What I got:

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

What I read:

• City of Night by John Rechy
• The Mariposa Club by Rigoberto González
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
• An Orchestra of Minorities (audiobook) by Chigozie Obioma
• Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton
• High Fidelity (re-read) by Nick Hornby
• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor
• The Strokes: The First Ten Years by Cody Smyth
• Legend (re-read) by Marie Lu

Welcome back to a normal monthly wrap-up! Since times are crazy, I thought writing a regular old book-related blog post would help add a sense of normalcy back into my life. So here we go!

Let’s start with books I’ve read for class. City of Night by John Rechy was a trip. This is a book about the 1960s male hustling scene, following a nameless narrator who talks about the people he meets along the way and involving a lot of identity exploration and criticism of American society. Everyone has a favorite character who the narrator comes across, and mine is cowboy Chuck. He’s just so chill about everything and takes life as it comes. He’s the laziest character the narrator meets, but he’s also super likable and unconcerned about what others think of him. City of Night was a difficult read in the sense that Rechy does not follow conventional story or sentence structures, but also in the sense that the narrator is emotionally detached because he experiences so much negativity. Perhaps if I re-read it at some point, I’ll be able to look into the language and story more deeply, but this first read is just a lot to take in.

The Mariposa Club is about a group of gay teenage guys who call themselves the Fierce Foursome and their last year of high school. They try to start an LGBT club at their school, and three of the four boys are Mexican. This book really only touches the story on a surface level, but its representation and exploration of intersectional identities and different types of queerness are important for young queer teens to see.

One book that I was hoping to absolutely love was Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. But it was just kinda meh. Paul is a gender-bending shapeshifter who sometimes identifies and presents as a lesbian and sometimes identifies and presents as a gay man. This is the one book that we are reading in my LGBT lit course that tackles transgender identities, and while it does dive deep into discussions of gender and sexuality, I just did not care about Paul and his sexual exploits. The one thing I did care about—the nature of his shapeshifting—never got resolved or explained. I don’t mind that his gender was never really determined, because no one needs to have a firmly identified gender, but it’s really only about Paul ditching his life, having sex with people, and then sort of pulling it back together. I wish the transgender novel we read in class would have been more rooted in reality, because Paul is so “other” that very few people will be able to connect to him.

The only thing I’m going to say about An Orchestra of Minorities is that I didn’t like it, had to listen to it on audiobook to get through it, and was disappointed with the ending. Objectively, the language is really lyrical, but that’s where my compliments end.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post was supposed to be the Queer Lit Club book for March, but we obviously weren’t able to meet, so I didn’t actually get to discuss it with others. The book wasn’t as sad as I thought it was going to be until I hit the ending, but I really enjoyed the experience of reading it. Lots of shitty things happen to Cameron, but she’s a strong character who, even though society tells her to keep her identity a secret, doesn’t try to change herself. Even at conversion camp, she makes friends with others who don’t follow, and don’t want to follow, the norm.

The other book club book I read in March was Next Year in Havana, the book I read with my sister. Luckily, we ended up quarantining together, so we could discuss the book in person. We went to the Starbucks drive-thru with our dog and then sat on her bed and chatted over coffee. While I didn’t love this book as much as my sister did, I did enjoy diving back into Cuban-American literature several semesters after taking a Cuban-American lit course. Chanel Cleeton shows what happens to those who stayed in Cuba when the revolution was happening and those who left. She discusses questions of identity, love, loss, home, memory, loyalty, and family. Anyone who can pack so much into one book without making the reader feel overwhelmed is a skilled writer. And while the plot and characters didn’t quite hit me as hard as I would have hoped, I am still planning to read Cleeton’s sequel to this one, When We Left Cuba, because of her skill and the fact that it’s about my favorite character, Beatriz.

And now, the re-reads!

I re-read High Fidelity in preparation to watch the miniseries on Hulu (which I still haven’t gotten to even though I can’t go anywhere… oops…) and also because I went through a phase when I read all of Nick Hornby’s novels. I think I liked this book the first time I read it, but Hornby is so good at writing stories about fuck-ups. His characters are usually men in their thirties with subpar jobs, not a lot of ambitions, and poor love lives. But I care about them… Any scene in the record shop that the main character owns becomes a favorite, because his coworkers are so ridiculous but believable.

My re-read of Legend just happened because I was at home with all of my old favorite books and I knew Marie Lu had recently released a fourth book in the series. For some reason, I completely blocked out that plagues are a huge plot point in this series, but I am gonna keep on reading them, anyway! I loved these books in high school and I am having so much fun re-discovering the characters and the plot. There are so many cliches in Legend, but I can tell why I liked it when I read them. And the pure nostalgia is really making me love them all over again!

For everyone as anxious as I am right now: I hope you find some joy in familiar favorites or new favorites, whether movies or books or TV shows or music or anything else. I’m taking this time at home to explore things that I once loved and how I have evolved as a person since those times. I’m hoping that reconnecting with my past self will give me more momentum to move forward with my writing and my reading and my life in general.