A tip of the hat to Octavio Roca for passing along this essay from Literary Hub: "Rabih Alemeddine Recommends Some Gay Books You Might Not Have Known Were Gay." As it happens, we read the first title on the list, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, back in 2017, but none of the others (yet)—though we have discussed other selections by some of the authors. But we've never discussed any works by Australian novelist Patrick White—nor, so far as I can recall, has anyone nominated any of them for our reading list—even though, as Alemeddine observes, White "was an openly gay man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for crying out loud." (He recommends starting with The Twyborn Affair.) Sounds like an oversight we might want to rectify this fall when we conduct our next nomination process...:-)
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Alemeddine Reccomends ("in no particular order"): entertaining, even helpful, though glinting with risibility.
I read The Twyborn Affair some thirty years ago. Have had no impulse to pick it up again or even leaf through. It says something that I still have it. (Must be the Nobel Prize Patrick White was awarded before The T-Bone Affair.
We may not have had a chance to vote on Patrick White but we did have a chance with Rabih Alemeddine's The Angel of History, which lost out to its 2016 contemporary Lily and the Octopus. You pays your money and you takes your choice!
Thanks for refreshing my memory on Alemeddine, Tim. Of course, I'm not unhappy with that outcome since I'm the one who nominated Lily!
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