As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski

Rating: 3/5, average

Trigger warning: depression

The author posted a link to this book in a Jewish Goth Facebook group I’m in, and the topic of being Orthodox Jewish and a transgender man interested me so much I bought the book right away and started reading it as soon as it came in.

As Long as I’m Still Breathing is a 75-page memoir broken up into seven chapters of first-person past-tense prose and free verse poetry. It delves into Avraham’s struggles with depression and how transitioning to male and converting to Judaism helped give him the strength to stay alive. It tells the story of how he converted to Judaism and his experiences with different Jewish communities. 

I really appreciated reading about Avraham’s experience because I don’t know of any other books about trans men who are Jewish.

It was a little hard to piece together the timeline of Avraham’s four conversions. The Reform conversion before moving to Israel was a little bit confusing because it was only mentioned in retrospect. It seems to go:

  1. Initial conversion at Orthodox synagogue #1
  2. Conversion at Orthodox synagogue #2 because the first one wasn’t considered halachic (not sure why)
  3. Reform conversion when immigrating to Israel (because he said it’s easier for Reform Jews to immigrate)
  4. Conversion on entering yeshiva #3

Avraham started his conversion as a nonbinary person with a Reform rabbi. He tried to go back in the closet and be an Orthodox woman, but it was too painful and he felt drawn to Orthodox Jewish theology and practice so he finished his first conversion with an Orthodox rabbi as a trans man.

Continue reading “As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski”

The Location Shoot by Patricia Leavy

Rating: 3/5, average

The Location Shoot by Patricia Leavy is about a literal cast of characters filming an intimate family drama with a French director in Sweden.

When I received the email from the publicist and read the description, I wasn’t sure if The Location Shoot would be more romance or philosophy focused. I would say it falls more on the romance side, as the philosophy that’s in it is more along the lines of life advice.

If there is a main character (it’s an ensemble cast) it would be Ella Sinclair, an American philosopher who’s working on a series of books about pleasure. The central romance is between her and Finn Forrester, an American movie star. They strike up a whirlwind romance that changes Ella’s life forever.

I didn’t love this book and I didn’t hate this book… it’s easy to read, but not super deep. Albie, an older actor, brings most of the existential philosophy. Ella has a bit of sexual philosophy: she says, “you should only sleep with people you’ll always love or people you’ll never love.” Ella also has some good career advice for Willow, a young starlet who has been feeling pressured by her agent into accepting gigs she’s not interested in. She essentially reminds her that the agent works for her and she doesn’t have to agree to jobs that don’t align with who she wants to be.

The sex scenes are vanilla and explicit. It is insta-love, so it goes a little fast, but Ella and Finn have a little chemistry.

I enjoyed taking a break from heavier reading, but I was a little disappointed with the plain prose and mostly unmet promise of philosophical ideas.

I would recommend The Location Shoot as a fluffy, don’t-think-too-hard romance with down-to-earth characters that explores the fantasy of being behind-the-scenes on a movie set.

Doughnut by Tom Holt

Rating: 3/5, average

My brother’s been bugging me to read this for a long time and I haven’t been too interested, but he came and visited and started reading it at my house so I thought “what the hell” and picked it up after he left.

The front cover looks tasty but doesn’t tell much about the contents of the book.

The back cover reads:

“The doughnut is a thing of beauty.

A circle of fried doughy perfection.

A source of comfort in trying times, perhaps.

For Theo Bernstein, however, it is far, far more.

Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he’s unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn’t have any money.

Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend Professor Pieter van Goyen, renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died.

By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions. A journey that will rewrite the laws of physics. A battle to save humanity itself.

This is the tale of a man who had nothing and gave it all up to find his destiny — and a doughnut.”

The plot is pretty convoluted. We join Theo, a disgraced scientist, as he’s trying to recover the shambles of his life after a miscalculation he makes causes a giant explosion. His most recent ex-wife Amanda (he had three previous wives, Amanda was his fourth) left him, we’re told because people were whispering about her “there goes the woman whose husband blew up the VVLHC.”

