The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

read by Angela Dawe

Earth Abides meets Children of Men with a little Parable of the Sower thrown in for good measure in this post-apocalyptic tale about a midwife wandering a world in which almost everybody has died of a plague, very few of the survivors are women, and childbirth has become universally deadly.

The conceit here is that a professional midwife from San Francisco falls sick with an illness that has been killing a lot of her patients and wakes up in the hospital an indeterminate number of days later to find that everybody is dead. (Walking Dead, anyone?) But not quite everyone, it turns out; there are a few survivors roaming around. The vast majority of this handful of survivors are men, and this is not good news for the small number of women and even tinier number of children who are left.

Our midwife, who never gives out her real name, keeps a journal of her travels. The beauty of this book is the way the journal is written. Not that it’s beautifully written; on the contrary, it’s full of irrelevant asides and repetitive typographical quirks. It’s also very convincing—you feel, as you read, that someone you know might have written it. The world she comes from is ours, and the world she lives in is recognizably what our world would probably become in the wake of that particular disaster.

As the story progresses, this sense that the protagonist is a very real person just gets stronger. She’s strong, but not superheroically strong. She’s tough in some ways but fragile in others, like we all are. She’s smart enough to avoid making stupid horror-trope mistakes, but not so smart that we can’t identify with her perfection. We believe in her, which makes the trauma she goes through every single day matter. And what she does about it matters, too.

The most moving post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommend.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

read by the author

My first reaction to listening to the audiobook version of this autobiography, which Gene Wilder narrated himself, was, “Ah, that voice—that’s the gentlest voice in the world. I love that voice.”

My second reaction was, “Man, Gene Wilder was really screwed up.”

It’s a truism that a lot of comedians and comedic actors are pretty screwed up. The line between a desire to please others and make them laugh, and an enjoyment of fame and attention—and a *need* for all of that, as a stand-in for love or a way of staving off deep, crippling anxiety—can be a fine one. In Gene Wilder’s case I think he spent most of his adult life on the sane side of that line. But he achieved that only after a lot of therapy.

We get to hear about the events of his childhood and young adulthood that shaped him as a person and contributed to his artistic and comedic sensibilities. Mr. Wilder was very open about who he was and how he responded to things, so we really get a sense of his life journey. For example, he was, if not scarred for life, at least greatly set back and discouraged, by an early encounter with the opposite sex, and while he definitely seems rather bitter about the other person involved, he doesn’t hold back about his own reaction, either.

We get to hear about his training as an actor, his friendships and romantic relationships, and his films--though the one thing I found a little disappointing about this book was that he doesn’t go into as much detail as I’d like about the making of most of his films. The only one he spends much time on is Young Frankenstein; I’d have loved to have heard much more about the personalities and the general experience involved with, say, The Frisco Kid and Blazing Saddles. Still, what he did include was more than I already knew. I loved, for example, hearing his impression of the young Harrison Ford.

And we get to hear, of course, about Gilda Radner. They had a deep love and a tumultuous relationship and he doesn’t spare himself or her in his descriptions. And we get to learn about the woman he married and was with until he died, Karen Webb.

This autobiography is full of beautiful little nuggets about the life of a very gifted man who had a lot of issues. Highly recommended to anyone who is a fan of his work.

The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage

read by Paul Michael Garcia

Published in 2005, The Commitment is a snapshot of a time in our country’s life as well as famed sex-and-relationship-advice columnist Dan Savage’s life. A decade before June 26, 2015, when the United States Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage and legalized it everywhere, there was still a lot of very contentious debate on the topic—not least among those most directly affected by it.

For example, there was Dan Savage, his boyfriend Terry Miller, and their son, DJ, aged 6 at the time. None of them wanted Dan and Terry to get married. At least, Terry doesn’t want to get married; not because he isn’t committed to Dan and their son, but because he doesn’t want to “act straight.” He’d rather they get matching “property of” tattoos. 

And DJ is against it because, in his six-year-old worldview, boys don’t marry each other. (Never mind quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.) Plus he doesn’t want to be there when his dads say mushy things to each other and kiss in front of everyone. But he wants cake. If there’s going to be a wedding, he’s definitely going to want some cake.

