This is a well-written short memoir about the author’s family, body, and experiences as a black boy and man in America. Kiese Laymon is an English professor from Mississippi, and this memoir starts when he was 11 and continues through his 40s, though of course covering so many years in 241 pages means we skip over a lot. The memoir is addressed to his mother, who is one of those mothers people are especially driven to write memoirs about: brilliant, loving, and abusive. He also writes a lot about his body issues, going from obesity to what looks like anorexia and an exercise obsession, and then back.

So there’s a lot packed into this book, and it’s highly readable although often “heavy” material. The sections about how Laymon saw black college students being harshly disciplined for minor infractions while white students got off with a slap on the wrist for much more serious crimes (or in one case, even pawned off their own culpability on unknown but totally scary people of color) was particularly hard-hitting to me. There’s a lot in the book that’s very raw, though told in an artful way by an author skilled at rhetoric. Much of it won’t be surprising to anyone who’s read much about race in America, but the author’s perspective makes a lot of sense.

It isn’t my favorite book of the year, perhaps because it isn’t written “for” me—Laymon writes about wanting to write for black people, which makes sense. Sometimes I found it a little confusing. At times in small ways: like many memoirists, Laymon leans heavily on brand names, which can be confusing if you don’t share the author’s pop-cultural background. And also in larger ways: the author seems to imply that his mother sexually abused him, but never explicitly says so even while he writes a lot about the need for radical honesty within his family, which tends to bury everything. In the end I wasn’t sure whether he was being cagey or I was reading in something that wasn’t there.

At any rate, this is a good book and well worth reading for anyone looking to read about race in America, or just looking for a good memoir.

As I just finished the last book of Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant series (and have also read both of her nonseries mysteries, Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes), it occurred to me that there is a third "series reading" master post I should keep, in addition to the First in Series and Ongoing Series posts that I created a while ago, as inspired by Moonlight Reader; namely, one to collect all my completed reading. So this post collects everything from books / series recently finished to those that I read a long time ago in a galaxy much further away than I care to think about: in the latter case, if fiction, I can't guarantee that I remember much about the plot or the characters (which just might mean that it's time for a reread, but that's a different matter); if nonfiction, whatever I remember of their contents has long merged into the general muddle of information about our world, past and present, that has passed through my brain over the years, mostly without taking permanent residence and definitely without me still being able to pinpoint any specific source. But so help me, I did read all of these -- some only once, some have become favorite comfort reads.

I'll only be collecting completed series or other similarly definable groups of books here (e.g., "all novels / short stories by ..."); beginning with actually completed books and concluding with a section listing the series I have abandoned.  This is not intended as a master post listing all of my completed reading.

COMPLETED

MYSTERIES

Dermot Bolger

- Finbar's Hotel (ed.)

G.K. Chesterton

- Father Brown

Agatha Christie

- all mystery novels and short stories:
     - Miss Marple
     - Poirot
     - Tommy & Tuppence
     - Superintendent Battle (incl. Bundle Brent)
     - Colonel Race
     - Parker Pyne
     - Qin & Satterthwaite
     - Nonseries mysteries

Arthur Conan Doyle

- Sherlock Holmes

Michael Connelly

- Terry McCaleb

The Detection Club

- The Floating Admiral

Colin Dexter

- Inspector Morse

J. Jefferson Farjeon

- Inspector Kendall

Caroline Graham

- Midsomer Murders

George Heyer

- All mysteries:
     - Inspector Hannasyde
     - Inspector Hemingway
     - Nonseries

Tony Hillerman

- Leaphorn & Chee

P.D. James

- Adam Dalgliesh
- Cordelia Gray

Stephen King

- The Green Mile

Stieg Larsson

- Millennium (original series)

Dennis Lehane

- Kenzie & Gennaro

Henning Mankell

- Wallander

Ngaio Marsh

- Roderick Alleyn

Denise Mina

- Garnethill Trilogy

George Pelecanos

- Derek Strange & Terry Quinn

Catherine Louisa Pirkis

- Loveday Brooke

Edgar Allan Poe

- Dupin Tales

Ian Rankin

- Jack Harvey Thrillers

Dorothy L. Sayers

- Lord Peter Wimsey (incl. Wimsey & Vane subseries)

Josephine Tey

- All mysteries:
     - Inspector Grant series
     - Nonseries mysteries (Brat Farrar & Miss Pym Disposes)

HISTORICAL FICTION (ICNL. HISTORICAL MYSTERIES)