I suppose she couldn’t handle that… he also implies that she’s greedy because she received a large amount of assets in the divorce but was still mad she didn’t get more. This seemed a bit misogynistic to me because I can’t imagine a woman leaving a man she truly loved because he’s suddenly infamous. Especially if what he did was a mistake… well, maybe if it killed people. But it sounds like it didn’t, because he says the scientists he worked with were mad at him because they were out of work, which means they’re alive, so it sounds like no one died.

Theo has a lot of toxic relationships, but he has no sense of introspection about his role in them. The people around him are all terrible to the point where it strains belief. He doesn’t seem to have any self-reflection, only self-pity. I did start to actually pity him about halfway through the book as I learned what the other characters did to him, which made it a bit more tolerable for me because I could see where he was coming from, but I still couldn’t quite believe that one semi-decent person could be surrounded by nothing but selfish people.

The negative depiction of his ex-wives as greedy, status-conscious, and fickle and the wallowing in self-pity got me off on the wrong foot with this book, but I started to get more interested as the plot started picking up around page 50. Unfortunately, I can’t really go into detail because it’s all spoilers, but it’s mostly about hopping between custom multiverses while searching for lost relatives.

Continue reading “Doughnut by Tom Holt”

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Rating: 4/5, good

I first read this book when I was seventeen, as part of summer reading before senior year of high school. It’s a short book, but very dense and philosophical. It was a bit hard to read and I remember not quite getting it, but the idea that religion is human-constructed and shouldn’t be taken too seriously buried itself deep inside my brain like a wasp burrowing into an oak gall.

I recently reread it with my local science fiction book club and I understood and enjoyed it more on the second reading. I remembered most of the characters, the general outline of the plot and major scenes, and the fictional humanistic religion of Bokononism.

Cat’s Cradle is about a writer who is researching a book about what important people were doing the moment the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His research sets off a series of events that lead to him becoming the president of a small island in the Caribbean and the destruction of the world.

John, the writer, sends a letter to Newt, the youngest son of Dr. Hoenikker, the scientist who designed the bomb, asking him what Dr. Hoenikker was doing the moment of the atomic explosion. Newt sends back a reply describing how that morning his father was showing him cat’s cradle (a children’s game that’s played by making a series of shapes with a loop of string between one’s fingers). Newt, who had grown accustomed to being ignored by his neglectful father (and the children had no mother because she died giving birth to Newt because of an accident Dr. Hoenikker caused that damaged her pelvis), was frightened by the sudden attention and ran away into the backyard.

In the backyard, he finds the middle brother, Frank, shaking bugs in a jar to make them fight. Angela, the oldest sister, asks Newt what happened between him and his father. Newt whines about how much he hates his father, and Angela slaps him and tells him that their father just won the war. Then Frank punches Angela in the stomach (defending Newt? Or just joining in the violence?) and she rolls around on the ground in pain with Newt as Frank stands over them both laughing. Their father sticks his head out the window for a moment and then returns to whatever he was doing without a word.

I think this scene does a fantastic job of capturing the trauma of growing up with an emotionally unavailable father. Dr. Hoenikker reminds me a bit of my dad. I really related to Newt being frightened by sudden intense attention from his father after being ignored for a long time. My father was a little bit less detached than Dr. Hoenikker—he would have come down and yelled at us, then gone back to whatever he was doing—but I find Vonnegut’s portrayal of a distant father in a demanding career to be spot on. Vonnegut’s own father was an architect who Vonnegut described as a “dreamy artist”, so he might have had a similar experience growing up.

Continue reading “Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut”

Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 4 by George Adamczyk

Rating: 4/5, good

I really enjoyed this book! It’s comprised of four short horror stories with plenty of blood, guts, and chaos.

In the first one, “Emma”, a group of “party girls” get terrorized by a haunted virtual assistant.

In the second, “A Grave Situation”, an abusive executive is dogged by undead unfortunates he took advantage of.

In the third, “Slime Dwellers”… if I say what the premise is, it’ll spoil it, so I’ll just say that it’s as sexy as it is scary.

In the fourth, “Gnome More, Gnome More”… I also won’t spoil that one, but it does literally involve garden gnomes and it’s equal parts humor and carnage. It also involves an abusive boyfriend getting his just deserts.

