Hal Schrieve (Author of Out of Salem)

Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it Eden II by Kenny Wroten	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Apr 12, 2026 05:50PM · 3 likes · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Eden II by Kenny Wroten. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Eden II by Kenny Wroten <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends ...more
Mar 12, 2026 08:00AM · 4 likes · like · see review
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema by Thomas Waugh	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I like this essay collection. I acquired it--I think via my?? therapist?? when I was a teenager, and I didn't get a lot out of it initially beyond watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the 1992 Swoon. There's far more in here than I remembered, and mo ...more
Mar 02, 2026 11:49AM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows by Megan Milks (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy ...more
Feb 26, 2026 10:17AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Mega Milk by Megan Milks. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Mega Milk by Megan Milks <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve is now following Neon Yang Author of The Black Tides of Heaven (Tensorate, #1)
Feb 11, 2026 06:55AM · like
Hal Schrieve wants to read Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide by Susan Abulhawa (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Feb 09, 2026 08:43AM · 1 like · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Every Moment Is a Life by Susan Abulhawa. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Every Moment Is a Life by Susan Abulhawa <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3) by Hilary Mantel	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Ten out of five stars for the audiobook reader for this series, who makes it feel like a radio play with his Shakespearean acting and meditative, emotive approach to Cromwell's voice. This book was a tad long-- and at times, after thousands of pages i ...more
Feb 04, 2026 07:21PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing Cannon by Lee Lai (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In thinking about what unites my favorite comic artists: I like when people acknowledge a brutal, scummy world that can really drive you insane but which still contains the potential for human connection or liberate– depicted in panels which draw you ...more
Feb 04, 2026 07:19PM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Cannon by Lee Lai. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Cannon by Lee Lai <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2) by Hilary Mantel	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Had a great time with this on audiobook-- started reading print book at my in-laws' house over the holidays and was hooked by Mantel's vivid, evil, sympathetic Early Modern Man. I'm a huge nerd for the Reformation thru seventeenth century all over th ...more
Jan 27, 2026 07:27AM · 2 likes · like · see review
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Super slippery, purple-prosadaical, sexy, dirty, saccharine in its own way, this is an edgelord '90s queer vampire adventure that is a template for a zillion things after it--including, I think, parts of the current IWAV moment but also a dozen dozen ...more
Jan 07, 2026 01:57PM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it

Eden II
by Kenny Wroten

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The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
by Wayne Koestenbaum

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I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends it at least once a season, and because Koestenbaum has a new book coming out: My Lover, The Rabbi, the launch of which I plan to attend on March 17 at McNally Jackson. Hanu probably has The Queen’s Throat because they write about the history of the early modern theater and queerness. They mentioned to me that a recent Renaissance academic convention they attended is mostly queer people and Italians-who-study-early-opera. I like what I know about early opera– that is, mostly Julie D’Aubigny and her gender-bending and fencing. I am not really an opera person–my compulsive music-listening is poisoned by streaming services that let me have more pop-centric and country-girl queens whose songs I don’t even have to hunt down– but I discovered two years back my friend/lover of many years, Aalon, loves opera, as he does disco. Somehow he had kept this from me. He had me watch his favorite production of The Magic Flute a while ago. In Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms, she opens with a discussion of how she identified with The Queen of the Night, the evil but cool queen from The Magic Flute, and how this connects to feminism’s urges to reclaim even evil women for its purposes. Opera is full of dramatic women dying, who rule the ear with their noise until they go. I went to see Madama Butterfly with my husband in Berlin because I felt I should understand it; two years back, I saw a Zefferelli La Boheme. Opera is stagy, big, and inaccessible. I disagree with Timothee that it is destined for death, but it is an old art form that certainly had more fans in the 1960s; all live performance in the USA now seems intended for the rich. I will say that I feel for Kathy Mattia, Tracey Chapman, Patty Griffin and Shawn Colvin and Theda Hammel more or less what Wayne Koestenbaum seems to feel for Anna Moffo. Though when I listen to Moffo I get it. There’s something in a woman’s voice, celebrating freedom or mourning its loss. Only a woman’s voice? No– Stephin Merritt gives it to me too (his low voice, restrained and held close to the ground, contained, feigning untrained: “Judy Garland set us free”).