But Dan isn’t sure. Marriage does seem pointless when there’s no legally-binding aspect of it and you’re an atheist. On the other hand, his Catholic mom would be beyond thrilled. Plus he’s already planning a ten-year anniversary party—the anniversary of his and Terry’s first date—and he wants everyone in the family to travel to Seattle for it, and to take it as seriously as they take other major family events. And it’s not like he’s going to be leaving Terry.

So he sets out, in his somewhat contrarian way, to explore the issue. He takes his little family to a summer camp for kids with queer families, so DJ can see that other kids *do* have parents with matching genders. The following summer, he brings his whole family along—mom, siblings-and-partners, everyone. He has conversations with them about why they have or have not chosen to marry and/or have kids, he has debates with Terry about the drawbacks and virtues of marriage and tattoos and how best to plan for their anniversary party.

The most interesting conversations he has, to me, are the ones he has with his older brother, Bill. I realized while listening to Dan recounting them just how much his philosophies on life, sex, and relationships are informed by Bill’s. In fact, many of Dan’s most regularly-repeated nuggets of wisdom come directly from the conversations about marriage that he had with Bill that summer.

In case you’re not already a Dan Savage fan and don’t already know how the story ends, I won’t spoil it for you. Whether you’re already one of his readers or listeners or not, though, I do  highly recommend this book. It’s an interesting and very personal and journey through what the politics of DOMA and the religious right put families through, and it’s told with clarity, frankness, and (sometimes self-deprecating) humor. It’s no longer ripped-from-the-headlines current, but it’s an important piece of (recent) LGBTQ+ history and a moving story.

A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon

read by Jeff Woodman

This is a novella from the Seven Stones to Stand collection—these are stories set in the Outlander universe, about characters other than Jamie, Claire, and their immediate family. It recounts the story of how Minnie met Lord John Grey’s brother Hal during a distinctly low period in his life, and it’s charming as all hell.

Minnie is a 17-year-old whose father runs a rare book business—and also trades in gossip, secrets, and documents whose originators and/or proper owners would prefer remain private. Minnie, like most people in that day and age, has been brought up in the family business. And she may have just a little too much knack for the illicit information trade for her own good.

As the story begins, Minnie’s father is sending her off to London, putatively to both deliver and receive some books and at the same time to be introduced to polite society with the idea of catching a wealthy English husband. In reality, he has a handful of less legal commissions for her—and she has some personal business of her own.

Accompanied at various times by two stalwart Irish bodyguards and by the redoubtable matchmaker, Lady Buford, Minnie sets out to accomplish her father’s errands, evade her new suitors, and find and meet her biological mother. Along the way she meets Hal.

Hal’s wife has just died a month ago, giving birth to a probable bastard. In addition to dealing with that, he’s trying to restart the regiment that was disbanded when his father became a convicted traitor, and to do that, he’s got to secure royal patronage. In order to secure royal patronage, he’s got to get rid of the stain on his reputation that was caused when he dueled with and killed his dead wife’s poet lover. And he’s got plenty of evidence—a cache of letters between his late wife and her paramour. But he refuses to let the deeply painful letters be made public, or seen by anyone at all.

Into this muddle sails Minnie, at a critical point. She has the tools to cut this Gordian knot—but will she find a way to do it without unacceptable consequences? How will this mess get set to rights, and who will pay for it?

Ms. Gabaldon’s crystal-clear pose and deft, balanced hand with character, setting, *and* plot will hook you and keep you hooked. (Not to mention a cameo from a certain Jamie Fraser, whose masculine charms get him out of hot water without him even knowing about it.) A must-read for fans of the Outlander books.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

I devoured this book in one sitting. Yes, it is a quick read—but it’s also a compulsively engrossing one.

Each page is a dictionary entry, a definition of a single word, in alphabetical order. But the definitions are idiosyncratic memories and emotions, definitions-by-example. And these examples are snippets from the life of a relationship--beautiful little snippets, as clear and specific as snapshots.

The snippets are set up in alphabetical order, not chronological order, so the narrative emerges like the image in a pointillist painting as the artist adds first ultramarine, then phthalo blue, then cadmium red, and so on—one image suddenly swimming into focus as others become temporarily more obscure, but what it’s being obscured by is detail that’s building up another section of the image, or linking one figure in the painting to another.

Which makes this sound very high-brow and maybe difficult to comprehend, but it’s not. The little “snapshots” are each so engaging, so clear, so poignant in small and large ways, that you just want to read the next one and the next one. And it’s no harder to understand than your own life, or a rambling story told by a friend who is rambling as they try to figure out where they went wrong in the most important relationship in their life.

