Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Read it because I heard it was about lesbian necromancers in space, loved it utterly because of its protagonist, Gideon, who is not a necromancer but is A. very much a lesbian B. an excellent swordswoman C. a messed-up eighteen-year old who's had a very unfair go of it D. snarky as hell with several heroic bones (ha!) in her body E. looks like this

Gideon's is such a wonderful headspace to be in. I love how irreverent she is, that she gets (physically) fucked up a bunch in this novel, and that despite the little kindness shown to her on the Ninth, as soon as she meets the other necros and cavs from the other houses, she so badly wants to protect them. I will save more raving about Gideon for the spoiler cut.

This was just a fun novel to read. I finished most of it in a single night, the prose has this wild energy to it, I loved the silly fantasy roles and titles, the hints of details on all the different Houses with the purposes they serve in the Empire. My Classification Id was happy. The necromancer-cavalier setup is perfect for a billion different takes on loyalty kink or lack thereof, and the book definitely makes use of that.

(Also, I could sense the Homestuck vibes and I was here for it.)

Spoilery thoughts below!

My favourite couple of scenes were the human battery scene and the pool scene. The human battery scene gave me a new trope to like, with Gideon just straight up telling Harrow to do it and getting comforted through it by Dulcinea. Dulcinea's dialogue there is even more meaningful when her true backstory contextualizes her opinions on what necromancers ask of their cavaliers. I very much do ship Gideon/Dulcinea and Gideon/????.

The pool scene, phew. My friend who read this book before I did told me she had a bet with herself with on whether I'd warm up to Harrow. A very fair take, given my usual apathy for an initial enemy. See: Sabran from Priory, Catra from She-Ra, etc. But that pool scene went so very far to warm me up to her, because Harrow just lays out precisely what a sin her very existence is - that even she became a Lyctor and revitalized the Ninth, she could never be worth it, she'll always be a war crime - and also tells Gideon she should hate her specifically for how Harrow treated her. That unflinching look at what her life has entailed and wrought was metal as fuck.

I'm still probably going to put off reading the sequel until I hear whether good 'old Gideon returns, because she's the fave, but I won't mind reading things mostly from Harrow's PoV either.

The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History by Marc Stein

A well-assembled collection of primary sources about and contextualizing the Stonewall Riots. The introduction does a great job of offering a variety of angles by which one could interpret the riots in light of larger historical trends around it, which I always like. Stein bounded himself to sources from several years before the riots and several years after; sources from within the US but not solely within NYC; mostly articles from gay periodicals and societies, other than court case summaries and a few mainstream reports of the riots themselves. That last point was interesting because it hadn't been his initial decision - the cost of reproducing more mainstream sources turned out to be prohibitive, but as he says, that was a happy accident that let him focus more on LGBTQ folks' words themselves.

There's all sorts of fascinating intra-community and inter-community debates going on within these sources. On general gay groups being dominated by men, with some lesbians rightly pointing out that supposed co-ed homophile orgs should focus on consensus among male and female members...and some going "why should we be burdened/care by the promiscuity and resulting prosecution of gay men?" yikes. The usual debates between the homophile societies and the more revolutionary sorts, disagreements on fighting for security clearances at all for gay people, disagreements on focusing groups' energies solely on gay issues or expanding to take up all kinds of causes - the book has the GAA and GLF agendas right after each other where you can see the contrast on that last one. The lumping in of age of consent laws with other various demands for changes to laws. The possibility of letting trans protections fall to the wayside in fighting for an anti-discrimination city ordinance.

The last few pages are paragraphs of book recommendations on various topics in LGBT history in the US, so I may have things to add to my reading list...