Koestenbaum is all into talking about how the opera, an institution involving gender transgression since its birth, became a domestic art form in 1905 when the record companies figured out how to imprison a woman’s voice and bring it home. Thus, a public spectacle–which might be observed in the standing-room section alongside other passionate listeners– could be contained to the home, where recorded music might sanitize the sick, educate the young, or comfort the infirm. Simultaneously, it could transform children:

“One parent writes to Opera News to describe an eleven-year-old boy’s peculiarly intense devotion to opera. This kid has an autograph book: Bampton, Moscona, Novotna, Tibbett…for Halloween he dresses as an astrologer, and made little predictions for all the guests, and here too he was very much at ease. What little predictions can we make about a boy at ease with opera stars and celestial bodies?” (79)

Koestenbaum spends his book investigating what it might mean to live through a woman’s body via the experience of listening to opera, disembodied–appropriating the subjectivity of a woman, powerful, indomitable, flawed and vulnerable to rupture, in place of their own potential sexuality or expression.

Koestenbaum says: “The diva is allowed to sing but not for too long; she is granted the power to soar in a phrase, but only under certain conditions; and when the voice breaks down, she does us how beggared and partial the terms of her triumph have been.” (127) He is bringing this up in the context of operas that are written to be unsustainable, which break the voice.

Quote from Koestenbaum:

“A tableau of two throats, Maria Callas’s and the opera queen’s, ends The Lisbon Traviata. While Callas, on record, spins “an elaborate web of coloratura,” Stephen, the opera queen, whose lover has just abandoned him, “throws his head back with her as she reaches for a climactic high note, but no sound comes out…Stephen’s mouth is open, his head is back, his eyes are closed. Callas is all we can hear.” By lip-syching to Callas, the opera queen is not brought closer to the magical realm of the vocal, the articulate, the expressive, or the open-hearted. In fact, the tableau convinces us that a passion for Callas has closed the queen’s throat, has taken away his power to love. While no sound “comes out” of the queen’s throat (the queen is reduced to the closet by his passion for the opera), Callas on record is singing Violetta, the consumptive courtesan. Stephen may regret that he can’t follow Callas into her hedonistic coloratura, but the subtext of Traviata reminds us that pleasure will kill Violetta as surely as, in homophobic scenarios of AIDS, it has killed gays.” –page 45

There’s something about the flapping throat, the open and vulnerable throat, silent but filled with someone else’s song, relating through the shared experience of obstruction, of desire, of doom, that I find poignant here.
Koestenbaum talks about assimilation, too; about the destiny of the closet, its inevitability, in a pre-Stonewall time when gay culture flourished but gay political rights were a matter of not being spotted. He feels his own opera-queenness has been obliterated by the opening up of other potentials–presumably, those of Sylvester, of Freddy Mercury, or of being a gay art critic. Not a drag queen, though he says “Callas appeals to the drag queen in me” (150). But he likes to look back at a half-invented past, at the bond between women artists and the gay men who aspire to their breaking-out. “Pasolini directs Callas as Medea, and she is attentive, obediently holding her hands to her face. These photographs attest to a specific historic configuration: the gay man venerating the theatrical woman and the woman responding gaily, the woman imitating the gay man and the gay man imitating the woman, the gay man directing and then listening and admiring, the man and woman collaborating.” But he also respects the moment that the diva-woman defies those who would direct or control her, such as when Callas walked out of a gala performance of Norma to protect her throat, defying the Italian president. Just walk out! Just walk out! You can leave! The closet, the structures. Callas said, “I see clearly what is right and wrong for me, and I do not confuse them or evade them.” May all women artists and gay artists see the same. ...more

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The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
by Thomas Waugh

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I like this essay collection. I acquired it--I think via my?? therapist?? when I was a teenager, and I didn't get a lot out of it initially beyond watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the 1992 Swoon. There's far more in here than I remembered, and mo ...more

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Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
by Megan Milks (Goodreads Author)

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The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy within capitalism's ravages of the body and land. I feel uncertain about my own allegiance to this kind of book, which has increasing genre popularity because of its personable marketability-- a comp I can think of is Kate Lebo's "Difficult Fruit", which I find deeply enjoyable and also felt frayed around the edges at times as she attempted to stretch her topic into an artistic shape, eg when she tried to eat a durian and make that something that was tied to her life, personally. Another perhaps closer comp is Adam Zmith's history of poppers where the author frequently goes on digressions about their own identity. It's a very queer way of writing a book, and it can make it more interesting. I breezed through this latest Milks, and I do like their style.

