phantomtomato

Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer

During the spring 1996 Everest climbing season, mountaineer and journalist Jon Krakauer is on assignment to document the experience of being a client with Rob Hall’s Adventure Consultants on a guided ascent of the mountain. Also climbing Everest that season was a guided expedition run by Scott Fischer, as well as expeditions including a South African team, a Taiwanese team, and an American team filming an IMAX documentary. This 1996 season was the deadliest in Everest history up to that point: 12 people lost their lives as a result of climbing the mountain, with eight dying in one storm from May 10-11. This is the story of that storm.

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The Mountain: My Time on Everest — Ed Viesturs and David Roberts

After Krakauer, I wanted another perspective on Everest (1996 and otherwise)—which brought me back to my loved/loathed Ed Viesturs. Viesturs has summited Everest seven times across ten expeditions to the mountain, which isn’t close to the world record but is a lot. This book covers the stories of all ten of those expeditions as well as other notable climbs in Everest’s history.

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And a note on Jan Morris:

Morris was a British journalist and travel writer, most famous for transmitting the coded message of Hillary and Norgay’s successful first ascent of Everest in 1953, which allowed The Times to announce it on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Morris is an important figure in Everest history, and both Krakauer and Viesturs/Roberts mention her. She’s also a trans woman, who came out two decades after the Everest story but who continued to publish and receive attention under her chosen name for decades more. Krakauer manages to acknowledge that she transitioned but only uses her birth name and he/him pronouns; Viesturs/Roberts use her birth name and don’t acknowledge her transition at all, writing a full 17 years after Krakauer. I think this gives a sense of the utter frustration of reading mountaineering literature. I’m currently reading an academic book critiquing gender in climbing lit, so at least I can appreciate that someone has made a point of calling attention to this.

Hemlock and After — Angus Wilson

This was the debut novel of Angus Wilson, published in 1953 as one of those precious, rare examples of an openly queer story from the midcentury. Bernard Sands, a celebrated British novelist somewhere around 60 years old in the early 1950s, is pursuing a political project in his quiet country town: the conversion of an old manor hall to an artist’s residence. The project has seen pushback from the locals, led by “lady of many interests” Mrs. curry, but succeeds on the strength of Bernard’s connections to national political figures and academics. Around this project, Bernard’s personal issues contribute challenges: his adult children dislike him, his wife has been suffering from a dissociative mental illness for the past decade, and he’s having an affair with a much younger man.

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The New York Times posted a summer reading challenge, ten books in ten different categories, which you can view in this image or read the full article [here] (log-in may be required).



I like the diverse set of goals! I won’t be using this, personally—my set challenge for the rest of the year is to clear up my unread book shelf—but I like that most of these are aimed at pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone. Shake it up, try something a little less comfortable. And it’s great to see a push for libraries. I took the opportunity to scroll through their [100 best books of the 21st century] list, which I was pleasantly surprised by.

Do you have any reading challenges for yourself this season/this year? Is any part of this one interesting or inspiring to you?

I feel like I’m establishing a pattern of posting a beast of a reading roundup at this time of year. It must be the sudden freedom of the end of the academic year and the burst of excitement for warm weather (and outdoors reading time!) that means I read a bunch of books in a short time. This is your warning that it’s a long post!

Howards End, by E. M. Forster

I finished my reread of HE just ahead of the final meeting of my book group, on May first. Reading it to run a book group was a very different experience, as might be expected. For posterity, the break points that I chose were:

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Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White

Nocturnes tells a story about a lost love—someone unappreciated in their time, whose value is only seen too late. Arranged in eight chapters, the book brings us back and forth in the narrator’s life, revisiting the relationship and experiences before and after it, all with a free-flowing style which blurs those boundaries in much the same way that the narrator’s memories have been made fuzzy, from repeated handling and reworking.

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I would strongly recommend this book. It’s not quite like other books you might get from White, but that should only indicate his range. This is a beautiful, poetic work, well worth the time of any reader of queer classics.

