—whether or not she’s actually demonstrating it!—and other characters are constantly praising or demeaning her for how well she does or does not fit feminine ideals. Her treatment is complex and the plot could not exist in this form without her; I don’t mean to suggest that her writing is flat or that her creation deserves scorn. Rather, Marian is an example of some of the characteristic difficulties in the handling of proto-feminist characters in books of this period, and the unique decisions in this portrayal make her essentially unpalatable to me. Which is a shame, as she’s one of the two main narrators of the piece, and the other is the dreary male romantic lead who is best when playing investigator and not character.

Overall, I am always glad for having taken part in these discussion groups, but of the Victorian bricks that I’ve now read, my preference remains in Middlemarch.

booknook created a great template for reviewing your 2024 year in reading, and I’ve edited it to fit me. I think the big takeaway from last year’s reading is that I’m happy with where I’m at in terms of number of books, variety, etc. Posting about my reading here on Dreamwidth has been one of my favorite online experiences this year—it’s very satisfying to look back on those posts, rather than needing to flip through my notes scattered among other thoughts in my physical journal. That’s also been a large portion of my personal writing in 2024! As I go through a period of lower interest in transformative fandom, but not a lower interest in reading new things, reflecting on the things that I’ve read (and occasionally getting to chat with other readers) has filled the role for me that sharing fic did in years past.

In 2024:

I Read: 27 books to completion

My Reading Goal: was to post at least 12 updates to my Dreamwidth journal about my reading, which I did exactly! I skipped December and condensed April and May into one post, but I also made two standalone book review posts. I’m happy with this; the point of this goal was to make reflecting on my reading a regular part of my DW life and to keep my journal active, and I did that.

An Author New-to-me in 2024 I Really Enjoyed: was Allen Bratton, whose debut novel Henry Henry absolutely tore through me. I loved it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Bratton’s career contains in the future!

My Favorite Book of the Year/Books I Read in 2024 That I Recommend:
Favorites are difficult! I loved Where Angels Fear to Tread and Howards End by Forster, and Henry Henry as mentioned above. This was also a great year in emotionally devastating queer manga, with The Poe Clan, Claudine, and Run Away With Me, Girl. I’m not big on choosing single favorites, and any of those really could be it, so instead I’d call them a group of titles that are easy to recommend. They’re so obviously great that if the premise and format of any sounds interesting to you, it’s probably worth reading.

I would also recommend A Separate Peace to fans of the homoerotic boarding school novel genre, which stands out among the boarding school novels that I read this year. I also enjoyed two fantasy books that I read this year, very different in tone: The Idylls of the Queen (Arthurian mystery) and The Great When (sardonic riff on the British portal fantasy).

In 2025:

My Reading Goal: is to again post at least 12 Dreamwidth entries about my reading

My TBR List: includes a bunch of books that I purchased in the second half of 2024:
The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, Edmund White
Love, Leda, Mark Hyatt
The Temple, Stephen Spender
Lost Property, Ben Sonnenberg
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (spring 25 reading group book)
Star Clock Liddell, Yoshimi Uchida (on preorder)

I’d like to also read these unreads sitting on my bookshelf:
Orlando, Virginia Woolf
The Secret History, Donna Tartt

I am currently reading The Book of Life by C. H. B. Kitchin, which will be my first novel of the year.


I’ve dropped a lot of the potential questions in this template, but if it looks interesting to you, go check out the full set on booknook!

This is likely going to be my last reading roundup of the year. November was a slow month, meaning that I only just finished the second of my November books today-in December! Between the US election, the US Thanksgiving holiday, and the end of the academic term, I’ve been a bit too occupied with other things to keep reading at the top of my to-do list. I look forward to a bit of extra time over the winter break, and I hope to return with a reading roundup in January. :)

There is one item of good news in all of that busyness: I have officially received tenure from my university! I’ve known that I would for a few months now, but it’s great to have that all public and announced—it confirms that I’ll get to take next year off as a sabbatical, and it’s a culminating experience for all of the work I’ve done over the past six years. This is the goal for any academic, and now I’m past it… I’m excited for the new experiences and challenges that come next! (But after my well-earned year off of teaching!)