I met George Adamczyk at Las Vegas Comic Con and he described this installment of the Lost Minds, Wandering Souls anthology series as similar to Tales of the Crypt, but while I was reading it I thought of it as “adult Goosebumps” because that was the horror anthology series of my generation (though I do want to watch Tales of the Crypt someday based on how much I liked this book!). He also took care to spell my name correctly when he signed my copy even though Sayre is a bit hard to hear or spell, so points for that!

These stories are pretty simple thematically. Most of them are tales of karmic justice being delivered via supernatural means. The morality is mostly clear (especially in “A Grave Situation”), with evil people getting what they deserve, so it’s more comforting than challenging.

The only part where I raise an eyebrow is where the “party girls” have bad things happen to them, but I’m not sure if that was intended to be a moralistic thing because they liked to party or if it was just mixing horror and sex appeal for maximum interest. I liked the female characters because they were pretty realistic, reasonable, and relatable. There is a bit of sexualization, but they are firmly subjects (as opposed to objects) in their narratives. “Slime Dwellers” and “Gnome More, Gnome More” have a bit of moral ambiguity as well, but I can’t discuss them without spoiling.

Continue reading “Lost Minds, Wandering Souls 4 by George Adamczyk”

We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal

3/5, average

I first learned about Hafsah Faizal when a Twitter post of hers responding to someone being rude about her niqab went viral. I saw that and decided “forget that person, I’m going to buy her book.” I’m not really a fan of YA fantasy, but I love the cover and the concept looked interesting: a romance between a huntress and an assassin set in an Arabia-inspired fantasy world.

I had a really hard time getting into this book. The first chapter throws a lot of new words at you, both place names and Arabic words. I think I picked this up once and tried to read it but didn’t have the motivation and put it down. Then we needed a new book for book club and I suggested it, so that gave me the impetus to buckle down and get through it.

The further We Hunt the Flame goes, the better it gets. Like other fantasy books, it takes a while to establish the characters and setting. That slow beginning is rough, but once the action gets going it becomes much more exciting. Hafsah Faizal is particularly good at writing fight scenes that feel visceral and impactful. The short chapters with lots of negative space at the end and beginning of each chapter (at least in the hardcover version) make it feel like you’re making progress and it’s going by faster.

I liked the characters, but they felt a little one-note… Zafira (the main character huntress) is very strong and stoic. She has plenty of emotional moments, but I didn’t notice much that would differentiate her from a similar strong female character. Nasir (the assassin boy) is a little bit more unique and complex. There were some things about his situation that I found a bit farfetched, but I was willing to suspend disbelief because it was interesting.

As for the side characters, Altair seemed like the sassy gay friend type (except not gay? Nasir says he likes women) who added a lot of levity to an otherwise serious story about saving the world from the tyrannical forces of evil. Kifah was cool as a badass warrior woman, though I feel we didn’t get to see much of her. I liked that Yasmine had a crudely humorous side to her instead of simply being a more feminine foil to Zafira’s masculinity.

Continue reading “We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal”

Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon

Rating: 4/5, good

I found this book in 2015 at the Grove Press booth at the Bay Area Book Festival. It appealed to me because I had seen a lot of pro-Palestinian articles online around the time of Operation Defensive Shield in 2014. My Hebrew school education on the conflict was about as balanced as I think my young teacher could make it without parents getting upset. I never had that rah-rah pro-Israel Hebrew school education that a lot of older generations grew up with. We covered modern Israel in seventh-grade Hebrew school, about the age we were having our Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. This was in 2003, during the Second Intifada, also the year Wrestling with Zion was published.

We learned about Zionist figures like Theodor Herzl and the early debates about where the Jewish state should be (Guyana and Uganda were in the running), how the Arab countries attacked the moment the state of Israel was declared, and how they exploited a Jewish holiday to launch a sneak attack during the Yom Kippur War. We also briefly covered modern Palestinian terrorism. However, we were also taught about the Nakba and Sabra and Shatila. Learning about how Palestinians saw us left me feeling conflicted about Israel. Whatever justifications we had—mainly the Holocaust pushing us out of Europe—from their perspective, we came and took control of their land.

