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Reading Roundup, November 2024
Dec. 7th, 2024 09:42 pmThis 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
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.
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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
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.