If I told you absolutely anything about the narrative, I’d be robbing you of the joy of discovering it for yourself. I won’t do that. This book is compulsively readable and you can do it in an evening. Go do it. You won’t be sorry.

Semiosis by Sue Burke

read by Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas Hay

In the wake of ecological catastrophe, starvation, and universal war on Earth, 50 pacifists (and a lot of frozen embryos) are chosen for a privately-funded mission to colonize a distant planet. Traumatized by decades of war, starvation, and despair, they land on a different planet than the one originally planned on. Now they have to find a way to survive: as individuals, as a species, and as a society, with their ideals intact. It’s those ideals that are going to prevent the new planet from going the way of Earth.

It’s going to be harder than anyone imagined, though. The new planet, Pax, is lush and full of unpredictable dangers. It’s also home to two sentient alien species, one native and one not. And the native life-form is such an alien intelligence that the Pacifists come perilously close to failing to recognize it as an intelligence at all. 

As each generation follows the one before it and adapts to life on Pax, new conflicts and opportunities arise. The Pacifists are clinging to viability as a colony, plagued by a lack of understanding of the local plant life, diseases they could have easily cured with their grandparents’ technology, and a crash in male fertility. Paternalistic first- and second-generation colonists hide crucially important things from their adult “children” for their own good, setting the scene for real violence, not to mention revolution.

To what degree do they need to adapt, and when does adaptation become dangerous backsliding into barbarism? What became of the other alien species that also colonized this planet at some point in the past, and left a ruined city behind? And can the rainbow colors of the bamboo grove near the ruins actually be a form of communication?

Burke does a fantastic job of world-building, depicting a human civilization that clearly owes a lot to LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and an alien intelligence that is truly alien, and the struggles and motivations of each to communicate. The structure of this book, divided into sections based on the current generation of the colonists and with a new unreliable narrator/protagonist for each section, doesn’t lend itself to a lot of character development for the human protagonists. But their society does develop, as does the alien intelligence, along fascinating lines.

A ripping yarn that also gives a lot of food for thought. Highly recommend.

The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story (Middle Falls Time Travel Series Book 1) by Shawn Inmon

read by Johnny Heller

Anybody who knows my taste in literature knows I’m a complete sucker for a time travel tale. Whether it’s a romp or a horror story, whether the fate of reality itself is at stake or just the fate of the protagonist and a few close friends, whether the story is beautifully thought out or the writer came up with a concept and just went for it, I’ll read it. Of course I appreciate something literary to sink my teeth into, and am delighted by a plot twist that actually surprises me (and that happens all too rarely anymore). But really, if a book is about someone traveling along the 4th dimension, I’ll read it and I’ll probably like it.

So I’m not setting a high bar. But I will say that The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver was above-average delightful.

It starts with our eponymous protagonist, Thomas, as a middle-aged man who has wasted his entire life. After a stupid mistake in his youth led to a tragedy, he sank deeper and deeper into depression over the decades, doing absolutely nothing of worth to himself or anyone else and not especially enjoying himself in the process. One day the final straw lands, and he decides to do himself in. He closes his eyes for the final time in 2016…

...and opens them in 1976, in his bedroom, in his 15-year-old body, with all his memories intact. After some disorientation, he figures out that it’s a few months before the tragedy. He’s got a second chance--maybe he can do things right this time. And while he’s at it, maybe he can stop a serial killer.

And then—well, and then he learns he’s not the only one to have traveled through time in exactly that fashion.

The tone of this book is by turns creepily suspenseful and thoughtfully hopeful. The author does a great job of putting you right back in 1976—if you’re old enough to remember it, you’ll instantly feel the verisimilitude of his depiction. It’ll feel almost claustrophobically like going back there. If you’re not old enough to remember it—well, here’s your chance to get a glimpse.

Our protagonist feels very believable. He vacillates between a burning desire to fix the wrong things and despair that they can’t be fixed. Also between an adult sense of agency and responsibility and the weird in-between passivity and acceptance of life of the young teenager. (As someone who moved back in with her parents to finish grad school, I can tell you that this is a thing.)

Thomas is a bit of a dufus, though, I will say. A well-intentioned dufus, but a dufus all the same. He just doesn’t seem to think things through. And we can’t blame it on him not being a science fiction geek and therefore never having thought about the potential consequences of his actions. He mentions, near the beginning of the story, having read some books and watched some movies about time travel, and being familiar with the “butterfly effect.” 