We Jews have been the underdog many times throughout history, but in resuming control of our ancient land, we’ve created a new underdog. Some people persist in seeing Israel as the underdog, but that illusion becomes more difficult to maintain as Israel grows more powerful militarily. Israel is a small country with little in the way of natural resources, but it has the backing of America and a steady supply of modern weaponry. It hasn’t faced war with an Arab coalition since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Since then, it’s been smaller conflicts with anti-Israel terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. These organizations use very cheap weapons and wage war from civilian areas, leading to high numbers of civilian casualties when Israel retaliates. It is hard to continue to view Israel as an underdog in this state of affairs.

Many of the writers in Wrestling with Zion are struggling with how to view Israel through a diasporic lens that understands the plight of the underdog. After living through the devastation of “might is right” fascism in Nazi Germany, it is painfully ironic to see “might is right” become the general attitude of the Jewish state.

Continue reading “Wrestling with Zion by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon”

Colonoscopy Tips

I recently got a colonoscopy because I have a family history of colon cancer and I’m having some recurrent upper left abdominal pain, chronic constipation, and minor rectal bleeding. It went pretty well (Excellent prep and no polyps! Just internal hemorrhoids. >.>;;).

I’d like to talk about my experience and share some tips, both for myself in the future and for anyone else who might be getting a colonoscopy. I had a lot of anxiety about the prep and procedure beforehand. I was worried the scope would be too big since I’m a smaller person, but learning that they do colonoscopies on children helped with that. I was also worried that it would hurt or feel weird, but I saw someone on a forum say that they don’t remember anything after getting the anesthetic and that helped me be more calm about it. Besides that, there were a couple of things the instructions I received weren’t that clear about, so I thought I would write a guide to clear up some of the less obvious stuff.

This is from a patient’s perspective; I have no medical training. Read all the prep instructions very carefully and if you’re not sure of anything, ask your doctor.

Planning:

  1. Ask your doctor what other options you have besides colonoscopy. FIT test is when they take a whole-bm stool sample and look for a certain type of blood can that be indicative of cancer. FIT test may be sufficient to check for colon cancer if you are over 50 and have no symptoms. Sigmoidoscopy is when the scope only goes through the bottom-left part of the colon. It also allows the scope to view up the left side of the colon. For sigmoidoscopy, you don’t have to drink a lot of liquid, but you do have to fast the day before, take a laxative the night before, and do 2 enemas in the morning. Sigmoidoscopy often doesn’t require pain meds or sedation and carries less risk of perforation, but you may have to prep again and do a full colonoscopy if the test detects something abnormal. CT or MRI scans may also aid in diagnosis. CT scans use a fair bit of radiation but they only take about fifteen minutes and are cheaper than MRI. MRI can take up to an hour and is a bit more expensive, but it doesn’t expose you to radiation.
  2. If you have periods, try to set the date of the procedure the week after your period. Period poops make for great pre-prep!
  3. I did it in December, but if I were to do it again I would do it in a warmer season because fasting, being up all night, and wearing a hospital gown are all more uncomfortable in cold weather.
  4. If you’re prone to constipation like I am, take Miralax in an electrolyte drink every day in the weeks leading up to the procedure. I’ve never had Miralax on its own work for me, but I got curious when I saw the prep involved Miralax + electrolytes, so I tried it in an electrolyte drink, and it actually worked! When the physician’s assistant (PA) told me to take it every day, I was worried it would give me too much diarrhea, but it really wasn’t bad… Miralax doesn’t give you the urgency of stimulant laxatives like senna or Dulcolax, so I found I could mostly go out and do my normal activities on it.
  5. Drink a lot of fluids. If you’re not in the habit of counting 64 ounces a day, now would be a good time to start. The cups I use hold about ten ounces of water, so 64 ounces is about 6 glasses for me (a standard measuring cup is 8 ounces). I like to use a tally counter in my pantry to keep track at home, and ranger beads if I’m on the go.
  6. Avoid red meat and heavy foods for a couple weeks before the procedure (I think this was in the instructions, so pretty basic).
  7. Ask your doctor what kind of anesthetic they’ll use during the procedure. I was worried about getting fentanyl because my dad had a horrible reaction to it, but I didn’t know that was what they were going to use until the day of, so we didn’t really have time to discuss alternatives. Luckily I didn’t have a reaction to it (they gave me Benadryl and that may have helped), but I wish I had discussed with my doctor what drugs they were going to use in advance.
Continue reading “Colonoscopy Tips”

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Rating: 4/5, good

Eversion is the mathematical problem of turning a sphere inside out without breaking it. In the 2022 book Eversion, the crew of a ship finds a mysterious structure that appears to be in the middle of that process of turning inside out. The protagonist Silas Coade, the ship’s doctor, is trapped in a Groundhog’s Day cycle of repeatedly dying and reawakening into a similar scenario a century or so later until he figures out important truths about the building, the crew, and himself.