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

Orlando is a boy in the late 1500s, coming of age under Queen Elizabeth. She’s a 36-year-old woman in 1928, nebulously married with at least one son. Her life between is continuous, but the telling—a ‘biography’—is disjoint, and the reader is required to make meaning from poetical ramblings in order to fully understand the story of her growth from boy to man to woman over the course of 350 years of English history.

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What I wish I’d known before reading is that Orlando includes a great deal of explicit and implicit racism, especially against Black and Romani people. This is widely discussed by academics, it’s on the book’s Wiki page, but as a lay reader I wasn’t aware of that reputation, only that of the book’s status as a queer classic. I’ve read that Woolf was satirizing Vita Sackville-West’s objectification of Romani culture, which, your mileage may vary on that explanation vis-a-vis the portrayal of the Romani characters in the book. But the violence against Black people and Black bodies is present from the first sentence, continues through the end, and seems a reflection of the author’s actual values.

So, I take some beautiful things from Orlando: its radical approach to queerness, and its distinctive relationship with time as expressed through prose. But I cannot shirk its racism in discussing the book, and so I can’t make—I don’t want to make—an unequivocal recommendation for it.

The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author
Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique

This 1808 epistolary novel, reissued in 2008 for its bicentennial, is the story of a biracial Jamaican heiress who travels to England to satisfy the conditions of her white father’s will in order to receive her dowry of sixty thousand pounds. Olivia Fairfield is smart, devout, and well-spoken—educated by a white English governess (the recipient of her letters, Mrs. Milbanke), Olivia is “more than half an English woman” and ably argues for racial equality when confronted with the prejudices of genteel England. She and her Black servant, Dido, together weather the crisis of a marriage plot, the machinations of a hostile white relative, and the trials of upper middle class society, to reach their eventual triumph.

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I was just really bowled over by this book, which would have been valuable as an artifact even if it were bad, but it was not bad, and actually very good on its own merits. It came to be via a colleague, and I’m very lucky for that—there doesn’t seem to be a copy on Project Gutenberg, and I’ve never seen it discussed amongst other Regency era works, though it so obviously deserves to be. And the editing by Professor Dominique in the Broadview edition, whose introduction, footnotes, and appendixes make the text and its context accessible, is a strong argument for buying or borrowing that physical reissue. I put this one down for fans of Austen, independent heroines, and historical literature!

Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini

This 1918 novel (reissued in 2018 by Persephone Books, and otherwise difficult to access) is a strident Pacifist argument, which ultimately resulted in its censorship and the destruction of unsold copies—probably contributing to the lack of modern digitization, despite the text being out of copyright. (And I’d love a digital copy to mark up!) That alone makes it worthwhile to track down one of the reprints.

Dennis Blackwood, a 25-year-old composer, and Antoinette de Courcy, a similarly-aged Anglo-French woman, meet during a sort of family holiday in June 1914. The Blackwoods hope that eldest son Dennis might court Antoinette, and Antoinette, though focused on the intriguing, solo vacationer Hester Cawthorn, recognizes in Dennis an opportunity to follow the expected social script. They part with promises to write to each other, and that’s the last bit of a society novel in this book. On his own again, Dennis meets, falls in love with, and flees Alan Rutherford, the socialist son of a coal mine owner; on her own, Antoinette reunites with Hester, falls out of love with her, and drifts. Dennis and Antoinette meet months later in London, after the onset of WWI, and their failed sham of a romance and Dennis’ status as a conscientious objector dominate the remainder of the novel.

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So, is what she delivers a flawless classic? No, definitely not. But I greatly enjoyed it. I loved Dennis and Alan and their romance, which culminates with (explicitly stated, not on-page) sex—eat your heart out, Mary Renault. I found Antoinette interesting, if frustrating after early promise. I liked the wider cast. The unflinching look at WWI era C.O.s was new to me, and well worth experiencing from a writer of the time. For me, this is a book that absolutely deserved its rescue, and should have a wider audience among readers of WWI fiction and historical queer novels.

