Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox, 2011

[yatima]

I read Helen Oyeyemi's book White is for Witching in a sleeping bag in a tent in the Sierras during an ice storm, and found it spellbinding. Mr Fox has the same enchanting quality. It shifts seamlessly between realism and fairy tale in a way that reminded me of many of the writers I loved best as a child: Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, Elizabeth Goudge, Nicholas Stuart Gray, Sylvia Townsend Warner, TH White. No surprises there, because Mr Foxis about the dissatisfactions both of being a reader:

With books you’ve got to know all about other books that are like the one you’re talking about, and it’s just never-ending, and it’s a pain.

and of trying to write:

I was sitting in my study, writing badly, just making words on the page, waiting for something good to come through, some sentence I could keep.

In particular, it's about reading a book and loving parts of it and wanting to smack the writer in the face for the other parts - the parts where women are tormented just to advance the plot, to choose an example at random.

As women, as queers, as POC, as any kind of Other, we all strike this devil's bargain with the canon as written by our oppressors, wanting to keep the good and rewrite the bad. Oyeyemi reminds us that this is the great work:

Tell the stories. Tell them to us. We want to know all the ways you’re still like us, and all the ways you’ve changed. Talk to us.

After all, our enemies do not rest.

Something terrible’s coming, and everyone in the world is working to bring it on. They won’t rest until they’ve brought it on.

Gengoroh Tagame, My Brother's Husband, Volume 1, 2017

[yatima]

My 11yo bought this on the strength of a blurb from Alison Bechdel (we all loved Fun Home.) After she finished it, she insisted that I read it. Kid knows the kind of thing I like. Tagame is known for his extremely kinky gay manga, but this is family fare: the tender story of a Canadian who visits his dead husband's brother and niece in Japan.

The point of view is that of the brother, Yaichi, who is burdened with a lot of unexamined homophobia. While a lot of the critical response to My Brother's Husband approaches this as a text that will help people unfamiliar with LGBTQ+ issues, it worked equally well to give my San Francisco-raised kid an insight into people whose daily lives aren't suffused with the gay! Tagame gives Yaichi space to wrestle with his preconceptions and doesn't judge him for his missteps. It's a sweetly sympathetic portrait that didn't raise my queer hackles: not an easy feat.

The art is my favorite aspect of this book. Mike, the Canadian widower, is a big beardie hairy man, and his body is presented as straightforwardly attractive. His growing rapport with his niece Kana and his kindness towards another young character are beautifully and movingly rendered. I can't wait for Volume 2.

Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, 2016

[yatima]

Believe the hype. This is the best book of poetry I have read in years, dense with precisely described emotion. It reminded me of the first time I read Plath's Ariel:

Not
a piano—but a mare
draped in a black sheet. White mouth
sticking out like a fist. I kneel
at my beast. The sheet sunken
at her ribs.

A side-note: in my Honours English class back in nineteen ninety-mumble, our great professor Bruce Gardiner wasted most of a tutorial trying to get me and the rest of my virginal cohort to understand Yeats "The Song of the Wandering Aengus" as the poet going outside at night for a wank. One of Vuong's poems here is helpfully titled "Ode to Masturbation," which should save many graduate student hours.