In Mega Milk, Megan Milks talks about whiteness, milkiness, the dairy industry, the diet industry, breastfeeding, transness, purity, and land ownership-- all salient, deeply relevant topics in a landscape , and all ones that they can put their interpretive shoulder to with relative ease. I like that they're working on this book that can stomach both Temple Grandin's squeeze machine and the imaginary internal life of a bull whose semen is sold in freezey vats that you can order online (though I wish the bull semen section had been, as their ex suggested, bolder in its use of the contents of that freezey vat). Their essay about Nazis and milk is one of the only longform pieces I've seen addressing the odd openly white-supremacist dairy fervor; likewise, their essay about their MAGA brother is a sensitive, interesting approach to queer family estrangement and the ways that similar conditions can produce such different people. I like that humans' relationship to the animals we live with is a topic Milks is interested in and turning their dream-fiction reveries toward (and that Lonesome George appears), and I appreciated the connections between the way we treat cats vs cattle, though I also felt that if Milks were going there, they could have gone deeper into the thorny ethical questions around meat consumption, labor, animal welfare, and anti-indigenous land destruction that are at the heart of the colonization. Vegans and radical feminists both point to the dairy industry as a site of perpetual rape, and you can't really argue that it's not; the question of how much of this industry is needed for humanity is sort of an important one, and the more you see animals as sentient individuals, the more spiritually unsettling it is, but Milks mainly lingers on the consumption rather than the animal-end production of this food, while highlighting at times the sadness of calf-loss that adult cows regularly experience. Meat and dairy is what created the geo-segmented monocultures of America's plains, amplified insect and forest destruction, and which tie so deeply to broader climate destruction in our time. The position of American farm workers vs farm owners is a topic that can and should be taken up by creative fiction and nonfiction writers; it still defines almost all our food consumption. Most of our non-fuel emissions come from animal waste. Most land use is for animals or feed. Adulteration of formula and its expense is a safety issue facing queer parents and poor working parents alike in a climate of deregulation and snake oil and false science. Abuse of children and adults working in meatpacking plants deserves its own essay; the effects of hormones used on cattle on milk-consumers' bodies is another direction that plays out in suggestion rather than actuality within the book. The overall feeling I have with this book, as with similar personal-essay-journalism type books, is that we are halfway to a serious journalistic approach to about fifteen different topics. The parts which are rigorous are my favorites-- documenting visits to farms, conversations with farmers, and examination of family history.

They found one of the most interesting knots in our psyche to work with, and they point to all the places its nervous shocks can take us. I think it's definitely a good read for people examining their own white childhoods in milki-land. ...more

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Neon Yang

Author of The Black Tides of Heaven (Tensorate, #1)

Hal Schrieve wants to read

Every Moment Is a Life by Susan Abulhawa

Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide
by Susan Abulhawa (Goodreads Author)

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The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)
by Hilary Mantel

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Ten out of five stars for the audiobook reader for this series, who makes it feel like a radio play with his Shakespearean acting and meditative, emotive approach to Cromwell's voice.

This book was a tad long-- and at times, after thousands of pages i Ten out of five stars for the audiobook reader for this series, who makes it feel like a radio play with his Shakespearean acting and meditative, emotive approach to Cromwell's voice.

This book was a tad long-- and at times, after thousands of pages in the Wolf Hall series, it does get repetitive. One wonders if all those courtiers were really sneering so much to Cromwell's face and saying *quite* so frequently that he is low born and should not really be called a lord, and if so, if every instance of it needed to be in here. But I love what Mantel gives us in terms of sketching a plausible picture of the religious heart of England in the midst of abortive holy wars that keep changing direction. Cromwell, who says he loves the gospel but privately doesn't believe in the Eucharist, is given the power to smash up all the saints and unlabel the bones of Beckett. The countryside, out of a mix of anxiety about taxes and anger that their icons are gone, arises in revolt against him; he is protected by a king whose vision of god is basically his own face. When Cromwell meets his maker, he does it alone. He is a man ahead of his time, making his time, unmaking the ground beneath him as he does so. He lives in a world in which, after his blood flows, his great-great-nephew will carry the axe in the opposite direction vis a vis monarchy barely a hundred years after his own chop-chop.