Both of my reads from April were purchased during my vacation to the UK in March, from G. David Booksellers in Cambridge. It was such a lovely shop with a huge selection of used books of all sorts, including the fun-to-browse antiquities/collectibles section! These two were not from there, more standard three pound fare, but they were fun to purchase and lovely ways to celebrate a holiday. I’m also extremely proud of myself for buying both and then immediately reading them, you know? TBR: almost net zero. (I bought something else at Oxfam which I haven’t read yet and won’t start soon, haha.)

Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh

This was Evelyn Waugh’s first published novel, from 1928. It’s a class satire, very of its era, following the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather who is sent down from Oxford for actions not his own fault, and it continues apace from there. Paul spends time at Oxford, teaching at a boys’ school, being idle rich, and in prison, before circling back to Oxford. He encounters a surprisingly-small cast of eccentric companions—as one of them later puts it, Paul is an essentially static personality who has been cast into the maelstrom of a more dynamic society.

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On balance, Lodge’s satires (especially Small World) were worse to read, simply because his misogyny intensely pervaded the entire novel, whereas Waugh’s bigotry is more localized at its extremes. But that’s hardly a recommendation. And our hapless, blameless Paul Pennyfeather, to whom bad things keep happening, isn’t the right lens for me to appreciate the satire. He only angers me when he absorbs the racist language of his peers, or fails to see the human trafficking that he’s helping to enable. Was Waugh’s writing witty or well-observed? Maybe. I don’t know, because I was distracted by the flaws. It was his first novel; maybe his future satires got better. Brideshead Revisited wasn’t like this. But, god, don’t bother with this one.

Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence

Women in Love is one of D. H. Lawrence’s most acclaimed novels—and such was my reasoning to start with this one, among the various options. I picked up a nice 1930s copy when I saw it, because it had been on my TBR forever, and I vaguely remembered it as being called a queer novel—but how so, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps the titular women?

Not really. This novel tells the story of the two Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their romances with two men, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, who are friends with one another. We get to know the social positions of the sisters versus those of their wealthier romantic interests, and follow the slow development of these relationships as they wind their way past social obstacles in the form of family and friends, culminating in one marriage and one death. The book occupies all four characters’ points of view at different times, so we get to see what love means for each of them, and how they hope their various relationships (romantic, sibling, friend) will develop.

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I’m glad that I read this book and I would recommend it. D. H. Lawrence is a huge figure in early 20th century British lit, someone discussed by Woolf and Forster as a contemporary. His books were also famously banned as obscene, and it’s worth reading them to see the sex scenes in all of their euphemistic glory. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s worth my time to try a second novel of his, but it was definitely worth my time to have read the first.

I have a long catch-up post this month, as I was traveling across the January to February transition! I spent a month in Tokyo then, and though I didn’t expect to read very much during the trip, I ended up fitting in a couple of books (and a couple of duds).

A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland
This debut novel tells a story about two unnamed Welsh men, called M and B, who fall in love during the 1980s. The book focuses on their experience of staying closeted and hiding their relationship from the others in their small Welsh town. Outwardly, they take the appearance of a shop owner and his live-in apprentice. Shapland’s prose is sparse and atmospheric, which along with the indirect way of addressing characters and glancing, in-the-know references to Welsh history, make for an extremely stylized read which has been recognized with awards and in reviews. It’s a short, quick book, and so I would recommend it broadly—not because I think it’s generally palatable, but because it’s an easy dose to take.

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The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction starts midsentence. I knew this, but forgot, and flipped back and forth in my eBook to confirm that I hadn’t skipped a page. Later, reading Wikipedia, I learned that many readers over the years have also treated this as a mistake in the printing—a shared experience. The book continues chaotically from there.

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The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
This was my third Maugham, a choice made by happenstance once I realized that I would have many 20-30 minute rides on the Tokyo Metro with not much to do but read or think. The Painted Veil was on my phone, short, and I’d forgotten any summary of it. Let me attempt one now: Kitty Fane is an Englishwoman displaced to Tching-Yen (fictional Hong Kong) by her marriage to Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working under the colonial government. She is unhappy in her marriage, which she chose because of the impending date of her younger sister’s own to a wealthier man, and in the two years since her move she’s begun an affair with the older, handsome Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charlie Townsend. Walter discovers this affair, and the aftermath of this discovery is the meat of the book, in which the Fanes face a cholera epidemic and Kitty, now disillusioned with Charlie and in a remote outpost with more limited company, completes a transition from frivolity to self-actualization.

