Welcome to Litsy!

Our young protagonist visits an older friend at the Palace. He ends up staying there while the friend gradually gets worse. This friend has a box where he‘s kept books on homosexuality and pictures. Through out the book we get glimpses of the picture and the blacked out excerpts from the books, along with their stories and family stories.

A book about friends and family, but also about homosexuality and what is being left out

I struggled to understand what was happening often. Some elements were lovely, but it didn‘t make much sense cohesively.

I get why this isn‘t for everyone. It is a bit different to have nonfiction intertwined with your fiction. I was drawn in and deeply moved by this novel. It is hard to describe. The writing is often beautiful, a great understanding of how humans navigate this life. A feeling of melancholy lingers. I had read the mixed reviews, I found it on the library shelves & decided to give it a try.

Well, the results of the "official" #ToB are out and Blackouts won by a landslide over The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which is interesting to me because I DNFed Blackouts pretty early on. I guess I like the "tyranny of narrative," which judge Kyle Chayka says Blackouts resists. Now I feel like I should give Blackouts another attempt, maybe in a different format, but the thought makes me want to go back to bed.

Call me impressed. Dazed, feeling melancholy. This is imaginative and creative without any sense of arrogance. Imho

#ToB24 #HardCover #Purchased Book 10 of 2024

“What the lovest well remains…the rest is dross… What thou lov‘st well shall not be reft from thee… What thou lov‘st well is thy true heritage…

Starting this one. #ToB24

I listened to this one over audio, which I enjoyed but definitely need to (re)read a physical copy of the book. I wasn‘t sure at first but then did some extra reading & read some interviews on Torres & realized the genius of this story. It‘s a fiction book told about actual people & accounts. Torres said in an interview that he intended people to be frustrated reading this book. He wanted readers to really feel the frustration at the erasure

A book that requires some effort is often one that I find the most rewarding. That‘s the case with Blackouts, which I found slow & confusing at first—3 different people with the surname Gay? Juan, Jan, Zhenya?—but I loved We the Animals so much that I was willing to trust Torres. By the 30% mark I was totally invested in this deathbed conversation between two gay men, one much younger than the other. Melancholy and deeply moving. #LGBTQ

Blackout‘s cover, designed by Na Kim, was on the NYT‘s best covers of 2023 list: “An existential mystery that interrogates modes of erasure & storytelling itself is not an easy sell to most readers. Nor I imagine is it appealing to a designer staring down a blank document & a publisher‘s expectations. This cover proposes a puzzle you didn‘t know you cared about cracking before picking up the book.”

https://ineedabookcover.com/designers/na-kim/

Two gay men sharing stories as one of them dies. It sounds simple enough but this is a very ambitious book that covered a lot of political and historical territory in a way that didn‘t mesh with me. There were moments that really struck me, especially in the beginning but over all I was left feeling adrift. #tob24

Juan did not think much of the other residents, wandering souls, whom he referred to as a badling of queer ducks. I‘d never before heard that collective noun. “All bitter,” he said, “or broken. Or lunatic.”

The way I understand it, historians locate a lexicological shift in the meaning of ‘coming out‘ to the midsixties. After Stonewall, the sense of coming out will be firmly attached to the closet, a place of skeletons, isolation, claustrophobia. But no metaphor of the closet existed in the decades before. The original sense of the term coming out was borrowed from debutante cultures, where one came out into the expectant world.

“Measurements from 15,000 men & women between ages 21-25 were used to come up with the proportions for these sculptures, which were meant to be the idealized norms for the human form. Every person measured was white.” —Blackouts

I first encountered mention of Normman [“normal man”] & Norma in Heather Radke‘s Butts: A Backstory, in a section where she discusses why ready-to-wear clothing rarely fits.

Illustration of a baby goat: One of my favourites of Zhenya‘s images, and perhaps another archetype: The soft little boy prancing around in his mother‘s heels?

The library stack that‘s been staring me down while I finished my last book. I don‘t think my next read will be the one that‘s tagged. Just flipping through it makes me think it‘s way over my head. 😵‍💫🧐

I didn‘t really ‘get‘ this rather experimental book - too clever for me!

Based loosely on a true story it follows the unnamed MC as he arrives to take care of a dying man, Juan Gay. He‘s also meant to be taking on a project that Juan has been working on for years, the much-redacted Sex Variants report from the 1940s. (Which is the true story part)

I found the redacted pages rather poetic, but didn‘t feel connected to the rest of the storyline.

Loved Torres‘ earlier novel, We the Animals. This one is VERY different. The plot revolves around a real historical study/publication called Sex Variants which discusses homosexuality. Did a lot of googling while reading to decipher between fact/fiction. The form was quite speculative and a bit hard to follow for me. Ok, but a lot of work. #ToB24

I watched the National Book Awards tonight and these were the winners. I haven‘t heard of or read any of these books but they all sound interesting.

1. Blackouts, Fiction
2. The Rediscovery Of America, Nonfiction
3. From Unincorporated Territory, (Amot), Poetry
4. The Words That Remain, Translated Literature
5. A First Time For Everything, Young People‘s Literature

I waited eagerly for a book from Torres because I LOVED We the Animals, but this very experimental novel was a miss for me. Perhaps my mind is not agile enough now. The illustrations and photos were amazing though. It‘s an older dying gay man and a younger gay man exchanging stories as the older one dies. The older man and his lesbian mothers are loosely based on real people, and sometimes books with that set up don‘t feel cohesive as fiction.

#libraryhaul

Still trying to read through the brain fog! I‘m about halfway through Blackouts, but it may be a bit over my head. 😂 What should I try next???

Two men sit together in conversation as one of them is dying. They explore their lives and the realities of living as gay men. This is good. The author is doing much more here than what‘s on the surface, including exploring multiple meanings for the title. I‘m not a rereader, but I suspect this is one that could bring additional things up on a second read.

NBA shortlist, fiction