Robert van Gulik

- Judge Dee

Anthony Horowitz

- Sherlock Holmes sequels

John Jakes

- North and South Trilogy

Patrick O'Brian

- Aubrey & Maturin

Ellis Peters

- Brother Cadfael

David Pirie

- The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

Jean Plaidy

- Mary Stuart

Tony Riches

- Tudor Trilogy

FANTASY / FAIRY TALES / SUPERNATURAL

Hans Christian Andersen

- Complete Fairy Tales

Brothers Grimm

- Complete Fairy Tales

Wilhelm Hauff

- Complete Fairy Tales

C.S. Lewis

- Chronicles of Narnia

Tamora Pierce

- Song of the Lioness

J.K. Rowling

- Harry Potter (minus The Cursed Child, which contrary to the sales hype wasn't actually written by Rowling)

J.R.R. Tolkien

- Middle Earth: The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings

T.H. White

- The Once and Future King

Tad Williams

- Memory, Sorrow & Thorn

CLASSICS & LITFIC

Aeschylus

- Oresteia (Agamemnon / The Libarion Bearers / The Eumenides)

Louisa May Alcott

- Little Women (incl. Good Wives, Little Men & Jo's Boys)

Margaret Atwood

- Gilead (The Handmaid's Tale & The Testaments)

Jane Austen

- Novels and fragments (minus juvenalia, except for The History of England)

Gabriel Chevalier

- Clochemerle (Clochemerle & Clochemerle Babylon)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

- Faust (Parts I & II and Urfaust)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

- A Scots Quair

Robert Graves

- I, Claudius

- Books on Greek mythology (The Greek Myths; Greek Gods and Heroes)

Selma Lagerlöf

- Jerusalem

D.H. Lawrence

- Brangwen Family (The Rainbow & Women in Love)

Naguib Mahfouz

- Cairo Trilogy

- Novels & stories of Ancient Egypt (Khufu's Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War, Akhenaten, Voices from the Other World)

Thomas Mann

- All novels and short stories

Edna O'Brien

- Country Girls Trilogy

William Shakespeare

- All plays, sonnets and short poems

Sophocles

- Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonnus, Antigone)

Wallace Stegner

- Joe Allston (All the Little Live Things & The Spectator Bird)

Anthony Trollope

- The Pallisers

HISTORY, (AUTO)BIOGRAPHY & OTHER NONFICTION

Will & Ariel Durant

- The Story of Civilization

Fischer Weltgeschichte

(various authors; elsewhere known as Universal History and Storia Unversale)

Antonia Fraser

- A Royal History of England (ed.)

Hugo Hamilton

- Childhood Memoirs

Hans J. Massaquoi

- Destine to Witness

Hans Silvester

- Cats in the Sun

ABANDONED

SERIES

Renée Ahdieh: The Wrath and the Dawn (after book 1, The Wrath and the Dawn)
Alan Bradley: Flavia de Luce (after book 1, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
Dan Brown: Robert Langdon (after book 2, The Da Vinci Code; no other books from series read)
Miles Burton: Desmond Merrion (after book 1, The Secret of High Eldersham)
Trudi Canavan: Black Magician Trilogy (after book 1, The Magicians' Guild)
Zen Cho: Sorcerer to the Crown (after book 1, Sorcerer to the Crown)
Jennifer Estep: Crown of Shards (after book 1, Kill the Queen)
Helen Fielding: Bridget Jones's Diary (after book 1, Bridget Jones's Diary)
James Forrester: Clarenceux Trilogy (after book 1, Sacred Treason)
Elizabeth George: Inspector Lynley (after book 16, This Body of Death)
Lee Goldberg: Even Ronin (after book 1, Lost Hills)
Kerry Greenwood: Phryne Fischer (after book 1, Cocaine Blues, aka Miss Phryne Fisher Investigates)
Philippa Gregory: Tudor Court (after book 3, The Other Boleyn Girl; no other books from series read)
L.B. Hathaway: Posie Parker (DNF book 6.5, A Christmas Case; no other books from series read)
Martha Grimes: Richard Jury (after book 21, Dust)
Dorothy B. Hughes: Griselda Satterlee (after book 1, The So Blue Marble)
E.L. James: Fifty Shades (after book 1, Fifty Shades of Grey)
Carole Lawrence: Ian Hamilton (after book 1, Edinburgh Twilight)
Edward Marston: Christopher Redmayne (after book 1, The King's Evil)
Francine Matthews: Caroline Carmichael (after book 1, The Cutout)
Pat McIntosh: Gil Cunningham (after book 1, The Harper's Quine)
Stephenie Meyer: Twilight (after book 1, Twilight)
S.J. Parris: Giordano Bruno (after book 1, Heresy)
Louise Penny: Armand Gamache (after book 1, Still Life)
Elizabeth Peters: Amelia Peabody (after book 1, Crocodile on the Sandbank)
Valerie Plame Wilson & Sarah Lovett: Vanessa Pierson (after book 1, Blowback)
Patrick Senécal: Le vide (after book 1, Vivre au Max)
Helene Tursten: Inspector Irene Huss (after book 2, Night Rounds)

