February Wrap-Up

Books Read This Month
1. My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays and One Wondering Jew by Abigail Pogrebin
2. Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #6)
3. Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik (Temeraire #7)
4. Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
5. Blue Horses by Mary Oliver
6. The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro
7. Paper Brigade Vol. 3 (Jewish Book Council Literary Magazine)
8. The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
9. A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren

Favorite Book This Month

The Le Guin is strong with this one. When Charlie Jane Anders said "I went through Le Guin's house and took everything that wasn't nailed down," at the Baltimore Book Festival, she wasn't kidding. Despite the obvious parallels to Le Guin though (frozen landscape, mirror societies), Anders also evokes Asimov, Butler, Bradbury, L'Engle and I'm sure at least a dozen other scifi writers and movies I've never even heard of. Anders' city(ies) sit neatly in the middle of conversations between older and more recent scifi. Like N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, Anders engages more explicitly with the relationship between sentient species and their environment, implicitly critiquing our own society's inadequate response to climate change. Furthermore, though, the centrality of friendship and especially female friendship to Anders' novel far surpasses anything I've read by Le Guin (which is admittedly far from all). There are two central female friendships in the book, one for each of the two viewpoint characters, Sophie and Mouth. However, although I do celebrate the under-sung values of platonic friendship, both these relationships seem more-than at specific moments, and yet these moments of queerness (which have to be intentional: Sophie stares at two girls kissing in the more libertine city while she yearns for the friend she's brought with her across the tundra) never come to fruition. I wonder why Anders made that choice, especially since while Sophie and her friend, from the more conservative time-bound city, may have cultural hangups, Mouth and her friend Alyssa decidedly do not. In any case, my interest in this book followed a similar pattern to when I read All the Birds in the Sky from "Oh. I like this book. This is interesting." in the beginning to "OMG I LOVE THIS BOOK" in the middle to "NO WHY IS IT ENDING NO." I literally screamed aloud when this book ended (also because I didn't think it was going to end quite yet; there were a few more pages that turned out to be Acknowledgments).  I was so upset, I tweeted at Charlie Jane Anders, who was gracious enough to answer me, although sadly not with the answer I wanted. I reiterate: I will live in hope.

Other Thoughts
I have thoughts about other books I read this month too, but I also want to get this post up.

In short:

• Paper Brigade is my favorite literary magazine that I've ever read (and yes, I have read, a number) and I wish it came out more than once a year. That said, I understand why it doesn't. More than a litmag, it's a barometer of the American/international Jewish literary landscape right now and coming up. It's got interviews with authors, excerpts from upcoming books, poems and more. If you have any interest in the topic, I highly recommend it.
• I read The Muralist for my new-to-me book club, and while I'm not sure I liked it as much as The Art Forger, it's a very clever and thoughtful book that (surprisingly) successfully pulls off Eleanor Roosevelt and Mark Rothko respectively as viewpoint characters. It provides a snapshot of the dark side of America in the 1940s, the chaos in the aftermath of the Depression and reminds us that anti-immigrant rhetoric and anti-Semitism were very much alive, what it felt like to be Jewish and know your family was being murdered on the other side of the world, and what it felt like to those who could not or did not do enough about it. A scarily timely read.