Gender

On Desolation: December 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What a read.

I picked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when I was twelve or so in the public library (translated into Spanish). It caused a great impression in me, because it wasn’t like any other fantasy book that I had read before –  I’m looking forward to rereading it as an adult in its original language.

Piranesi, on the other hand, didn’t draw me in as much when I first saw it in a bookshop. I remember working at Waterstones when it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and we were selling heaps and heaps of them. And yet, when I read the blurb, it didn’t sound attractive to me at all – it seemed so vague.

I know, judging a book only by its the blurb. I should know better.

Sure, there are many potential issues and plot gaps in this book but I adored it and I read so fast. One of the most astonishing achievements of this book – which you could call a novella because of its length and the way the plot works – it’s how it manages to suggest such a complex world in very few pages.

Piranesi has something I have a passion for: strange vast and desolate landscapes. I can’t explain it, but I feel attracted to such places, which explains why Abandoned Places is one of my favourite books to look at and chill with a cup of tea.

In Piranesi, most of the plot is set in the House, a building of mammoth proportions composed of halls with impossible tall ceilings. There’s nothing in them but statues of all the things you can possibly imagine, including, for example, a woman carrying a beehive. (Because, why not.) To complete the picture, there is also a sea in the House so now and again, and depending on the tides, some of the halls get flooded. Because of this, there are fish, and sometimes seagulls, and even albatrosses. Apart from that, there are no other beings aside from Piranesi and the Other.

Can you imagine anything more beautiful?

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Genders and genres: June 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Crime Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

This is not at all the kind of book I’d normally gravitate towards since romance is one of the genres I read less of (to put it generously). But because this was one my book club’s pick of the month and I decided to go with it. And, spoiler alert, I was pleasantly surprised. 

This is the book I would have loved to read when I was a teenager. Honestly. It would have saved me lots of heartache to see more positive queer relationships portrayed in stories back then. You have to understand that during my teenage years in Spain the only queer couple I read about was Louis and Lestat in Interview with the Vampire (a novel that I loved at the time, but that’s another story) or the turbulent gay relationships in Lost Souls and Drawing Blood by Billy Martin. I still remember the first time I realised I was queer – and I thought, fuck. I had a lot of internalised homophobia. I could find some books abut gay men, but women? It was almost as if we didn’t really exist.

So I think it’s very important that young adults can read fiction like this, where the main character, August, can fall in love with a charismatic older girl, Jane, she meets in the New York’s underground, and it’s natural, and it’s fine, and is not even the point of the story. The point of the story, actually, is to show August’s coming of age journey in New York (while she tries to finish university an decide what she wants to do with her life, hello being twenty-three years old). The point of the story is also a bizarre sci-fi twist that includes some time-travelling theory and which definitely didn’t make sense (even for someone like me who doesn’t always get all of the science). But you go with it because by the time this comes up in the plot you’re already invested in the characters.

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