As I said with Bring Up The Bodies, this is a fantastic catharsis to read right now in America, because it is about a vindictive and increasingly autocratic leader too short-sighted to see the consequences of his actions, in a kingdom where morally weak politicians mad for power are buffeted by waves of favor and their own vicious scheming, and a tide of history which promises to crest sometime but keeps carrying you higher and higher above a stormy sea. What Mantel promises you on every page is that the Tudor wave crashed-- and ours will, too, plunging every man who vies for Ozymandian status to the grave sooner or later, eroding class, and leaving all of us to plod or charge, with fire or prayer, toward our various better futures.

If you enjoy Wikipedia research spirals and a lively, engaged, personal image that makes the alien past seem like it breathes, this is an awesome series for you. I wish she had lived longer so I could binge-listen to her take on the Diggers, the latter Cromwell, or, hell, even Queen Anne. ...more

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Cannon
by Lee Lai (Goodreads Author)

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In thinking about what unites my favorite comic artists: I like when people acknowledge a brutal, scummy world that can really drive you insane but which still contains the potential for human connection or liberate– depicted in panels which draw you In thinking about what unites my favorite comic artists: I like when people acknowledge a brutal, scummy world that can really drive you insane but which still contains the potential for human connection or liberate– depicted in panels which draw you along through both the ugly and beautiful parts of the world. What I see from Lee Lai is an almost unbelievably consistent artistic project centered on themes of queerness, family, the difficulties of intimacy and trust, and (often) food. I remember a comic Lai drew in what must have been 2015 or before of two chubby gay guys in bed together talking about their relationship insecurities while discussing a recipe for noodle soup. Their visual style was almost the same then; their focus and subject matter has sharpened in depth but remained in the same frame of focus.

I read Stone Fruit a few years ago.It’s one of the most enchanting, empathetic break-up books I’ve ever encountered and features painfully recognizable scenes of missed and lost intimacy, as well as a visual approach to rendering child-play and imagination as toothy and partly unskinned which I think illuminates the joy that adults can have with children while also stripping it of traditionally sentimental visual language.

Lai’s new book, Cannon, has artistic depth and interest outside of its use as a manual or reflection– but I enjoyed listening to Tuck Woodstock talk to Lai about what her project is and realize that she set out to do basically exactly what she actually achieves.

In Cannon, Lai follows a friendship between Lucy (Cannon), who is pathologically stoic out of a conviction it is moral and necessary, and Trish, a high school friend whose self-obsession and loudmouth processing habit isn’t visible to herself because Cannon spends all her time in the relationship absorbing Trish’s feelings but rarely offering her own in return. This dynamic is unsustainable. Unreflected, Trish feels alone. Meanwhile, Cannon’s workplace is grueling, her boss a creep, her formerly abusive granddad is declining with apathetic paid care, and Cannon’s mom, who bore the brunt of her father’s abuse, isn’t present to help care for him for understandable reasons that nevertheless place a lot of pressure on her daughter. Trish talks about herself all the time and fixates unhealthily on past breakups while keeping an eager FWB lad at arm’s length; she expresses her love for her friend and demonstrates she is actually paying attention by incorporating Cannon’s life into her art practice. Dodgy decision at best.

In another author’s hands, virtuous Cannon would explode righteously at her friend at some point in the narrative for her selfishness, and her friend would tearfully apologize, realizing she has been using and abusing Cannon’s generous good nature for too long. Not here. There is still a moment of eruption– but it is a moment of meeting. Both characters find they have something to complain about– leaning too hard without providing reciprocal care is cruel, but avoidance of dependence shuts the people you love out, after all, and noncommunication doesn’t necessarily protect those around you. Both women have problems selecting partners– Cannon, reticent, falls for a forward, directly-communicating bartender girl at work and rapidly comes to expect more than she can give, resenting her for flirting with their mutual terrible boss, and Trish beds down with a sort of awesome dude who’s ready for a relationship that she really doesn’t want yet. Both emerge as complex, messy women who need quiet, passion, care and peace, and who contain the power to deal with their respective situations.