The characters really turned me off at first, but they grew on me over time. I almost put this book down after the Russian financier of the expedition (Topolsky) said some very racist things about the Mexican explosives expert (Ramos). It reminded me of some of the more iffy parts of The Sparrow where the narration discusses the main character’s Spanish and indigenous heritage almost as a symbol of colonization or the West mixing with the exotified other rather than a mundane fact of life.

It made me wonder, “Why is scifi being weird about mestizos again? It’s strange enough that it happened once!” What furthered this impression was that Silas dismisses it weakly, only telling Topolsky not to breathe on his patient (what makes it worse is that Ramos was unconscious and undergoing cranial surgery at the time). In retrospect it makes sense because Silas didn’t want to anger his employer and his character is not the type to speak up, but since this happens so close to the beginning of the novel I wasn’t sure if Silas (or the author) shared Topolsky’s opinions about Ramos.

I wasn’t sure if I should keep reading or not, so I read reviews and watched a video by Raf Blutaxt raving about it and saying that there was a twist that plays on the main character’s sexism later in the novel, so I decided to give it a chance to see if it would get more woke. I wouldn’t really say it’s woke (the twist mentioned is a fairly minor point because the character in question is mostly out of the narrative by then) but all the characters do get a lot more sympathetic except for Topolsky, who becomes a clear villain.

Continue reading “Eversion by Alastair Reynolds”

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Rating: 5/5, excellent

Trigger warnings: anorexia, bulimia, emetophobia, child abuse, sexual abuse, CPTSD, alcoholism

I was too old for iCarly by the time it came out. I caught bits of it walking in and out while my younger brother watched it, but it seemed really mean-spirited to me, especially the character of Sam (played by Jennette McCurdy). I also thought it was reckless for a show geared towards preteens to glamorize having a web show without warning kids about the potential dangers. I was surprised to learn that McCurdy disliked being on the show, and curious as to why since she starred in it.

There were a couple of reasons Jennette didn’t like being on the show: 1, her mother pushed her into acting and she didn’t genuinely enjoy it, in fact it made her extremely anxious 2, the showrunner (The Creator aka Dan Schneider) was creepy, verbally abusive, made her do things on camera she didn’t want to do, and denied her career opportunities 3, she thought the show itself was dumb.

I suspect a lot of people are coming to this book expecting tea from behind-the-scenes of iCarly, but the book is mostly about Jennette McCurdy’s relationship to her mother and the long-lasting damage her mother caused to her mental health. In a way, this is a light read: the plot moves quickly, it’s funny, it’s extremely well-written, but in terms of content it’s VERY heavy. The things she went through, holy fucking shit… when I got to about 75% through, I started speeding up because I was too invested to stop and I just wanted to rip off the band-aid.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but the title is earned. Her mother was extremely toxic, but it was complicated because they did have their good times and Jennette grew up believing that they had a great mother-daughter relationship. The problem is that Debbie McCurdy controlled and manipulated Jennette to the point where Jennette’s first instinct was always to put her mother’s needs first. Debbie had a lot of mental issues, including hoarding and anger management. She looked to Jennette to make her happy and keep her often explosive emotions in check. She clearly felt bitter about how her life turned out and sought to live through Jennette vicariously, pushing her to achieve the dream of being an actress that her parents denied her.

Debbie McCurdy survived a bout of cancer when Jennette was two years old, and she held it over the family for years afterward. Jennette grew up in the shadow of this impending loss, and it furthered their codependence. Jennette mentions being afraid of it all her life, and then when it actually happened it ended up being a good thing for her because she could finally define her life on her own terms. Her mother’s death freed her from her abuser and made her able to live without the threat of impending loss.

Continue reading “I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy”