"Such Times": Get This Book!

Greetings, Colleagues--

At our meeting this past Wednesday, the first essay we discussed in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (Tom Cardamone, editor) was Jameson Currier's tribute to Christopher Coe's second (and, alas, final) novel,  Such Times.

I've had that book for many years but, like so many others on my shelves, just never got around to it.  But this weekend I finally read it--something I've vowed to do every time we've read an inspiring essay  in the various anthologies we've discussed over the years, but never before actually did.

Perhaps the best tribute I can pay to Coe is this: I've always been a fast reader (perhaps too fast), but it has been years since any book captivated me enough to finish 300-plus pages in three days. Don't get me wrong: It's not a perfect book by any means, any more than is its narrator, Timothy Springer.  But if there is such a thing as a character who is redeemed by his flaws (and I tend to think there is), it is he.

Don't take my word for it, though: Discover  Such Times  for yourself. (But read Currier's essay first.)

And if, like me, you have a bucket list of books about which you've read reviews or essays, do yourself a favor and make the time to read at least one of them. Even if the experience doesn't fully live up to your expectations, it's still worth taking a chance.

Cheers,
Steve Honley

Haunting Douglas

Richard Canning's essay on Ghost Dance in 50 Gay … [Blah-Blah-Blah] didn't interest me all that much in Douglas Wright but looking at excerpts from Leanne Pooley's documentary Haunting Douglas certainly has. I'm tempted to spring the $35 for a NTSC copy. Check it out!

Until the acropolis …

Some people tweet, others facebook, I tumblr … in particular my favorite aggregator of images on the web, Foonman's Spiritual Remedy:

Clayton Coots (1936–1984)

Frank Rich has written a haunting memoir in the May 26 issue of New York about an older man who befriended his seventeen-year-old self at a troubled moment in his adolescence. An exemplary "life in the shadows" of a revenant in our triumphalist parades.

Inaugural Hatchet Job Award

Adam Mars-Jones' review in the Observer  of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall — "killingly fair-minded and viciously funny" — won the 2012 (inaugural) Hatchet Job award, given to the writer of "the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" to have appeared in the preceding year.