Nominations for September 2012 Reading List

FICTION
The Art of Fielding  by Chad Harbach
Slant  by Timothy Wang
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov  by Paul Elliott Russell
The Empty Family  by Colm Toíbín
We the Animals  by Justin Torres
By Nightfall  by Michael Cunningham
The Passages of H.M.  by Jay Parini
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You  by Peter Cameron
Dorian  by Will Self
The Farewell Symphony  by Edmund White
Gods and Monsters  by Christopher Bram
The Eye of the Storm  by Patrick White
The Counterfeiters  by André Gide

MEMOIR
The Last Deployment  by Bronson Lemer
Journey to Myrtos  by Robert Mitchell
The Fry Chronicles  by Stephen Fry
Dropping Names  by Daniel Curzon
Christopher and His Kind  by Christopher Isherwood

NON-FICTION
Secret Historian  by Justin Spring
What Do Gay Men Want?  by David M. Halperin
February House  by Sherill Tippins
Proust’s Way  by Roger Shattuck

POETRY
The Best of It  by Kay Ryan
Blackbird and Wolf  by Henri Cole
Sublimation Point  by Jason Schneiderman

DRAMA
The Bereaved and Mary  by Thomas Bradshaw
Cock  by Mike Bartlett
Speech and Debate  by Stephen Karam
The Brother/Sister Plays  by Tarell Alvin McCraney

ANTHOLOGIES
Boys Like Us ed. by Patrick Merla

Somebody New

An executive summary of "Books We Have Read" below: We've read:

   three books by Edmund White

   two novels by Paul Russell

   two novels by Michael Cunningham

   two books by Colm Toíbín, and

   two books by Christopher Isherwood

I'd like to read somebody new.

“The Song of Achilles"

Here is a book and article that may interest readers:

Madeline Miller has won the Orange Prize for Fiction for “The Song of Achilles,” a novel set during the Trojan War which casts the Homeric hero’s relationship with his friend Patroclus as a love story.

The American writer received 30,000 pounds ($46,600) and a bronze statuette called “the Bessie” at a ceremony last night at London’s Royal Festival Hall. She overcame competition from Cynthia Ozick and four other novelists vying for the U.K. literary award for women.

Joanna Trollope, the head of the judging panel, praised the novel as being “interesting, passionate, uplifting and different.”

Still Tight in East Lansing

When straight women's sex lives resemble gay men's, I'm always interested. Right now I'm reading The Sexual Life of Catherine M., an erotic memoir of a French woman who had a lot of sex—49 penises in a ten-year period which she could put a face to, but orders of magnitude greater for faceless phalluses (if I may be permitted the oxymoron)—and have just finished Toni Bentley's The Surrender, wherein a ballerina finds liberation, sexual and otherwise, by getting sodomized 298 times by "A Man". Unfortunately, it turns out, she was just dealing with daddy issues. All very reminiscent of Norman Mailer's all-time camp classic "The Time of Her Time" (a short story first published in his 1959 Advertisements for Myself).

The [!?] sexual revolution, it has been said, will have occurred when most straight men want to get pegged. On the basis of the latest episode of HBO's Girls (a younger and grittier Sex in the City) we're a ways off. Hannah is back in East Lansing from NYC, visiting her parents. She hooks up that night with Eric a cute pharmacist she knew in high school six years ago. They're under the blankets, near naked, making out:

HANNAH:  What's your favorite part?
ERIC:  Of what?
H:  Of fucking me?
E:  Don't know, I haven't done it yet.

[More making out, by which time Eric sheds the boxers he went down under the blankets with!]

ERICH:  What are you doing?
HANNAH:  Uhmm …
E:  Please don't put your finger in my asshole!
H:  You weren't telling me what it was that you wanted at all so I was just trying to guess what you wanted. You're allowed to just tell me what it is you want.
E (very patiently):  I just want to have … sex.

The Benevento Head

                  always disponible, always open
to what the world had to offer, but always reserved,
  always sure—a little too sure—of his own innocence.

—and for more of which, the Louvre.

A Moveable Feast

We have been meeting at the Tenleytown Branch Library but next week—May 16—we will meet at the American Foreign Service Association at 2101 E St NW (near the Foggy Bottom Metro on the Blue and Orange Lines).

We are an open and public group. That means our meetings are publicly posted and open to whoever shows up. To the best of my knowledge that makes us unique in the nation as a private (i.e. non-institutional) book club (gay or otherwise). We have met (if memory serves) at Cybercafe, Midi, Sparky's, Books-A-Million, Cleveland Park B.L., Capitol Hill Starbucks, and the Sumner School. We meet where the winds blow us and we find safe haven. We're always on the lookout for new places (Metro-accessible). Please keep your eyes peeled and clue us in on any potential venues!

Happy Birthday to Us!

This month BookmenDC (nee BoysnBooks) marks its 13th birthday as an organization. We started meeting in 1999, making us the D.C. area's oldest continuously-operating gay book group, and one of the longer-operating GLBT social organizations in the area. Definitely a milestone worth celebrating!