AUTHORS

Anne Rice

Read:

- Maifair Witches through book 2 (Lasher)

- Vampire Chronicles through book 6 (The Vampire Armand)

- Stand-alones: Cry to Heaven, Violin, Vittorio the Vampire

Mike Birbiglia is one of my favorite stand-up comics and I loved the movie for 'Sleepwalk with Me', so it was pleasure to be able to read this.

Birbiglia cuts to the heart of fears surrounding parenthood and reflects on how life tends to put us in really compromising situations. Reading this I am more fervent than ever in my desire to never have children, but 'The New One' has a lot to offer, even to parents. As ever, Birbiglia tackles his insecurities in a super funny and super uncomfortable way with complete honesty.

I first read H. F. Saint's novel thirty years ago. I recall the praise it received at the time for how well thought out the novel's exploration of the problems that an invisible person might face. When I read it for myself I was similarly impressed with the challenges Saint identifies (how does someone who's invisible drive a car, or feed themselves, or find regular housing?) and how the book's titular character overcomes them.

For decades, the novel remained a fond memory, one which I remembered mainly for its description of Halloway's challenges with invisibility. Then I came across a paperback copy in a used bookstore, and I decided to reread it to see how it held up.

Reading it again brought back a wave of nostalgia tempered by hindsight. In it, Nick Halloway, a yuppie securities analyst living in 1980s New York, visits a laboratory staging a demonstration of a new technology. When the test is sabotaged by student protestors, the resulting explosion turns Halloway and everything else in the building invisible. As he adjusts to his new condition, Halloway becomes the target of a small team of federal agents determined to exploit his new condition.

From there the novel becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Halloway and David Jenkins, the agent in charge of his team. Halloway has to find ways to elude their methodical attempts to locate and capture him. While this may seem like a trivial matter for someone who is now invisible, Saint emphasizes the problems invisibility creates in terms of doing even the most basic things which people today can address without a second thought. Soon Halloway finds himself cut off from his old life and driven from his apartment, forced to find housing and sustenance wherever he can. These challenges are at the heart of the book, and Saint's consideration of how Halloway overcomes them is one of its great strengths.

Yet what really drives the book is Halloway's conflict with Jenkins. Here Saint envisions an ideal foe for an invisible person: someone who is smart, patient, relentless and with the authority and resources necessary to hunt down someone who is little more than a specter. What makes Jenkins especially interesting as an antagonist is in how in many respects he is as invisible as Halloway, as Jenkins' anonymity and cover identities as an intelligence agent render him nearly as indiscernible to modern society. As a result Halloway finds himself constantly on the defensive, adding suspense to the plot and lending weight to his occasional triumphs over his tenacious opponent.

All of these elements explain why the book has such a fond place in my memory. But then I came upon the sex scenes. I had forgotten about those.

Halloway's battle with loneliness is one of the central themes of Saint's book, as his invisibility and his need to remain hidden isolate him from people even when he is in their midst. At two points in the book, however, Saint has Halloway's desperation drive him to engage in what amounts to sexual assault. Neither scene has aged well, and that the second assault leads to "consensual" sex (to the extent that the woman enjoys the experience with what she thinks is a ghost) doesn't redeem it but makes it worse. It definitely soured my memory of the book, and demonstrates how sometimes the past should stay in the past, even when it comes to a warmly-remembered novel.

I hated Malabar the whole book. And for a while I hated her daughter too. But then I had to remind myself she was just a child and was pretty much brainwashed into all this drama. My own mother was like this. She would rope me into schemes to torment my stepdad's ex and think it was perfectly fine to include a 12-year-old in adult problems. That is why I hate Malabar so so much. She never learns anything. She keeps being selfish. And all she fucking cares about his her boyfriend and her stupid necklace. It was of some comfort that her daughter finally broke the cycle, but for a while I felt like she was just continuing the cycle. Some people just shouldn't be parents. What an exhausting read.