Maybe some of his dufosity can be explained by the fact that, although he has all of his memories from his adult life through 2016, he’s now back in the body of a teenage boy, all hormones and undeveloped prefrontal cortex? Our narrator is definitely unreliable, so it’s probably that, rather than lazy plotting. In any case, you’ll want to slap him sometimes.

Fortunately the story doesn’t revolve around his tendency to make mysteriously stupid mistakes. Instead it revolves around free will and the nature of causality, like any self-respecting time travel tale. Also around the interactions between Thomas and the other time-traveler, and the ripples (both emotional and in the time-space continuum) those interactions create. And the book leaves some mysteries unsolved--maybe because it follows Thomas’ point of view so closely and he doesn’t learn everything there is to be learned, or maybe because it’s the first of a series and the author wants to leave the reader curious.

Speaking of that, once the denouement becomes apparent on the horizon the book does seem to draw itself to its conclusion very quickly. In spite of which, the ending isn’t at all unsatisfying—if anything, it’s more satisfying than I expected.

In conclusion, if you’re not a fan of time travel novels, this one probably won’t convert you. But if you are, you’ll find it intriguing and mysterious and creepy and sweet, and you’ll enjoy meeting all the characters and getting lost in the setting. And maybe being surprised by some of the twists.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

read by the author

The first time I read Tales of the City, I had not yet fallen out of love with San Francisco. It was sometime around 1992 and I fell deeply in love with Mouse all the other Barbary Lane denizens. I proceeded directly to the library to get my mitts on every other book in the series so I could devour them all.

I was far too young, when my family moved to San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, to be really aware of what San Francisco meant to the adults, what it was like to live there—especially coming from somewhere else. Nonetheless, as I came of age during that decade and the next, I absorbed the local customs and predilections without realizing it was happening, as one does. And picking up a book, in my early 20s, that spoke lovingly of the sorts of people I’d grown up around, when they were roughly the age I was when I finally got to reading it… it was a rediscovery of what still felt like my home town, and a discovery of some of the influences that had shaped me.

I continued to read these books as they came out, up to The Days of Anna Madrigal. I never stopped enjoying them; it was always good to catch up on the latest gossip about old friends. But it had been a few years, and I had said goodbye to them all in my heart, when the new Netflix series came out.

This isn’t a review of that series. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a reboot that happens instead of what happened in The Days of Anna Madrigal (I think!), in an exaggerated but clearly recognizable San Francisco of today. I liked it a lot. I liked it so much, I decided it was time to go back and re-read the book that started it all, to see how it had aged.

It has aged beautifully—mainly, I think, because it was so deliberately and perfectly a work of its time that it’s a perfect little time capsule. San Francisco in a music box. It makes no attempt to be universal or timeless; it’s a unique product of a unique place and time.

To begin with, there’s Barbary Lane itself, a sprawling wooden apartment building on a tiny side street that’s also a staircase in the Castro district. This sort of place still exists, of course, but nobody in the socioeconomic neighborhood of the folks in the book could afford to live there now. Except the landlady, of course. But it’s a type of building and street and hillside very familiar to anyone who has spent much time in San Francisco.

Then there are the characters—stock characters of their time. Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the adorable, wistful twink who just wants to find love. Mary Ann Singleton, a blonde Midwestern career gal naively navigating Oz. Mona Ramsey, both earthy and spacey, both questioning and believing everything. Anna Madrigal, the wise, quirky landlady who grows her own pot and dispenses it, along with sometimes-cryptic advice. It goes on and on.

The one thing that I think would stand out as an off note to a modern reader who wasn’t around in the late 20th century is the telegraphic-yet-pulpy style of writing. The book was originally published in serial form in the San Francisco Chronicle, so each chapter is a little segment written to be read on its own and to compel the reader to comb through the sections of next week’s Sunday paper to find the next installment. If that whole concept seems strange to you, the pacing and semi-shorthand will feel a bit odd to begin with. But I think you’ll acclimate.

Verdict: if you were there at the time, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you weren’t, but are fond of (or curious about) San Francisco in the 70s, absolutely give it a read. If you’re curious about the roots of modern LGBTQ+ culture, this is a must-read. And if you just like a good soap opera, give it a try!