Hold Me Now by Stephen Gauer

Hold Me Now by Stephen Gauer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book. It took a while to get going for me but once it did, about 75% in, I loved it.
The story is told from the perspective of a straight father and his gay son has been recently murdered. A few times the father's perspective reminded me of my own father.
Many angles were covered in this book, mostly told from the father's perspective. I disliked how everyone referred to the main character as Brenner, not sure if this was his first or last name but it sounded overly formal. Also loads and loads, pun intended, of straight sex in this book which I wasn't expecting. It ended up being a unique perspective as I wasn't sure a gay man could write so convincingly from a straight man's perspective, so who wrote this book and what was the intended audience? These questions held me up for most of the first 2/3 of the book.
There's a section where the father is thinking of the murderer in prison and wanting him to have more time to reflect on his crime. The book says: "Or did that assume a level of introspection and intelligence that would have prevented [him] from killing Daniel in the first place?" Which is an excellent question and once the focus shifted away slightly from the father I was able to get much more into the book.
The book left me focusing on the system of punishment we have, what we expect the punishment to do, why these crimes are committed, and although it left more questions than answers, I appreciated having these thought provoking issues to reflect on.

View all my reviews

Pumpkin Eater: A Dan Sharp Mystery by Jeffrey Round

Pumpkin Eater: A Dan Sharp Mystery by Jeffrey Round
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A good addition to the series, I liked it better than the original, Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery.

Dan Sharp is in a better mood this time around, less old crank hitting the bottle and more likable detective/father. He's also less down about the city he lives in, Toronto, and these were my only two complaints about the last book.

The story reads well and it is nice to step back into this character's life. The mystery is a little too straightforward and then suddenly a little too convoluted. One person called by two names then becomes two people, then becomes three? Not sure how that happens. I think my math skills are a little off.

I liked hearing more about Ked, he seemed more real to me this time and I didn't get that he wasn't white last time for some reason. Ethnic diversity is also always good.

I also really liked the use of the Toronto Islands setting, I liked this more than the thousand islands setting previously.

I had a couple questions. I thought the preview at the end of Lake for this book indicated the initial warehouse fire was back in time, I seem to remember 2008. I haven't double checked but I remember thinking "Oh good, he gets to stay in Toronto as we're going back in time" and assuming he was moving to Vancouver as indicated at the end of the last book. Anyway, what happened to that as suddenly we're in the present.

Also the preview at the end of this book for the next book, The Jade Butterfly: A Dan Sharp Mystery doesn't mention Dan Sharp or any of the characters we know. I thought that maybe wasn't the best excerpt to use.

View all my reviews

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this. A short travelogue of life in North Korea for a foreigner in 2003. Well drawn, the graphic novel is the perfect medium for this story, I enjoyed all of it.

I like to travel and I doubt I will get to North Korea, or would want to. I appreciated the outsiders perspective, it felt like I was there experiencing these things. The author wrote well and welcomed people into the story. I am not very familiar with communist regimes in practice and this was a great introduction.

Lots of great tidbits like only one floor of the 47 story hotel has power, the ones with the foreigners on it. The only place in downtown you will see lights at night are the lights illuminating the statues of the Great Leader. Indoctrination messages are painted on the sides of mountains. And the work week in North Korea is six days per week, with "volunteer" time on the seventh day. "Volunteer" activities include things like sweeping a highway or painting a bridge.