Something I appreciate about this book is that it contains both evil and beneficent men– abusive dads, terrible bosses, loving boyfriends whose asses are clean and who cook even if you didn’t ask, coworkers who play bossa nova to lull you out of a panic attack– and sometimes guys who can be both, as in the scene where Cannon’s restaurant coworker who has a hot temper and can be a real crud helps her out in the aftermath of her inevitable explosion. It’s a cool-eyed but loving look at the world. As an aside, I adore the way Lai draws men’s bodies, particularly their arms and tummies.

Racism and the pressure on artists to make work about themselves, exposing their lives for a (white) audience, is also a theme in this book. Trish’s white lesbian writing mentor offers insight into using her identity to get funding, which makes Trish stall out; Trish’s strategy of using her friend’s life rather than her own speaks to a kind of self-protection wherein she also cannot safely expose herself or her life. Her subsequent drop of the project when Cannon finds out feels like a relief– and her beneficent mentor, who previously appeared a little sympathetic or hot, has a moment of embarrassing exposure when she reveals to her partner that she needs Trish to feel relevant right before Trish stops working with her.

Limited-color comics are more of a thing lately. I don’t know if it’s because of any kind of expense-related thing– certainly there are enough glossy bright-colored kids’ comics which throw vivid shit on the page just for the sake of it– or impact, but I like the way red is used in this book, and the way visual language is used to communicate something that Cannon herself has difficulty expressing about her rage and its connection to her grandfather– to her fear of herself.

For a book that’s just about friendship drama and which doesn’t contain a “bad end”, Cannon was gripping to read. Lai, for her part, represents a kind of community-focused art practice in a very individual medium that I think is genuinely useful for every reader. ...more

Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing

Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)
by Hilary Mantel

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Had a great time with this on audiobook-- started reading print book at my in-laws' house over the holidays and was hooked by Mantel's vivid, evil, sympathetic Early Modern Man. I'm a huge nerd for the Reformation thru seventeenth century all over th Had a great time with this on audiobook-- started reading print book at my in-laws' house over the holidays and was hooked by Mantel's vivid, evil, sympathetic Early Modern Man. I'm a huge nerd for the Reformation thru seventeenth century all over the world, because it's the period that produced so much we live with today. A time of Mughal kings, Chinese consolidation, cataclysmic genocide in the Americas and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, English domination of Ireland and the rise and fall of Spain and the Hapsburgs, power struggles, and the beginning of modern banking practices in Europe that would completely change how governments functioned in the centuries to come and destroy the power of kings.

Cromwell (great-great-uncle to Oliver, with dramatic irony) is at the heart of all this. Mantel's project is to imagine as vividly as possible what people in Henry VIII's court might have been feeling while sticking as closely as possible to more-or-less-agreed-upon historical fact. And Cromwell is one of those men who is uniquely produced by his time and seems dedicated to single-handedly shoving the wheels of history. A king's right-hand-man whose life journey started as either a blacksmith or yeoman's son (Mantel votes blacksmith, for drama) and became a mercenary and a banker/lawyer before ascending ever higher into a court at a crossroads.

Characterization is what makes this book awesome. He's a real man: tough, pragmatic, and unsentimental, with calloused emotional baggage from the death of his mentor, his enemy Thomas More, his wife and daughters, and the loss of a young love in Antwerp. He's evasive about his faith but sympathetic to Lutherans and gospelers-- twenty years after Martin Luther stuck some notes to a door and ten years after the german peasant rebellion. You can feel the immediacy of these events, the uncertainty. Will Protestantism be crushed, or will it challenge the balance of power across the world? What are its key tenets-- faith over works? The idolatry of saint worship? He's interested in draining power from the churches and monasteries and reallocating funds to the state-- which benefit his king, who has less of a long term vision and sometimes worries about his soul but is always certain that God is on his side. Mantel rides the line of occasionally showing a kind of great-man theory of history here, but she also shows how recent changes made a man like Cromwell possible while also illuminating contingency. IF Anne had born a son and not miscarried... IF Henry had fallen and died at a joust...