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Two DNFs:

• Providence by Craig Willse A professor at a small liberal arts college in Ohio (modeled significantly after my own undergrad!) becomes obsessed with a mysterious and dangerous student. Willse writes a convincing and funny take on the elite rural midwestern SLAC, and an unconvincing take on why an English professor with a tenure-track appointment would ruin life and career for a nineteen year old boy.


• George Passant by C. P. Snow Small-town politicking in exurban 1920s England. The opening incident is a fascinatingly direct tale of homosexual attraction ruining a man’s reputation, but after that Snow’s writing loses focus, and his blank-slate narrator fails to persuade me to attend to any of the actors in this slow-moving drama.

K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
Ed Viesturs is an American mountaineer famous for climbing all fourteen mountains taller than 8000m, and in this book he takes on K2, the second tallest of those after Everest. He explores the history of climbing on K2 through the stories of a half-dozen notable expeditions on the mountain, looking at the challenges, failures, and mistakes in each of those years. Viesturs refrains from defining success as a complete ascent of the mountain, though of course that figures—he takes the more interesting approach of discussing teamwork, technique, and technical feats by the climbers. Though somewhat jargon-y, it’s still easy to follow the action in the book, and between Viesturs’ appreciation for the emotions of mountaineering and Roberts’ presumable editing and writing contributions, the book flew by.

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I wiped myself out this month with mostly one book, and my goal for next month is to be gentler: shorter works and less reading overall, especially given that I'll be seeing family twice. November and December are always my slowest reading months due to the holidays, work deadlines, and so on, and this year I'm going to try and embrace that by lowering my goals.

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys - Forrest Reid

A rarity: a queer early 20th century novella with zero fandom awareness, that is, zero hits on FFA. This follows Graham, who is in the present a middle-aged man, as he reminisces about a tragic boyhood friendship with Harold Brocklehurst. Harold is a Pan-ic figure, which is explicitly stated in the text but all of the nature references would also get you there. His near-mystical appearance in Graham’s life lasts less than a year, but is haunted throughout by a half-remembered dream. When Harold meets his tragic, it’s in a similarly dreamlike chapter.

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This novella is too short to do more than develop the relationship between Graham and Harold, and either you will like the Pan theme or it’ll do nothing for you. I wouldn’t call this the old book to change one’s mind on old books. But it’s short and incredibly gay, and it was an interesting read to see a rare example of open queerness—well, perhaps not technically open, but as near enough as one could ask.

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

After Cakes and Ale earlier this year, I thought I should read more of Maugham, and this book came along to me in a free library. It’s Maugham’s most famous work, and very chunky—around 260k words—which is outside of my normal wheelhouse for solo reading, but I thought that such a long book would be a good occupation during my temporary relocation. It certainly filled the last month! Whether that was the ideal choice is harder to say.

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So, where this leaves me is that I appreciated much of this book: Maugham writes well, and arguably quite compellingly, but not without issues. And for me, the issues would be best resolved by cutting content, shortening sequences and resolving some arcs much sooner. But I recognize that those choices would negate what this book is, what makes it stand out so much in its era, and would change it fundamentally. For me, that means that I didn’t like Of Human Bondage, but I wouldn’t call it bad, just a book which definitely requires a reader to meet it on its own terms, versus one which works to persuade you that its terms are interesting and worth the effort.

My Father and Myself - J. R. Ackerley

Joe Ackerley was a literary editor and memoirist from the early 20th century. He lived as openly gay when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. And though he never had a steady long-term partner, he seems to have had many friendships and to have mentored young gay writers during his tenure working for the BBC. Mostly, this memoir is not about these parts of his life—mostly, this is the story of Ackerley coming to understand his sexuality, alongside a recollection of his relationship with his father, whose own past he only belatedly takes an interest in learning.

