Tag: Book Review

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Arts Culture

Six books I didn’t read in 2024

Don’t turn the page on these great reads that were published over the past year. Supplied photos.

Earlier this fall, I had COVID and, among its other health impacts, one bears mentioning here: For a time, I lost the ability to read. That is, I couldn’t read anything longer than a sentence without losing the rest of the day to a blinding headache. As a fervid reader, this was crushing. I spent a lot of time sleeping and then staring at a stack of books, wondering if I would ever read them. It got a bit maudlin. I’m now back in the world of readers and, to celebrate, here is a list of books from 2024 that I hope to read soon.

The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky by Josh Galarza

Josh Galarza is a Richmond-based writer and educator who’s currently completing his MFA in creative writing. His debut novel, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, was selected as a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other notable recognition. Accolades aside, I love a heartwarming YA novel and this one explores themes of mental health, grief, and body dysmorphia with empathy, quirkiness, and comics—and presumably a big handful of the titular chips in all their tongue-tingling glory.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
by Sofia Samatar 

Sofia Samatar is a Roop Distinguished Professor of English at JMU and I look forward to reading everything that she writes. Her work is wide-ranging in genre, including speculative fiction, nonfiction about the craft of writing, memoir and family history, and more. Plus, her books offer interesting structural forms, lyrical prose, and deeply imaginative worldbuilding. She’s also prolific—this is just one of her two new titles this year. Like so much of the science fiction I enjoy, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain offers starships, transformative journeys, and a vision of the shared liberation that can come through collective action.

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia

Before he passed away in 2023, David Golumbia taught at VCU and, before that, at UVA, where I had the good fortune of being his student. Intellectually rigorous and passionate about his work and the community it made possible, he left us this new, posthumous book that examines the right-wing legal and economic underpinnings of digital technology and how the early promise of the internet helped foster present-day fascism in global politics. Informed by expansive research as well as his experience as a software developer, this book argues that we have to understand where things went wrong before we can develop more egalitarian technological futures. 

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
by Camille Dungy 

This fall, Camille Dungy was the UVA Creative Writing Program’s Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and gave a reading of her work. She is a poet and prose writer whose work often examines intersections between race, gender, the environment, history, and family. Among other honors, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her latest book, Soil, shares her experience as a Black gardener and mother in a predominantly white town, examining how homogeneity harms our ecosystems and ourselves, while also interrogating how we relate to ideas of home. 

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy 

Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, musician, and podcaster. Her community preparedness podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, is a mainstay for me, and her previous work includes short stories and novels that are darkly funny speculative fiction, bordering on horror at times. She gave a reading at The Beautiful Idea in September for her latest, The Sapling Cage, which is the first in a trilogy. This book promises to be more high fantasy than what I’ve read from her in the past, combining witchcraft, monsters, and magic in an epic, queer coming-of-age story that also tackles questions of power, identity, and gender. No notes. 

Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis 

JJJJJerome Ellis is a self-described “disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters” who gave a performance of their work in October as the Rea Writer in Poetry at UVA. Their latest book, Aster of Ceremonies, is a poetic healing ritual, an invocation of ancestors, and a deft examination of race and collective belonging, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to take their freedom. Though I am typically a paperback reader, this audiobook is read and performed by Ellis, and I am ecstatic for the chance to listen while holding a hard copy in my hands, creating a harmonic resonance through his words.

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Arts Culture

Stardust inside us 

TJ Klune celebrates the release of In the Lives of Puppets during a ticketed event with Elle Cosimano at Pro Re Nata Brewery on April 24. The evening is hosted by Bluebird & Co. Publicity photo.

The latest book by novelist TJ Klune features a cast of robots who love to garden, make sex jokes, listen to Miles Davis, and watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. From more familiar robots, like a loyal vacuum cleaner named Rambo and a sadistic robot health professional named Nurse Ratched, to extremely futuristic robotic killing machines and ethereal artificially intelligent entities, In the Lives of Puppets’ non-human characters explore what it means to have agency (perhaps even personhood), to grieve, and to love in this heartfelt fantasy adventure. 

Led by the novel’s protagonist—an asexual human named Vic—the merry band of explorers embark on a very personal quest, which leads them outside the boundaries of their home and into the wilds. There, they encounter robot brothels, electrified roads, and floating museums, among other wonders, but also authoritarianism and genocide. In short, they discover a world where robot society is, in many ways, as human as our own, for better and worse. “We know we’re making machines and artificial intelligence that will one day surpass the need for human intervention,” says Klune. “But they will still be us, just imperfectly perfect.”

In this exploration of what it means to be human and to care for those we love, Klune builds a dazzling and detailed future world, which is a joy to inhabit as a reader, and also serves as fertile ground for expanding on the metaphorical and narrative work achieved in Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. “Speaking strictly as an American, I think most people from my country have only engaged with the character of Pinocchio from the Disney version. … Collodi’s original text doesn’t have the happy sheen the animated version does,” explains Klune. “I love the darkness fairy tales and fables have, even when teaching us lessons.” 

If you haven’t read Collodi’s work, Klune’s homage to the mischievous marionette’s exploits might inspire you to do so—if for no other reason than to better understand the references to the older text embedded throughout this novel, and to appreciate the way Klune’s characters also help us, as readers, recall some fundamental lessons about being alive and living in a community. There is a wild hope infused in the book through acts of caretaking, love, and free will, and Klune is masterful at ensuring that his stories are fully human but never overly serious.

“Comedy has always come easy for me,” he says. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more interested in what makes people tick. Why do we do the things we do? Why are some people good, some people bad? There are kind, empathetic people and people who only know greed and malice. You turn on the news and you see people wanting the LGBTQ+ community to burn simply for existing. You go on Instagram and see people filming their dogs being absolute dorks and everyone is laughing and laughing. … Humanity is cruel, destructive and selfish. And yet, there is so much stardust inside us that it boggles the mind. I want to know why.”

A Lambda Literary Award winner and author of numerous series as well as standalone novels including The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries, Klune is best known for contemporary fantasy novels with nuanced queer characters who grapple with messy human emotions such as grief and anger. 

“As an asexual man myself, I know how important it is to have representation that comes from a place of knowledge,” he says. “I don’t speak for every ace person; instead, it comes from my own experiences. Vic’s asexuality is but one part of his humanity, but seeing it on page, discussed, and having boundaries acknowledged and respected means the world to me. I’m not ignorant of the reach I have, and if I can use that to show people that love comes in all forms, then I’m all for it. Queer people deserve to see themselves as the heroes (and the villains!) of a story.”

In addition to providing this representation, In the Lives of Puppets revisits themes from some of Klune’s previous books, including the strength of chosen family and explorations of flaws, forgiveness, and the roles of sadness and mortality in meaning-making. Further, his writing is imbued with a strong sense of self-awareness and symbolism, encouraging the reader to inhabit the world of his characters but also to hold themselves accountable as they do so. As Vic’s father says at one point, “No civilization can survive indifference.”

“For anyone who wants my books to be just a story, they can. There’s nothing wrong with reading it that way,” says Klune. “But if people read my books and walk away thinking just a little bit differently with how they react to the people and the world around them, then that’s all right with me too. … I don’t have all the answers, but I do know this: We are more than we show ourselves to be, and if you’re not fighting for the best possible world for everyone, then what are you even doing?”

Categories
Arts Culture

Leaders and lessons learned 

Journalist and bestselling author Beth Macy addresses the complexities of addiction and healing in Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Supplied photo.

Virginia journalist and bestselling author Beth Macy returns this week with Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. The book builds off her previous book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America. While Dopesick traced Purdue Pharma’s orchestration of the opioid epidemic and shared stories of those caught in the crisis, Raising Lazarus examines the recent legal machinations of the Sackler family (Purdue Pharma founders) while highlighting the work of harm reductionists working to make care more accessible for people who use opioids. 

For those new to the topic, Macy provides a nuanced history of drug use and treatment in America, examining racist, classist, and anti-immigrant policies—from the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 to Nixon’s War on Drugs—that have led to almost 110,000 deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, with opioids accounting for approximately 75 percent of those, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As Macy argues though, this does not have to be the state of things—and in most other countries, it simply is not. Opioid and substance use disorders are medically treatable, and there are proven models for community-based harm reduction; the social stigma and societal problems at the root of the American overdose epidemic, however, are more difficult to address. 

“America remains the only developed country where it’s easier to get high than it is to get help,” Macy writes. The terrible reality is that 90 percent of Americans with a substance use disorder do not receive treatment, a theme that Macy returns to time and again: Public health infrastructure in the U.S. needs to be reimagined in ways that are informed by people who use drugs and people who have been working for years to meet the needs of their affected communities, with or without institutional support. 

Macy’s decision to focus on “the people who weren’t waiting around for justice” introduces an assortment of folks working day and night with limited resources, often on a hyper-local level, in the face of the ongoing opioid epidemic. Her subjects range from nurse practitioner Tim Nolan, who provides mobile testing and treatment, to photographer Nan Goldin, who organized die-ins to raise awareness of the Sackler family’s involvement in the opioid epidemic, and Lill Prosperino, a nonbinary public health “hill witch” in West Virginia, home of the highest overdose rate.

Throughout Raising Lazarus, Macy is no-nonsense, calling out the bullshitters while sharing the struggles and  successes of those whose work she celebrates. The personal stories included in the book are devastating, and patience is necessary to find glimpses of hope amidst the overwhelming severity of the problem. Some communities are more open to harm reduction than others, and the people she highlights so passionately are human too. This is a story of the messy middle, with hindsight to explain how we got here, insight into how we might move forward, but without a concrete conclusion, as there is still much work to be done.

Despite the fact that “roughly one in five Americans uses illegal drugs,” according to Macy, social stigma and shaming are hardwired in our culture, reinforcing ideas about “tough love” as a response to drug use despite decades of data demonstrating that this does not work. Raising Lazarus offers wide-ranging alternatives, from “the lowest of the low-hanging fruit” like drug court to radical ideas of safe consumption sites, and middle-ground options such as increased access to addiction medicines like buprenorphine.

For now, 90 percent of physicians still “refuse to prescribe addiction medicines because they don’t want ‘those people in [their] waiting room,’” writes Macy. Indeed, there is a dramatic lack of well-resourced programs that are accessible to the people who need them, many of whom are also grappling with other health concerns. Numerous treatment programs continue to be abstinence-only or include mandatory counseling, both of which are exclusionary and ineffective. Simply put, there is no single treatment strategy that will work for every person.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Macy does not have an answer to this complex and evolving epidemic. However, she does provide action items, including basic human rights like housing and universal health care. She also references sociologist Damon Centola, whose work suggests that dramatic social change—of the sort needed here—is possible when “just 25 percent of people are committed to changing the status quo.” In other words, change is possible through the efforts of individuals like those highlighted in Raising Lazarus, advocates like Macy herself, and community members who are willing to get to work.

In the Charlottesville area, resources include the Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition, a peer-run nonprofit that uses evidence-based solutions to improve the health of the people who use drugs, and Cville Area Harm Reduction, which works to provide free naloxone, sterile syringes, and fentanyl test strips. In addition, free opioid reversal training is offered by the Blue Ridge Health District, On Our Own of Charlottesville, and Region Ten. Learn more about these and other resources for addiction, substance, and overdose prevention and treatment through the Community Mental Health and Wellness Coalition at helphappenshere.org.

Raising Lazarus is available through local booksellers and libraries. Macy will be featured during a free in-person and livestreamed event on Tuesday, August 23, at 6pm, hosted by the Library of Virginia. Learn more at va.virginia.gov/eventscalendar.