Henry's personality is satisfyingly executed too. He's narcissistic, short-sighted, ponderous, self-pitying, easily swayed, but full of powerful passions, explosive anger and a sense of his own nobility and grandeur-- even as his kingdom's wealth pales in comparison to the continental powers. England under Henry is at a crossroads, and with Cromwell's encouragement, Henry pushes it further from Rome and enhances his own coffers by enclosing land, turning on some of his own noble families to take their lands for the Crown, and refusing to share power or give Catholic countries what they want from alliances.

The women at the edges of this narrative move to its center as Henry's persecution of Anne reaches a zenith and the ladies of court scramble to save their own asses. I love when they emerge from the shadows-- vindictive, vulgar Lady Rochford especially, but also opaque, shy but occasionally vicious Jane Seymour, who is implied to have engineered her own rise a little more than any man around understands. I listened to the last half of this on audiobook and I really enjoy the French accent the reader gives Anne, who spent time in the French court. ...more

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Lost Souls
by Poppy Z. Brite (Goodreads Author)

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Super slippery, purple-prosadaical, sexy, dirty, saccharine in its own way, this is an edgelord '90s queer vampire adventure that is a template for a zillion things after it--including, I think, parts of the current IWAV moment but also a dozen dozen Super slippery, purple-prosadaical, sexy, dirty, saccharine in its own way, this is an edgelord '90s queer vampire adventure that is a template for a zillion things after it--including, I think, parts of the current IWAV moment but also a dozen dozen indie-comics ripples. There is nothing Brite's writing reminds me of so much as the dark queer manga and manwha I read in middle school--stick-thin goth bishonen boys, child abuse, blood, aesthetics at the expense of worldbuilding-- mixed up with a kind of grimy grunge indie aesthetic and a lot of a dude just having fun at the keyboard.

It's funny that I'm writing this review and reading this Brite after writing my own runaway-kid-encounters-vampires narrative. I at least can't be said to be cribbing from it--my vampire queer teens are from an undoubtedly post-queer-youth-organization moment. Brite's vamps are the kind of monster that I find very fun, but difficult to write as queer allegory: they're absolutely Predator Monsters, with the ability to love humans tied closely to their ability to kill them and no sense of human sexual mores or decorum. They are exactly what the right is scared of. There's a curious lack of depth to the vamps as consequence, but as sex objects or figurines, they're fantastic. A fun visual detail that Brite includes not infrequently is the image of candy and sugar slicking over these immature vampires' teeth in a gross brown film. The central vamp trio are sort of eternal party kids who roam around killing people and leaving messes in their wake-- escaping, who knows how, persecution in their endless Chartreuse and opium-fueled orgies. There is also an older vampire named Christian who, after being confronted by the father of a teen girl whose death he was present for, takes off and sells roses by the side of the road. And then there's Nothing, the half-vampire changeling reunited sacrilegiously with his vampire father as he flees suburban emptiness. There's also a rock band composed of a psychic named Ghost and a dude who abused his girlfriend and feels bad about it. The human characters have a deeper relief than the vampires; I love the way Brite writes a kind of deeply curious (and currently unfashionable) approach to understanding abusive relationships between devastated people in dire straits, and how his fucked up boys (human) tend toward the moral arc as a consequence of facing the pain of constant loneliness as the result of causing harm.

There is a really upsetting scene where Nothing helps kill a former friend, who is a thirteen year old wearing pink high top sneakers. That is the biggest warning I would issue for this book. There's other assaults, murders, moments incest and violence, mostly against and by queer people. Just know that you're getting an edgelord. It's like if Koontz was a queer boy with eyeliner.

This is an excellent book to read on a plane or a beach, like Brite's other work. It delivers an endless snacktime of horror-- I won't say "cozy" horror, because that doesn't fit the aesthetic, but like...dark cobwebby spanish moss horror, bartender horror, skinny pretty boy with bloody lip horror. He precedes Tumblr and fanfiction.net and MCR, but Brite knows the to-be-repeated guilty pleasures that lurk in the back of the adolescent queer mind. Without condemnation, he puts together a kind of festival of tropes and hot boys and horrible kinks for his reader to escape into, doing the absolute most the whole time. ...more

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	Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition by Maia Kobabe (Goodreads Author), Hal Schrieve (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Dr Sandra Cox (Contributor) 4.27 avg rating — 79,899 ratings — published 2019 — 30 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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