welcome to the azalea garden!

I had this finished on 2 May, but I guess I just… forgot to post it, I guess? Anyway, I don’t remember April much aside from a few unpleasant events, and honestly, I’m glad it’s over. Also, I read a couple of godawful books, one of which might be the worst thing I’ve ever read.

Overall, I read seven books: Legendary Frybread Drive-In edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith; You Can’t Live All on Your Own!, volume 1 by Mizoko Tsuno; Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge; My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday; Girl by Camille Laurens, translated by Adriana Hunter; and Sword in the Stars by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy.

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Legendary Frybread Drive-In was, overall, a spectacular anthology. It was precisely what I needed when I needed it, and I’m so glad I read it. As is often the case with anthologies, especially when each story is written by a different author, I did enjoy and get much more out of some than others. It was confounding and disheartening that one of the stories suggests it’s important to respect people who don’t consider Twilight to be racist, which is just fucking stupid. LOL. Full review here.

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You Can’t Live All on Your Own! is a series I won’t be continuing. It isn’t bad but it’s really not for me. The single volume I read was a slog to get through. I appreciate the exploration of the pressures that late-20s women often feel due to the misogynistic expectations placed on them by the society they live in. As far as I read, the focus was primarily on dating, which is extremely relatable for many women who aren’t me. It’s an extremely cis, straight look at the misogynistic pressures women face, which is by no means a bad thing—it’s the experience of the majority of women, presumably including the author—but it’s not for me. I’m very familiar with the misogynistic expectations from society, but I’m nonbinary and a lesbian so my relationship to misogyny and patriarchal power structures in society is different from that of women who easily conform to straight, cis womanhood. I’m interested in these things being analyzed in fiction, but I’m bored when it’s neither deeper than this manga goes with it nor from a queer perspective. But it’s clear this manga resonates with many women and has made many women feel seen and validated, and I’m really glad they have a piece of media like this to connect with.

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Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was a highly valuable and enlightening read! I’m glad I prioritized it; my TBR is 600+ books long, so there’s always something else to pick up instead.

It discusses racism in general, but with a focus on the UK, as that’s where the author is from. The UK’s history of colonization, imperialism, participation in the slave trade and utilization of slave labor, genocide, racist laws and policing, and racialized violence are things that I often see sidelined in favor of acting as though the US has a monopoly on the worst racist atrocities the Western world has to offer (it doesn’t!), including within the UK. At the start of the book, Eddo-Lodge explains how she, a Black British woman, didn’t understand the UK’s legacy of imperialism and racism; she was so blind to it that, when she was younger, she resented her parents telling her that, because she is Black, she would have to work harder than her white peers to have a chance at the same opportunities they have. (Speaking of how normalized and overlooked racism is here—on my first day in the UK, I filled out an intake form to get medical care, and of the ethnicity options was just a fucking slur. Like, excuse me?)

Considering the nationality of an immigrant to be determined by where they were born, not where they decided to immigrate to, is xenophobic and racist, unless referring to individuals who prefer to continue aligning themselves with their country of origin instead. I was born in the US, and while I feel a connection with the land itself due to being Indigenous, I’ve never cared about the US as a country. I was always in trouble in high school because I declined to stand for the pledge or the anthem. The UK, like the US, is a racist (among countless many other things baked into and perpetuated by its systems of power), imperialist nation that covers up whatever atrocities it can and whitewashes and downplays the atrocities it can’t. Everyone knows the US benefits from imperialism and slavery, while often overlooking that imperialist European nations (the UK, France, the Netherlands, etc.) benefit as much or even more. I say all this because I traded one racist as fuck nation enriched by imperialism and slavery for another of my own free will (rather than as a consequence of displacement, my own country being made some degree of unlivable due to Western imperialism, etc.), will be happy to renounce my US citizenship, and wish to live in the UK permanently. Therefore, I am British. And as a British anti-racist leftist, it’s absolutely crucial for me to understand my nation’s history of racism, slavery, and imperialism. British history is now my history. As I read the beginning of the book, as Eddo-Lodge explains her past ignorance and the journey she went on in researching the UK’s racist, slave-owning past and how it impacts the present as the UK continues to reap the benefits of imperialism and slavery, it really sunk in how important it is for me to understand that history and its ongoing effects as well.

It wasn’t a comprehensive guide by any means. The history presented in this book focuses on the most important bits, meant to convey to readers where the present-day systemic racism found everywhere in the UK originated from and how the UK’s racist history directly informs its racist present. Like most British people, including—perhaps especially—those born and raised here, I have a lot to learn about my history and the ways inequality invades every aspect of our society. This was an excellent jumping-off point, and I’m looking forward to researching more and expanding my knowledge going forward!

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My Secret Garden could’ve been good, but it’s godawful. Friday’s analysis of women’s sexual fantasies is repetitive, drawn-out, and difficult to get through, and it’s impossible to tell if she was trying to pad out the word count or if she thought she had a lot more to say than she actually did. Her writing style is devoid of talent; maybe her fiction is good, I wouldn’t know, I don’t care, but her nonfiction writing is mediocre and unengaging. But more importantly, in her attempt to normalize women’s sexual fantasies and to explore the who, what, why, when, and how of them, she created and published a book that contains truly heinous things: the sexual fantasies of multiple underage girls; confessions of predatory thoughts and possible actions toward real-life animals; admissions of sexual fulfillment via the corporal punishment of school boys, some as young as 11; promotion of racist language and stereotypes in the context of fetishizing people of color, especially Black people; and attempts to destigmatize the eroticization of incest, pedophilia, child grooming, bestiality, and racism. I’ve seen a lot people dismiss the criticisms of the book’s content as prudes clutching their pearls; some criticisms do boil down to that, but everything I say is coming from a person whose sexuality is defined around BDSM and being a domme, and who has some fairly “extreme” kinks. For me personally, I wouldn’t trust anyone who can’t comprehend that it’s fucked to objectify people of color or to find pedophilia, bestiality, or incest titillating in any context. Further elaboration on how fucking dogshit this book is here.

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Girl was really good until it absolutely wasn’t. Without mentioning trans people, Laurens manages to push a pretty transphobic narrative, and she dips into the subject of homosexuality long enough to virtue signal about how stereotypes about gay men are probably bad (I think that was the point?) and to pretend to care about lesbians despite her understanding of lesbians being pretty lesbophobic. It’s clear she has a lot of internalized misogyny to unpack before she can be capable of writing actually, meaningfully feminist literature. This would’ve been a progressive book in the 80s or 90s, but considering it came out in 2020, it’s leagues behind present-day feminist analyses of gender, sex, and society that are easy to find and research if you care about feminism. Elaboration on the ways it got really bad toward the end here.

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The Sword in the Stars is a super totally feminist King Arthur reimagining in which a man teaches a woman subjected to extensive misogynistic abuse starting from birth that she shouldn’t use that as an excuse to torture people—and this is all it takes to save the entire universe from an evil, turbo-capitalist fascist regime; the fall of the regime and the appointment of a new benevolent leader happens off-page and is not meaningfully explored in any way. No exaggeration. That’s how this girl power King Arthur tale ends. Excalibur is so unimportant that my friend made a joke about the novel having way more to say about teens being horny and wanting to have sex than the sword, and for a moment I was confused about what sword they were talking about. I had so completely forgotten about Excalibur that the mention of it wasn’t enough to instantly jog my memory. Also it’s full of historical misinformation that the authors would have easily known to avoid putting in their book if they’d spent any time trying to learn about the Middle Ages. And it’s racist, misogynistic, and always contradicting itself. Slightly more abridged thoughts and some banger quotes in my StoryGraph review.

It might actually be the worst book I’ve ever read, but I’ll need more time to think about it. The first book was racist, misogynistic, weird about nonbinary people (fluids; they’re called fluids), and endlessly self-contradictory, and the ending felt not like an ending, but rather like just another chapter midway through a single book. I understand the importance of a good cliffhanger to bring people back for the second part of your duology, but Once & Future felt like the first half of a book twice its length rather than a novel in its own right. For some reason, as well, both novels have particularly feminine covers, presumably to convey that this King Arthur tale is, allegedly, feminist; this would be find if Ari, the most recent reincarnation of King Arthur, was highly feminine instead of being constantly indicated to be masculine, but instead it gives away the authors’ implicit views of what femininity actually is. Like, why would a book about woman who adheres more to conventional masculinity than femininity have a cover that conveys the opposite? (Also, in this imagined future, misogyny simultaneously does and does not exist. Not sure how or why masculinity and femininity would continue to exist, in the form they do presently no less, in a future where true gender equality has apparently been achieved.)