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This book was such a brick, in the best possible way. Schulman's oral history of Act Up has a precise goal: to show the diversity of the movement in all its facets: the people who participated (not just white gay men, but also women, latinos, sex-workers, addicts, youth, etc), the issues it dealt with (not just drug development, but housing, health care, migration and detention policy, etc), and the tactics it embraced (disrupting mass and marching on the street, but also charity auctions and mail advertising to fund-raise, interrupting TV shows and conferences, sitting down with policy-makers and CEOs of pharmaceutical companies to discuss clinical trials, poster campaigns and political funerals). No doubt, this diversity is what made them so effective, but was also the movement's undoing, as people 'on the inside', who got a place at the table with the powerful, and people 'on the outside', who were left / insisted on stay outside shouting stopped being able to work in tandem and parted ways. To make her points, Schulman tells so many stories about so many different people, because the point she wants to convey is that there were no heroes, and that everyone's contribution was important and awe-inspiring. Which is such a beautiful thing to contemplate! Also: activism made everyone in Act Up really sexy, or at least that was most interviewees' first impression.

Pursuing a humanities degree has left Kate saddled with a huge student debt and the only way she sees to pay it back is to go and work in the Alberta oil fields. Life in the camps is quite miserable: the same grind day in, day out, toxic dust and sludge that irritates the skin and kills ducks, an unsafe work environment with many work victims and, for Kate and the few women in the job, a daily experience of sexual harassment and, not infrequently, sexual violence. The drawings are simple, like a comic strip, and the narrative is very repetitive; intentionally, I think: every day is cold and filled with sexist comments. Something I enjoyed is how Kate is determined to not demonise the men around her, and tries to understand how they can be loving fathers to some distant daughters and absolute creeps to her. Loneliness and alienation are the answers she comes up with.

Something that I found maybe slightly problematic is her handling of indigenous people and their claims to the land that is being destroyed. She explains that, as a just-graduated twenty-something, she was barely aware of this issue, which is fair enough. And to be clear: I believe that we should always be curious and outraged when people are exploited and made to suffer. But the book was published a good 15 years after the end of the story, so possibly it's a shame she didn't wave this more into the stories.

As a child in 1980s Albania, Lea grows up feeling free. She believes in the ideals of socialism and in 'holiness' of Enver Hoxha. She doesn't miss the freedom to consume what she wants, happy to choose between toasted and non-toasted sunflower seeds. She is unaware of the system of political repression of which she is a tiny cog, and that has harmed her direct family in quite brutal ways. Then, the dictatorship falls, and capitalism comes to town. Suddenly, freedom is on everyone's mouth, but Lea starts to notice unfreedom everywhere: people lose their job and have no money for things that used to be provided for free by the state, they are forced to migrate because of unemployment, while not being allowed to migrate because of borders. Money replaces imprisonment as the main engine of coercion, until the dramatic ending when, as the country is torn apart by a quasi civil-war, Lea is not even allowed to leave her house or risks being shot. Alongside Lea, we learn to know her family: first and foremost Lea's dad, Zafo, and her granny, Nini, as well as her more distant mother, and a host of more typified characters that are also braving the same transition: the dogmatic socialist teacher, the ridicolous World Bank consultant, the street bully. I really enjoyed this book!

Another Orlando-inspired novel, straight after Andrea Lawlor's, this time setting out to interrogate what gets lost when one is socialised as female. The protagonist, a slightly uptight university professor of literature, struggles to read Virginia Wolf, which she accuses of being mortally boring. Until the unruly part of her decides to escape, taking the form of a boy. The two half of the selves are gendered in a bit of a conventional, essentialist way, but of course the fact that they are both within her makes it more interesting. To my taste, the writing verged on the erudite-for-erudite sake, but with a hint of self-irony about that too. Often, that humorous touch was provided by the ominiscent narrator, who, unfortunately, had decided it wasn't becoming to describe the sexual encounters of the escapee who, keen to act on decades of repressed desire, loved to cruise (while disappointing while reading, I can see this was probably a reasonably choice on the part of an author who, likely, has never gone cruising). As an aside, this is the straightest book with a gay protagonist I have ever read (not in a bad way).

This was such a great holiday read, I loved it! I know many would understand 'Holiday read' to mean shallow, fun-but-devoid-of-literary-merits. Here, I use it to mean: joyful (though also heartbreaking at times), very queer and very, very horny, with loads of really well-written sex scenes.

It is sold as a queer-er, 1990s Orlando, and I would need to have read Orlando (on my list) to be able to comment on that. What I can say is that Paul is a careless gay boy, a ready-to-fall-in-love-so-hard dyke, a curious gender-queer person, constantly trying to have sex as a way to connect, have a fun, feel alive, deaden the pain, self-destruct, or just while the time away. They can be a sissy boy, a hunky gay man, a soft butch, or a feminine girl flirting with frat boys at parties. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Mortality is all around, as the AIDS crisis looms, and then hits. But there is no tragic ending for Paul, nor a happy one either, the book ends, but, I imagine, Paul just keeps at it.

While the book is marketed as an 'AIDS memoir', I would rather describe it as a provocative essay. In the first pages, Sarah professes to hate books that revolve around a single argument, yet I'm tempted to summarise the one at the core of this book as follows:

*Before AIDS, queers in New York (and possibly everywhere) were outcasts and rebels who made edgy art, which sometimes was good, sometimes was not; but it was experimental and meaningful. After AIDS, most gay people are just hipsters and yuppies, who work in the arts but have sold out and/or are concerned with professional success and paying rents, something that admittedly has become a lot harder to do. AIDS was the key event that marked, and possibly even caused, this transition.

I don't buy the causal relation implied here (AIDS having engendered gentrification), although I'm sure it looks that way from Sarah's standpoint. But that's very much secondary. The description of how gays became shallow is absolutely convincing, and the analogy/link between this shift and gentrification really helpful. Sarah manages to critique some personal consumption choices while keeping the focus on the loss of collective organising and political vision. Finally, I feel compelled to mention how strong a ranter Sarah is. She rants about homophobia, she rants about chic restaurants, she rants about lesbians making babies, she rants about MFAs and the publishing industry, she rants about youth these days...and I'm here for it. I hope to stay inspired and keep my inner gentrifier at bay.

The premise of The City and the City is fascinating: two overlapping cities functioning as separate countries, separated by a cross-hatched border. Residents are taught from a young age to unsee what happens in the other half, the separation policed by a mysterious higher power, Breach.

Knowing China Melville’s legendary status as a leftist author, I was expecting this to go in the direction of political satire, as the setting would lend itself so well to problematising borders, or perhaps more broadly our collective capacity to pretend not to see. Instead, I would firmly place the plot in the crime novel genre and, I must say, not in a particularly satisfying way. I did not find the characters fully fleshed-out or convincing, I did not think the twists were particularly well constructed, and I wasn’t dying to know who did it. I was also disappointed at how pro-cops the book was, given my aforementioned expectations. Did I miss something?