Ackerley’s memoir is short and easy to read, despite his foreword warning about irregularities in the timeline. He writes in flowing first person with long, punctuation-heavy sentences. But the book is short and fairly narrow, so it’s not a challenge to follow the personalities and events. As a memoir, I don’t want to review it for “plot,” but Ackerley is clearly invested in the construction of his “reveals.” I wasn’t really surprised by any of them (or truly convinced that most were reveals) but anyone who wishes to go in unspoiled should take care to read the introduction, by W. H. Auden, last. Make sure also to read the Appendix before that, which is not optional content.

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Chrestomanci Book One: Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones

The first book (publication order) in the Chrestomancy series tells the story of a young boy, Eric “Cat” Chant, as he experiences your fairly typical magical adventures: dead parents, a startling new world, tangles with other children, a mysterious and aloof magical mentor, and a final life-threatening confrontation over a magical macguffin. There is even a (baby) dragon and a castle, and being a children’s novel, it fits neatly into an afternoon’s read.

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I can’t go back in time and read this as a child to compare, but I suspect that I would always have been upset by such a passive main character. It is one of my more recurrent complaints as a reader. There are seven of these books, and I cannot stomach any others about Cat, even if he matures, as this one spoiled him for me. I am vaguely interested in Christopher, and I know that two books focus on him, so I may read one or both of those standalone. This book had a really jarring moment of anti-Asian racism in it, but it is the oldest of the series, and a quick scan of reviews of the more recent entries doesn’t send up red flags for that recurring. The universe of the series is interesting and I do understand the appeal of this magic system—it seems like a compelling universe for worldbuilding, which is probably a main source of its enduring appeal.

Shyness and Dignity - Dag Solstad, tr. Sverre Lyngstad

Elias Rukla is a middle-aged literature instructor at a high school in Oslo. After a disappointing class period, he has an angry breakdown out front of the school. What follows is an accounting of his life, from his university education through his early career, marriage, and step-parenthood. Thus emerges the story of his listlessness and dissatisfaction in a job which never fulfills him and in a relationship with no emotional intimacy.

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This was a recommendation from a friend with more esoteric tastes in prose than my own. I ultimately prefer a recognizable narrative style and did not appreciate what this novel was doing. There are some funny observations, like this excerpt about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain:

One of his colleagues came into the teachers’ lounge just before the bell rang for the first class and said, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should probably have stayed under the eiderdown. A jolt shot through Elias Rukla. Had he heard correctly? Was the name of Hans Castorp mentioned, and in this free and easy way, in passing? Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, referred to by a senior master at Fagerborg High School, and not by a German teacher, but actually by someone who taught mathematics!

(And what a fun reminder of Spender’s The Temple!)

But these are few, and even they are drawn out to pages of repetition, so that the original humor is lost. I can’t think of any audience that I would recommend this to; I trust that if it is your interest, you’ll run across it from a more suitable source.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the second Ishiguro of my summer, and I am sorry to conclude that I don’t think I get along with him. This is an extremely well-told story of an English butler reflecting on his 30-year career in a distinguished house, Darlington Hall, from the vantage point of a short motoring vacation to see an old friend. Narrated in a Very Correct first person, the book does a great job of establishing the voice of the butler, Mr. Stevens. Ishiguro clearly understands the importance of perspective with unreliable narrators, something I remember from Never Let Me Go. Unfortunately, he so effectively set up the reasons to question Mr. Stevens that I could not bring myself to feel the sympathetic turn when that arrived.

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I can’t recommend either for or against this book—it’s a very carefully put together story, but by an author who doesn’t quite work for me.

Thanks to vriddy for pointing this out! Find the questions here from maevedarcy. ❤️

Which of your fics is your pride and joy?
I have a series for this, and I think it's mostly up to date, but to pick... either In Fealty to Apollo or A Sense of Self in Decline, which are messy mid-length fics for my two OTPs, and so I flip between them.