View all my reviews

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I am going to buck the trend of four and five star reviews here and give it a one. Another reviewer said of this book that it made her sorry she learned to read, and I take the point, but for me this book is like the anti-reading. It sucked the life out of me, it sucked me dry, and took a pleasurable escapist pastime like reading and made it dirty and violent and negative. This is the book that made me watch more TV.
I read this for a book club and the book is dripping with violence. The Road was a great book because it so vividly portrayed its post-apocalyptic world but this book doesn’t have that. It has dialogue and violence, and not really much else. The violence would turn your stomach if you processed every word of it. I read every word of the book, but I didn’t process every word. There was too much.
After the barrage of violence we meet the Sheriff, part of the old men, old school mentality who doesn’t understand how the South of yesterday has become people with green hair and bones through their noses walking down the street. He’s trying to solve the crime, but which crime? I suppose the missing money, or is it the murders, or is it the disappearing guns? This is intertwined with killers talking with their victims at length about philosophy before shooting them in the head. It’s just not anything I need in my life. I suppose if I were younger the violence would bother me less, but the writing is good and has a level of sophistication that I don’t think my younger self would have been able to appreciate, so I’m left wondering who it’s for. Who are all the five star reviewers?
I will agree the book is written well and the author presents it in a uniquely stylized way which is always a plus when reading. But if you can’t get past the bad people, does anyone in this book have a conscience?, and the violence, then what’s the point? The book takes you down, and mires you so deeply in the muck you can’t see your way out. In the end, as the book says:
“There wouldn’t be no point to it. There ain’t no point to it. Not to any of it.”

View all my reviews

My Caribbean Cruise 2014

Starr Lyte by Blaise Bulot

Starr Lyte by Blaise Bulot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Starr Lyte is a drag queen who can't read or write and lives in the ghetto of New Orleans. She frequently spouts profound wisdom, such as:

"Different strokes for different folks.
If all of us liked the same thing
Some of us would be awful lonely,
and the rest of us would be awfully sore"

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I'm wavering between three and four stars, I feel like four is what I wanted to give it, but three better reflects my experience.

Starr is charming, her cast of friends is wonderful to read about and you'll really enjoy spending a day in the life with her and her wild outlandish stories. It's subsequent days where the charm wanes a little. Several chapters are written in poor folk southern drawl, some of which just can't be understood, all written phonetically. It starts off being cute and a reminder of the down home south, but does begin to grate. All the chapters, most just a page or so, are in the same format, with a short vignette into Starr's life or one of her friend's lives, and while interesting, it does get repetitive.

I liked that this was a small press, I liked that it was by a gay author of colour, which is rare, I liked that it was set in the south, I liked that it was about drag queens. I just wanted to like it all a bit more.

View all my reviews

The Coming of the Night by John Rechy

The Coming of the Night by John Rechy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this a lot and will continue with other Rechy books. I read City of Night first and this second. This is no City of Night but it was good, and I do still give very high marks, both to Mr. Rechy for not resting on his laurels and for writing something new, and for the book itself, very entertaining and thoughtful.

This book is a snapshot of gay culture in 1982, when the first whispers of AIDS were starting. I expected the book to eventually step into the AIDS crisis but it never does, making allusions to it but never going there outright. The book is more a day or a few days set in LA as the Sant'Anas blow a hot wind of change.

Rechy has a gift for being sex-positive with great characterization and still evoking feeling and meaning. I think there things are all necessary for good gay fiction and few authors can manage all three.

Rechy examines the gay culture of the early 1980's with several elements still resonating now. A wide cast of characters really try to include everyone, we see porn stars, gym bunnies, ultra macho daddies and past-it aunties.

"I accept those things, Thomas, the three curses in the gay world - unattractive, old, and fat. I've been spared the fourth curse, the curse of a small dick, but that's not a blessing for me because no one notices."

I loved the scenes at the porn shoot, to me this had the ultra vivid characterization and humour of a Robert Rodi book, but with the sex left in that Rodi always cut. All the story lines are interesting, you'll be quickly turning the pages, and this can be hard to do with a large cast of all similar gay men. Some gay books you lose track of who's who, and while Rechy isn't perfect here, its a solid 9 out of 10.

The book has some thought provoking moments, like this meditation on gay sex culture that reminded me of the resonance of The Normal Heart:

"This is all there is - just sex and more sex and still more sex. That's all God gave only us - and to no one else - to compensate for all the shit they keep throwing at us. It's the only thing that blocks it all out. That's all some of us have. When that's gone - for some of us, there will be nothing."

Again well written, I read this on a gay vacation which was the perfect time for this book. Slight marks off for not being quite as good as City, and also for the last page, the last four paragraphs really which I found confusing. If someone could message me and fill me in on the meaning there I would appreciate it. Did he die? Why the blood? Was the Christ real? Did he screw him? To understand everything but the very very end I found frustrating. Still book is highly recommended.

View all my reviews