The Great When by Alan Moore

I purchased this the day after the US election. It felt the right moment for escaping into a bit of fantasy. Alan Moore is an author that I know for his comics work—Watchmen, From Hell, and so on. I was surprised to hear that he’d written a novel (not his first, apparently!), and I was curious to know what a graphic novelist did with a prose novel.

The Great When is a portal fantasy set in London in 1949. Dennis Knuckleyard, 18, works at a used bookshop in the East End and is nobody special. However, an encounter with a used book that should not exist draws him into another world, and the quest to dispose of it, avoid the nasty types who want to steal it from him, and prevent the uninitiated from finding the magical world leads him to a host of new connections and demands that he muster a bit of bravery and competence.

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I enjoyed this book. It’s the first in a series but reads well as a standalone, and I might recommend it on that merit. I also like it as another entry into the British Boys Portal Fantasy club, especially one which meaningfully examines class through its choice of protagonist. The prose is strange for sure, and I don’t love it, but I got used to it. It reads like Moore indulging himself—he has so many outlandish descriptions, and even the non-magical sections are studded with references to literature and music and art and film and occult history. This is a man who truly loves Edwardian ghost stories and historical occultists stringing together a plot and some new characters to get to play around with their ideas, their contexts, their lives. In some ways, it has the addictive quality of reading an old pulp novel—which, all told, I think that Moore may have been pleased with.


Bertram Cope’s Year by Henry Blake Fuller

I was browsing Standard EBooks and found in the summary for this novel that it was about a gay character—and Wikipedia backed this up by calling it the first American homosexual novel! Well, that bit of notability meant I had to read it.

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Overall, this lives as a great read if one is feeling patient enough to take on character study, historical detail, and subtly-drawn relationships (at least, between Phillips, Randolph, Cope, and Lemoyne). It is not a page-turner, and it is no mystery why this book has lived on primarily in academic circles as a landmark work in the development of the queer novel.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

I started this three times before it took. No one told me that Brideshead was a frame story! The first chapter, introducing us to a narrator broken down by the second world war and resurfacing long-buried memories upon revisiting Brideshead Manor, is truly very dull. I wanted a story about English social class, not a war story. It isn’t actually a war story, but you must hold out for a little while to get there.

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Decent Fellows - John Heygate

Denis Bailey attends Eton College. He’s about sixteen, short for his age, and just behind his longtime friend in moving through the school—a new term separates them as the friend joins an elite society of senior boys, leaving Denis to find new friends to share tea with. He settles on a motley bunch of slackers, all of whom are united by their families’ wealth and status. Within Eton, the impact of this is limited to what they can bring to tea or how many new suits they have made in a year; during the holidays, Denis finds out just how much their home lives diverge.

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Rare Male Slash Exchange reveals!! 💖 I wrote two fics:

In Every Respect
Pride and Prejudice, Darcy/Wickham, 4k, Explicit

Wickham takes the living at Kympton, but becoming ordained does not cure him of his bad habits. He and Darcy develop a new ritual for clearing debts.

Something Less Familiar
Original Work, M/M, 11k, Explicit

Samuel Mendelson has recently earned his doctorate and is still finding his footing in the world of computer security research. When a tenured professor in the field makes a dickish comment after one of Sam’s talks, Sam naturally grows to hate him—but they can’t avoid each other.

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RMSE remains my favorite fandom exchange of the year. There’s tons of other good works in the collection, and it’s also just been such a delight to create for. ❤️

Two books this past month, both starting with the letter ‘P.’