What are your top three most commonly used tags on AO3?
Oh, I'm so proud of this: Explicit Sexual Content, POV Second Person, POV First Person. I believe strongly in using fic as a space for explicit depictions of sex (this was my challenge to myself when I started writing: I wasn't allowed to be afraid of publishing smut), so I'm happy to show that I really did work past that early fear and am now, I think, a fairly strong sex writer. And I fell in love with first and second person POV, so I'm extremely happy that so much of my fic uses it. It's one of my favorite things that people comment on!

What’s something you learned while researching a fic?
Just so much about different periods of historical dress, especially men's underwear. See above, re: smut writing.

Is there a character or ship you’d love to write for, but haven’t yet?
For how much I love him as a character, I'm really disappointed that I haven't written any of Clive from Maurice! I think that the right ship for me to do it with is Clive and Frank Maddox (of David Blaize), and the trouble is doing three books' worth of canon review.

What makes a fic ‘successful’ in your opinion?
For me, that I am proud of my writing when I reread it. I'm a big rereader of my own fic, and when something enters the regular rotation (so I revisit it at least once a year), that's a success.

What makes you happiest? New fic comments, kudos, bookmarks, user subscribers, story subscribers, or Tumblr asks?
New comments! I respond to each one, and I use them as a chance to revisit the fic and offer some new insight or thought about it. I love seeing what people think about a fic, and I love trying to offer them something new in response.

Does anyone you know in real life know you write fanfiction?
Yep. Most of my close friends, and of course my spouse. Only perhaps two people know my fannish username, but I'm friends with lots of people who are or have been fannish, so it's easy to be open about my fanfic hobby.

Did you do anything special to celebrate finishing a fic?
I used to write fic meta posts, some of which are archived on this journal. I kind of miss doing that! It just always felt a bit awkward so I stopped the habit. Otherwise, nope, I usually just appreciate it being done and move on.

What’s a story you’d love to write but haven’t even started yet?
Too many. Uhh, a recent one would be for The Secret History, Richard/Henry in a post-canon Henry-lives AU. I’ve gotten as far as English Prof. Richard being invited to give a named lecture at a campus near Henry—either Henry’s a professor or he’s a benefactor—and so reuniting with Henry there in the audience. I could really see Richard choosing to be at a liberal arts college or at a school with a small honors program sort of deal, but striving to be as un-Julian-like as possible out of a fear of recreating the social dynamics which caught him. Henry would not understand this fear at all, but for whatever reason my mind says that he shouldn’t be in a position to become Julian himself—that it’s narratively important that they be contrasts in this way.

Do you ever prep your fics with outlines or warmups before you start writing, or do you just dive right in?
It depends on what length I'm aiming for. If I'm feeling rusty and want to take on a more involved project, I'll either do prompts from a random generator (or FFA 100 words threads) or sort of write to myself about what I want in the fic, until I start getting the actual prose of the story flowing. I'll also keep a list of necessary scenes for long projects.

How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
Depends on what revision means, here! I do at least three readthroughs, one out loud, for SPAG and flow. I'm not a big 'rewrites' person, though, so I don't usually redo a scene that's already written—when I feel stuck, I'll delete and/or set the work aside, but I don't write through a scene that's not working.

A character you enjoy making suffer. and A character you want to protect.
Tom Riddle remains my fave, and for the most part, if I want to do something in a fic, I want it to happen to him. But I wouldn't say that suffer/protect is a dichotomy that I find much use for when writing. It isn't my approach to fic.

What is your favorite fic to get comments/messages on?
Two categories of this:
(1) My rare fandoms! I will never cease to be amazed by someone stopping in to say that they've read, for example, my Middlemarch fic. Who is looking for Middlemarch fic?! I am delighted that there are other people like that in this world.
(2) My unhappy or bittersweet endings. I have a fair number of these, and I fully understand that they're not usually what readers come to fic for, especially mid-length fic (10k+). (I see the short tragedy as its own genre, with IME more takers.) So when someone does sit down and read 20k of maundering without even the relief of a clear happy ending, and then they tell me they liked it? Joy.

What fic took you the longest to write?
I think it was How anxious are his Lares, mostly because it came at a time when I started having to give more priority to what was happening offline. It's not particularly long for me, but each of those chapters kind of got written when it could. You can see it in the chapter publication dates: a bunch of quick shorter chapters over my winter break, and then more spread during the spring semester. I wonder how the story might have gone differently if I'd written it over the course of just a month or two, instead.

