Reading Lust
As it is the lusty month of May (and my birthday month), I wanted to share some thoughts about the books on my nightstand. This is a big shout out to my friend James (speaking of lust) an impossibly hot bisexual, rugby playing, law student who lives in a part of the world where he can be imprisoned for openly loving a man. Kind of like North Carolina. Kidding.
James just finished his studies for the year and is embroiled in a week long, continual act of drinking with friends and sleeping off hangovers and flirting with hot girls and boys. If I were a able, I’d transport my big blonde furry ass down there and be waiting in his dorm room after a night of drinking (most likely after jerking off with his ripe jockstrap in his mouth) and try and take advantage of his humpy body . . .
Ahhh, but I digress . . . on to my reading picks for May . . .
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain
This novel is getting a lot of hype and a quick read of the first chapter had me hooked. Here is a review I particularly liked, “As a seventy year old woman who doesn't own a TV and lives in Maine, it's unlikely that a book about soldiers, football, and high rollers looking for a movie deal set in Texas would compel me to write my first review, but this book did. It's a piece of Americana that tells us about ourselves in the same way that say To Kill a Mockingbird or Death of a Salesman reveals pieces of the puzzle that is America. I somehow feel better for having read this book which is why, I guess, some of us read in the first place.”
In one Person: A Novel by John Irving
I am so excited to read John Irving’s new book, not just because the main character is a bisexual man, but I find his storytelling talents to be one of the best in America. And ok, honestly, who hasn’t jerked off while reading him?
As the author has already pointed out in several interviews, his books -- from _The World According to Garp_, _The Hotel New Hampsire_ and _The Cider House Rules_, to A Son of the Circus_, _A Widow For One Year_ and _Until I Find You_ -- have featured sexual outsiders. Billy Abbott of _In One Person_ is the ultimate sexual outsider: a bisexual man, who literally lives between two worlds, that of the heterosexual women he loves as well as the world of gay men, which he eventually enters (no pun intended) after struggling, as a young boy and teenager, with the stigma of his sexual attraction to men.
Though I've never had the chance, or desire, to experience a lot of the things Billy does, his story -- told in first person, so it reads like a memoir -- is a page-turner. I haven't finished a mainstream novel this quickly in a long time.
Author Irving throws in lots of literary allusions and references (from Shakespeare's "The Tempest" to _Giovanni's Room" by James Baldwin, a renowned, gay writer of the 60s). Accompanying Billy on his journey of self and sexual discovery are a sexually adventurous young woman named Elaine (who tries various sexual couplings herself), an unbalanced (pun intended) fellow wrestler and prep schoolmate, Jacques Kittredge, two gay lovers and friends (one of who is an older man), and three transsexual women, Miss Frost, Donna and Gee (who, like Billy, are sexual outsiders -- perhaps more so than Billy, considering how transsexuals get treated by straight and gay alike). Miss Frost is the most important of this last group. In fact, even though she appears in only about one third of the book, she is as important a character to the novel as is Billy.
Irving's story takes Billy from the 1950s, into the '60s and the Vietnam War, onto the free love era of the 1970s and straight into the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
Lots of sex, lots of comical farce (in the plays as well as in the interactions between characters) and lots of pathos, as well (the scenes involving people dying of AIDS are not only well written, they're unnerving).
This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. Augusten Burroughs
I go back and forth on Burroughs – I love some of his work and others I feel like he is writing to impress a creative writing teacher. And to be honest, I’m never completely sure what to believe is true about the circumstances in his life, But I’m more than willing to give him a shot because if half of what he says is true, I admire his courage to share it. Here is a review I liked.
Damn though, he's kind of cute.
“In writing and in life, Augusten Burroughs has repeatedly summoned the courage to grab the wolves of his past by their foaming muzzles and peer into their wild eyes until he owns them--and because of this, he's survived nearly every horrific experience a person in a modern-day, first-world country could face and emerged as an astonishingly well-adjusted person. After turning his profoundly messed-up early life and its alcoholic aftermath into six harrowing, uplifting memoirs--including Running with Scissors and Dry--Burroughs lost interest in writing about himself. He kept meeting people who were locked in the same struggles he’d overcome and decided they needed to know they had options for fixing their lives. In This Is How, Burroughs delivers prescriptions for handling life's most pernicious problems. Don't let the snake-oil-salesmannish title put you off: this is raw, hard-knock-life advice, veering from brutal to hilarious to deeply compassionate. Burroughs doesn’t really believe in "happiness" or "healing." He’s honest about the limits of recovery, but even those in the depths of despair will be energized by his exhortations to claw their way back to OK, even if it means leaving the life they’ve known in the dust.”
Canada by Richard Ford
I first read Ford’s novels when I was way too young to appreciate the subject matter. It is kind of tough for a 20 or 30 year old to read about a man’s dissolution with his career, marriage, choices in friends etc., And sometimes I struggle with his pacing – like I want to yell “come on Ford, deal already,” but he is a very gifted, mature writer and for that, I’ll always give him a shot. And I love the premise of this new novel.
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."
“Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic. “
I will keep you all posted on my reviews of these books. And as for my friend James – congrats on finishing school your school year and I know you are going to be an incredible lawyer - but more importantly a deeply beautiful, enriched man.
I know it is tough to be a closeted man living ina place where your government casts judgment about who and how you can love.
Know that there are men all over the world who are exactly like you. You are not alone and we admire your bravery and courage to pursue the happiness in life you so richly deserve.
Loki