How was your June? Here, June marks the first full month of summer on campus: almost empty buildings, no meetings, no events. The bagpipers practice out on the quad in the afternoon. I spend the evenings thinking I can still hear the sound of pipes. I also traveled and hand a wonderful time visiting a great friend. ❤️

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
I associate Susanna Clarke with JSMN, which I haven’t read, but which a good friend dragged around for what felt like a year in middle school. It was probably a month, but time works differently when you’re twelve. JSMN is a brick, and I don’t read bricks—but when a friend indicated that Piranesi was more reasonably-sized, I decided to give it a read.

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Generally I would recommend Piranesi, and I expect that I will consider future works from Clarke, as long as they’re also more conventionally-sized.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
This is a book that I thought I would never read. Such is the power of friendship, I guess, that I’ve ended up here.

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My primary reaction to finishing this is to think, well, I’ve done it! It feels like one of those life milestones, like living alone for the first time, or perhaps buying a vehicle. I have read Pride and Prejudice. I think it will be useful to have done so, so I’m glad that I did.

Dear author, I’m so excited for this year’s RMSE! Each one of my requested ships is something I would be delighted to see, so I’m so grateful that you’ve offered it or taken up my pinch hit. :) Please have fun!

Likes:

First and second person POV, Slice of life, Domesticity, Older characters, Romance, Realism, Complicated feelings, Bed-sharing/forced proximity, Kissing, Smut, Body-part kinks (hand, foot, armpit, etc.), Impotence/sexual dysfunction, Frottage, Rimming, Manual/oral/anal sex, Coming too soon, Awkwardness and embarrassment during sex (especially first time), Cuddling, Crossdressing, Lush descriptions of bodies and clothing, Body hair, Loyalty, Strong and deeply-felt relationships, Bad characters shown as both bad and mundane/regular people, Introspection, Time and place as important to the characters and story, Sex before love or as a path to love, Reunions

DNW:

Noncon, Dubcon, Major Character Death, BDSM, Mpreg, Omegaverse, Setting change AUs, Sexual relationships for pre-pubescent characters, Non-canonical permanent injury, Body horror, Sexual humiliation or degradation, Unrequested pairings, Unrequested identity headcanons, Epistolary, Outsider POV, Script format, Threesomes/moresomes, Teacher-student

Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
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Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
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Crossover Fandom
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Henry Henry - Allen Bratton
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The Hill - Horace Annesley Vachell
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The Longest Journey - E. M. Forster
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I have made progress on my Tibby/Cecil fic, though it feels slow—probably down to the research. I hit a few dead-ends during canon review and while looking at academic sources. Cecil is so uniformly described as shallow, judgmental, and nearly nothing else that I realized my job would be to invent a version of him nearly whole-cloth; I used to have the energy for that sort of thing and I wonder at my past self. How did I manage? (Across multiple stories is the answer, I think. It’s a much bigger challenge to do that work in a single short fic. Necessarily, I cannot answer every question.)

I plan to spend the weekend on finishing it up, in order to set the draft aside. I’ve got other fics I’d like to write as well!

raremaleslashex remains my favorite exchange on the calendar. I’ve spent all week looking at the nominations page. Signups can’t come soon enough.

The academic term is over and thus began summer reading. Probably a bit too much, to be honest; it's not as though I haven't had other responsibilities for the past month! But this was overall a really enjoyable crop of books, and I'm excited to get to talk about them.

Jeremy at Crale by Hugh Seymour Walpole

I got the tip to move ahead to this third book in the series from edwardianspinsteraunt, thank you for that! To be very honest, I read this at the beginning of April, but my other April reads got their own posts and so I have lumped this in with the May group.

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The author called out a Talbot Baines Reed book in the foreword (The Cock-House at Fellsgarth), and I tried that as well but DNF’ed around 20% through. I will likely try to return to it later, it was just… straightforwardly a boys’ school adventure, nothing particularly slashy about it. My first Talbot Baines Reed disappointment, and I’m afraid the likely trend of his remaining school novels, judging by the quick skims I gave them. Fifth Form and My Friend Smith might be the only slashy ones.

Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr

This was in an exchange tagset (for an exchange I ultimately didn't join), but I knew I'd seen it discussed on meme and, after Middlemarch and Henry Henry, I wanted something lighter to enjoy. I really enjoyed it! Good choice, past self.

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Persuasion by Jane Austen

I read this alongside yletylyf and at her prompting, which I'm grateful for! I've probably never read Austen before (there's something I owned in high school, but I can't recall what or if I actually read it). I'm glad for the pushing, which helped me realize both that Austen's novels are not as long as I feared, and also that they're a very clear influence on Forster, which I love. I will make an effort to read at least one more this summer, ahead of the Austen Exchange.

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Howards End by E. M. Forster

During my debate about which Forster to read next, I found an old copy of this at a local antiquarian store, and that decided it for me. (I picked up a pretty specialty printing of A Passage to India during a recent trip, so I'll say that the ordering worked out!) I didn't know much about it going in and I wonder how it would have felt if I did—this is a novel I want to revisit in a few years' time, as I expect it offers a great deal to the rereader.

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Henry Henry, by Allen Bratton, is modern queer litfic. It’s also an adaptation (of Shakespeare’s Henriad), or fanfic. Most importantly, it’s great.

I’m not overly-familiar with the original Shakespeare. I loved the novel without getting any specific references, and I’m sure it benefits from being read by someone who has that sort of love for the material which inspired it. But it holds up without, and the writing is that beautiful sort of prose which grounds a story in specific detail. It’s set in the recent past, mostly 2014, and documents its version of 2014 like historical fiction. I like the choice not to make it exactly contemporary with when it was written… there’s space for me to wonder what became of the characters during the past decade. Hal Lancaster (Henry V), our POV character, is around my age—did he kick his drug habit for good? Does he commit to his off-and-on relationship? Does he hold down a job? Get therapy, outlive his father, connect with any of his siblings? I don’t know, of course, but I enjoy having the room to speculate and the investment to hope.

My comments below are medium-spoilery. I hit the broad strokes of what happens but not specific events.

Adaptations and Fanfic

There was a conversation about Shakespearean fanfic, or the relative lack of, on FFA recently. A nonny was wondering at the relative smallness of those fandoms. Many of the responses pointed to the professional work based on Shakespeare, and how frequently we see adaptations, as reasons why there isn’t much fic.

So with the memory of that in mind, I spent the past few days reading this novel looking for whether and how it would work as fic. I think it would? I find myself wanting to say it’s not written as fic, but I don’t know exactly what I mean by that. The prose doesn’t match the usual that I see in fandom, I suppose. But it is the sort of prose I strive for in my fic, so that’s one strike against me. The sex scenes mostly don’t read as titillating, though some do… and they are graphic, even when short. Perhaps if Bratton had used the word ‘cock’ more? In the litfic adaptation of a classic category, it’s very low-plot—fic of this length would most usually do something more extravagant. There wasn’t even a death. But, again, if this is what I like to write in my own fic, is that truly outside the realm of fanfic?

I think this is inherently an introspective question for me. What makes something fic-like is a question I have wrestled with wrt my own writing since I began doing it, and it dredges up all sorts of spectres: OOC, canon compliance, things of that nature. Henry Henry, if it is fanfic, is the sort of fanfic I want to write—a story that eschews the idea that any particular part of the original is sacred, and whose goal is simply to create something new that is also good. This one happens to belong to the world of professional publishing and so is called an adaptation; I’m glad it exists, whatever its form.

Nothing Ever Happens

For a novel with so much drug use, family strife, and even a shooting accident, nothing really happens during the year-and-change we follow Hal Lancaster. He loses some weight and gains it back, coinciding with using coke then going back off of it. He does get shot in the face, but even the drama of that initial scene quickly recedes behind the mundanity of outpatient surgery. Death looms over the novel, but it’s the deaths of the past generations: a grandfather, a mother, an uncle. They are long dead, and the one who might join them, Hal’s father Henry, resolutely does not. He deteriorates, maybe. He might have already been deteriorated when we met him. Hal’s never certain of the severity of any of his health crises. They are all terrible and inconsequential at the same time.