Sunshine Challenge #4 this year is to create a list of ten things, and the subject currently on my mind is “men in books who should have been blorbos, but for lack of adequate shipping options.” Here are ten male characters where I read the book and went, oh my, he’s perfect, too bad about the lack of any I want to mash him against!

This was a fun exercise—I realized that I actually do have ships in some books (left off the list) and it’s simply that the fandom was too small/nonexistent for me to want to write fic for it. The ones who are left really felt like characters who were isolated in their original contexts, either for lack of other (male) shipping options, or because some dominant ship wasn’t for me.

1. Edmund Pevensie, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series

Edmund is a lovely, awful child character whose primary shipping option is his brother or Prince Caspian, and I happened not to like either very much. I don’t think I even realized how much I enjoyed his character until I saw him in a crossover fic with one of my other faves, and that’s been the main way I’ve written him!

2. Clive Durham, E. M. Forster’s Maurice

My most favorite Forster character ever is locked into a story in which he has a terrible ill-fated romance with a character archetype that I really did not get along with, so I can’t even enjoy the bits of Maurice/Clive that are out there. I want badly for him to find someone else who is exactly the same type of prick that he is.

Honorable mention to all of Forster’s other queer men who never quite felt well-paired in their books!

3. Bunny, Mary Renault’s The Charioteer

There are a wealth of available gay men in The Charioteer, but none that I really love for Bunny! I’d read any combination of Bunny/someone else, just to see how it goes, but he really does seem like he’d be stuck having to grovel to make those options work beyond a single hookup. :( I want Bunny to be appreciated for his flagrant awfulness.

4. Frank Maddox, E. F. Benson’s David Blaize

An unfortunate victim of a book with a clear main ship that I do not like. David is a great friend to Frank, but I cannot see him as a good partner, and the book (and its sequel) is so invested in centering that relationship that no other boy gets the development to be a real option. Poor Frank! I love his gentleness and his intelligence and his angst so much; he needs someone other than David.

5. The Darkling, Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha series

Oh, Darkling. Burdened by being the evil leg of a love triangle in a fantasy series. Plenty of shipfic for him if you like the series protagonist, which I do not; no significant relationships with other men in the series. He is forever in my wishful-thinking pile. I would have loved to collect another dark wizard.

6. Dennis Knuckleyard, Alan Moore’s The Great When

I loved being introduced to this useless adolescent lump through a bad masturbation scene. That is perfect for me! He’s a great character but only plays off of one similarly-aged character, and that romantic potential is (very rightly!) shut down. At least this is the first of a series, and he might come back and we might see him interact with others/gain depth to minor relationships?

7. Leo Colston, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between

I was so taken with preteen Leo’s growing awareness of adult affairs and concerns during his summer holiday. He reads to me as queer and I’d be very interested in watching that continue to develop, but it’s just not the purpose of this story, and neither is it a focus to develop his relationship with his peer. The Go-Between is about adolescent yearning, but the character would have been great to play with if his world were more fleshed out beyond that period of life.

8. Eric Ashley, Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us

Ashley’s novel comes with options, but no one meets his strength of character and self-knowledge. Just one other young teacher, or perhaps if we’d gotten a few scenes of interaction with his former school boyfriend…

9. Ernst Stockmann, Stephen Spender’s The Temple

I am still not over the treatment of this character! He was so symapthetic to me, in all of his awkwardness. His stiff inability to be carefree ended up wrapping back around to make him one of the more genuine characters in the novel—he never actually pretends to offer something he cannot, or to not have the history that he does. I love him for that, even if the book won’t. Of course, that no one else in the book likes him makes it awful to contemplate pairing him with anyone.

