Mostly non-fiction so far this year. The exception is:
Touch Not The Cat (Mary Stewart), which I read for my romantic suspense book club. We started it last year: I’d been keeping myself to the two chapters per week for scheduled discussion up until the second week of January, when I gave in and finished it off. Having read a fair few Stewarts for this group – and not the Arthurian ones – I was rather surprised by the ESP element (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s introduced very early on) but it worked rather well. I wasn’t so convinced by the parallel 1835 timeline. Usually I read Stewart romances for the armchair travel; this was more armchair nostalgia, as the bulk of the action is set in the region where I grew up. It was equally enjoyable: Stewart is always good for an evocative description or several.
Permanent, Faithful, Stable: Christian same-sex partnerships (Jeffrey John) has been on the shelf for ages, and I felt both that I really should have read it and that I was fed up with it being there making me feel guilty. A quick read – and it is one – sorted that out. I think it’s probably the most succinct summary of the theological debate around same-sex relationships that I’ve read and would recommend it on that basis, though I did have a few quibbles. (Specifically: I did not feel that the author engaged adequately with the argument that marriage is a human institution and replicates human, patriarchal, systems of exploitation. More generally, I have been bearing a grudge to the tune of the most biphobic remark I’ve ever heard from the platform at a supposedly LGBTQ affirming event. The scene in The Real World where Colette walks out of the LGBTX West Country meeting? Not terribly far from real life.)
This was a fairly old edition, and events, in the form of thousands of actual same-sex marriages, have overtaken it. The arguments still feel very familiar, though.
The Queer Parent: everything you need to know from Gay to Ze (Lotte Jeffs and Stu Oakley) – very much the book I needed to read, squaring as it did the vicious circle where I’ve been feeling increasingly adrift from my bi identity but very conscious that as parenthood goes I haven’t had to deal with any problems that are not common to all. In a weird way, it was most affirming to read an interview with a bi couple who said that they were finding it hard to reconnect with the queer community. But it was interesting (and often humbling) to read about the experiences and decisions that I haven’t even had to think about, from surrogacy to IVF to doing the whole thing as a trans person.
The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck) – was a wild ride. It’s one of those books whose existence I’ve been vaguely aware of for a long time, but could have told you nothing about beyond ‘er, self help?’ Then I read bell hooks’ All About Love last year and was intrigued by Peck’s definition of love which hooks quotes:
the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth
And I think that probably was the most useful part of the book. To summarise the rest of it: life is suffering, because life is change and change inevitably involves suffering; we have the choice as to how we engage with that. It was extremely readable – short chapters, and with most of them the promise of a mystery worked through, which is what I always enjoy about case studies (really I should just go and read more Oliver Sacks). I did feel that it rather lost its way when it got more heavily into the spiritual side of things. And there were a few ‘yikes!’ moments where it became less possible than usual to forget that this was published in 1978.
So it’s going back to Oxfam and I’m keeping All About Love. I’m not sure that I entirely adopt that definition, but it’s still better than a lot that I’ve seen.
Kathleen Jowitt 