I loved this. I love when a story shuffles its characters around the board and they end up mostly back in the same places as they started because it makes me examine what impact their journeys have had, if anything. I think that Hal comes out of the novel changed. I think he has turned the corner on processing his childhood sexual abuse, I think he’s likely to use fewer drugs if not drink less, and I think he has something more hopeful happening with his romantic life than he did when we met him. But I also deeply appreciate that none of this is confirmed: we don’t get a glorious moment of death, of Hal outliving his father and assuming the title of Duke of Lancaster and either making it his own or at least carrying the weight of it. We don’t know how, if ever, it will happen. Hal could return to hard partying and die before his father in this modern AU. Or, on the romantic front, maybe Hal doesn’t end up with the man he’s seeing for most of the novel, and maybe he does bow to tradition and marry a woman of acceptable status in order to keep up appearances. I don’t know! I like that I don’t know. It reflects the uncertainty of his life. It would be tonally wrong to know.

Reading this reminds me of the value of style and theme and character. Without a big third-act crisis (there’s a family wedding that might count, but only in the way that any drunken argument might count), the book relies more on its writing to keep you coming along. Chapter 30 is this for me. The narration shifts for just this one chapter, from a close 3rd person following Hal to second person (my favorite; no wonder this worked for me!) as another character narrates a story to Hal. For just this one chapter near the end we become the character we’ve been following and sit in his place for the course of a single evening. I can’t even say that the story we’re told in this chapter clears very much up. It doesn’t answer big questions or prompt radical change in Hal’s behavior. He remains drunk, unreliable, and wary of connections. Those are things too big to shift in the span of one evening or even one year. But it was emotionally cathartic to join with Hal for this stretch of a dozen pages, after all of the time we’d spent getting to know him and his problems, and then leaving that perspective for the remaining few chapters of the novel was the process of saying goodbye and trusting Hal to—to start going somewhere different. To exist without us watching him.

A Short Note on Top/Bottom Roles

I’m putting this in purely for my own amusement. When I read In Memoriam last year, I noted what I considered a silly passage where the narrative justifies the physically larger character bottoming for the smaller one. It felt like an unfortunate post you’d see in fandom spaces, or a not-great paragraph in a fic. I stand by that judgment.

By contrast, Henry Henry makes no comment on having Hal, physically larger than his partner Percy, bottom during their penetrative sex. It comes up obliquely much later, after we’ve gotten many such sex scenes, at a high society party. One of the guests from their parents’ generation makes a homophobic joke which assumes that the smaller Percy must be the bottom, and Hal, absorbing the social awkwardness of the moment, jokes back in a way that confirms this (incorrect) assumption.

It was Hal's charge now to demonstrate graciousness, even though it would require him, in this circumstance, to undergo real humiliation, and to put Percy through it too. He only did it because Percy looked like he might be about to ask the man what he meant by that.

It’s an unpleasant encounter for both Hal and Percy, leaving the more-recently-out Percy unhappy, and in that context we get this lovely line:

Percy was upset for the rest of the night. Hal forgave him, for he was grieving the permanent and total loss of his masculinity.

That is how you acknowledge assumptions about top/bottom stereotypes, imo.

Overall I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys queer modern-day stories which deal with heavy topics (I have mentioned sexual abuse and drug use/addiction, but the book also involves a lot of religion and class issues). I haven’t gushed about how much I adore the main romantic relationship or the sibling relationship between Hal and his younger sister. There’s also a lot in here, perhaps predictably, for people who like to read about terrible fathers and the weight of familial expectations. It’s good, and it’s a lot to process—I think I will be continuing to process this one for months.