10. Mark Daubery, Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent

This new addition is what’s got the subject on my mind. I love a wealthy middle-aged Brit who is not good news! He’s so honest about that, while simultaneously being a mysterious, oily bastard, and I adore a character who cannot be trusted from the start but who still manages to shock. Again, he’s hampered by the narrowness of the cast: half of the secondaries are students, half are much older colleagues, and although the protagonist does sleep with him, I am rooting against her actually staying with him. I would love him being charmingly devious to someone who matches his energy.

After reading The Secret History in May, and surprising myself with my enjoyment of it, I did the natural thing and immediately read four more Dark Academia(ish) books to explore the genre. I ended up with a pretty broad mix: scifi and fantasy and horror, a range of school types (primary, undergraduate, graduate), and both British and American offerings. Still, looked at as a whole, there were a lot of similarities which I think defined the books as (mostly) fitting the image of the aesthetic, for better and for worse.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

To start, the least-fitting of the bunch. This book came as a recommendation by way of a colleague who teaches a course called “Dark Academia.” They said that this book always ended up being the showpiece of the class.

To head things off, I don’t think this would be a common or expected rec for the DA genre. It is a speculative fiction novel set in 1980s-1990s Britain (Wales is mentioned!) in which our first-person narrator Kathy H. gives us a retrospective of her life. Her narrative is ostensibly a recollection of childhood friendships with Ruth and Tommy, met at a boarding school called Hailsham, but oddities in her story soon make clear that her childhood was not normal and that her world has very dark undertones. The prose is chatty and easy to read, so the effect is a discomfiting, tense sense of dread which does not match the lighthearted childhood stories.

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Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Katabasis is the sixth novel by R. F. Kuang and the first of hers that I’ve read (thanks to a friend of a friend who had early access). It is a fantasy in which two rival graduate students of the same deceased PhD advisor journey into hell in order to retrieve their advisor’s soul. It takes place in a slightly alt-history version of 1980s Cambridge, and it is a critique of the abuses endemic to graduate school. As a fan of portal fantasies and a lover of navel-gazing books about academics, I am its core audience. Unfortunately, I think it was bad.

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Overall, I don’t recommend this. The lead is difficult to deal with beyond what I write here, the prose is bland, the magic and the settings are uninspired. It does stand out for being a Dark Academia book about graduate school, but really, just go (re)read one of the comp titles.

And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh

This was a true and clear Dark Academia novel, playing the concept straight. An unnamed protagonist narrates from twenty years in the future, describing his time as a Cambridge music student (two Cambridge books in a row!). The odd Northern duck out, he quickly sets his sights on joining the friend circle of wealthy, attractive Bryn Cavendish. Both men share fraught relationships with their fathers (the narrator’s father was an alcoholic who passed away; Bryn’s father is a famous stage magician who is separated from the family), but Bryn’s glamour and flair for the sinister captivate half of campus. In the present, our narrator hints at the knowledge he has about Bryn’s mysterious death.

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One of my biggest critiques is that And He Shall Appear does not follow through on its drama. I like a low-stakes story. This isn’t that. This is a high-stakes story which does not deliver. We are promised black magic, a death, addiction, and class commentary. And yet the answer to those is passivity. The result of all the build-up is nothing: no magic, no murder, just a lonely adult drunk twenty years on. All of this for a guy that the narrative only ever manages to tell us is worth this obsession. And then there’s not even any school in it.

If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio

I’m glad that I ended with this novel. It helped me understand why there is so much hope for Dark Academia as a contemporary genre.

If We Were Villains is the story of seven Shakespearean Theatre students, currently in their fourth year at the fictional Dellecher Classical Conservatory. Dellecher is an arts school in rural Illinois with a prestigious, harsh reputation—each year, half of the students are not invited back, leading to things like a seven-person senior class in a major. The Dellecher drama program only studies and performs Shakespeare, making for a heavily-referential novel. It is a frame story, narrated in both the present (10 years on from school) and the past by one of the thespians, Oliver Marks, who explains the death of one of his friends during that final year at Dellecher.

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I recommend this book to anyone looking for a recent take on Dark Academia, especially if you’re otherwise leery of cynicism. I came into this without any sense of the plot or relationships, and I really enjoyed encountering them without spoilers. It was a rewarding book for letting the mystery unfold at its own pace.