I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JAN/FEB 2025 EDITION)

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Starting late on this year’s series, mainly because I spent most of January either moving or being sick with a headcold. Which is as well since I only managed to read one book that month anyway. Hopefully normal service resumes as of now.

Beyond a Binary God: A Theology for Trans* Allies by Tara K. Soughers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was assigned reading for a class, and I’m glad it was, because I fully admit to being rather ignorant on the whole transgender topic to the point that I tend to stay out of debates about it. To be clear, I have always believed that trans people should be treated with love, dignity and respect – I mean, that’s just an obvious baseline to me. But a lot of the debate tends to focus either on the science of gender, the whole TERF thing, the supposed Biblical arguments against trans people, or the political trappings that these views tend to be wrapped in. I don’t know enough about it to argue on those levels, and I’m disinclined to debate about stuff I don’t know anything about. And while I’d like to educate myself, it’s hard to find reliable information or know what sources to trust, given the aforementioned political tropes and the general state of disinformation.

Anyway, Tara Soughers wrote this book after finding out that her 20-year-old daughter was actually a trans man. While Soughers understood transgenderism from an academic POV, she struggled how to process it as a parent, a trans ally and an Episcopal priest. The latter was especially tricky, as very few resources were available that looked at where trans people fit into from a theological stance, apart from conservative Christians who use existing theology to persecute everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community. So Soughers decided to write her own book to explore this issue.

Consequently, the book is less of a concrete theology and more of Soughers processing her own thoughts about her trans son, the transgender community and how they might reflect God’s image (as we all do) from a theological standpoint. I can’t say how successful she is in terms of the theology, but it’s a decent start, should anyone care to listen or follow up. I do think she makes a very strong argument that God’s creation is far too complex to be reduced to binary dualities, and that people who do not fit the binary are not problems to be solved, but gifts from God to help us gain a deeper understanding of Him and ourselves. I also learned a lot about transgender studies, so there’s that. To risk stating the obvious, what others make of this will depend on what political or theological baggage they bring to the table.


The Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I rather enjoyed Lovecraft Country, which juxtaposed Lovecraftian horror with the real-life horrors of Jim Crow America. Whereas that book employed the structure of a television series (separate self-contained stories comprising a broader story arc), The Destroyer of Worlds is more of a straightforward novel, although Ruff still juggles a number of different storylines that somehow merge by the third act.

The story kicks off with Atticus Turner and his father Horace traveling to the Swincegood plantation in North Carolina to celebrate the centenary of their ancestor Hecuba’s escape from the plantation where she was a slave (described in the prologue) by retracing her route to freedom. Things start to get weird, which may be due to Hecuba having had magical abilities.

Meanwhile, Atticus’ aunt Hippolyta is traveling to Las Vegas with teenage son Horace and her friend Letitia Dandridge to retrieve a magical item for the ghost of sorcerer Hiram Winthrop, who is currently haunting Letitia’s house. Hippolyta also intends to acquire a mystical transport unit that allows the user to travel to other planets, having done some planet hopping in the first book.

Meanwhile, her husband George – who, unbeknownst to her has been diagnosed with terminal cancer – recruits his Masonic lodge brothers to help him steal a corpse for Winthrop in exchange for a cure.

Meanwhile, Letitia’s sister Ruby, who is still using a magic potion to pass herself off as a young white woman, realises that her brother Marvin, who recently turned up on her doorstep in Chicago, may not be Marvin at all.

All of this somehow comes together in Part 3, and it more or less works, although the climax seems to come out of nowhere, as it relies on one of the story arcs that ended a third of the way through the book. Somehow it doesn’t quite match the intensity or weirdness of the first book, though that may simply be the product of The Destroyer of Worlds leveraging an established world and cast rather than building it from scratch. I also think Lovecraft Country’s episodic structure was a more effective way of juggling this many characters. Still, it’s a decent story with a solid and likeable collection of well-rounded characters, so while it may be a case of diminishing returns, it’s still entertaining.


Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Izumi Suzuki is a cult legend in Japan – a model and occasional actress in early 70s “pink” films who also wrote science fiction stories, and hanged herself at age 36. Her work was never translated into English until this volume was published in 2021, which is when I first heard of her. Between her bio and the fact that her SF was more in line with the western New Wave than the usual space operas and giant robots and whatnot, I was keen to give her a try.

The seven stories here cover a variety of scenarios: acts of rebellion in queer matriarchal utopias, cryogenic population control where the frozen can live in your dreams, aliens trying to live like Earthlings by referencing pop culture, relationship advice from talking furniture, rapidly ageing drug addicts, the strain of geo-planetary tensions on a human/alien couple, and teenagers that can’t distinguish television from reality. The common theme throughout the stories are anxiety, alienation and a general inability to relate to other people or society in general.

There’s a lot of neat ideas here, with varied execution, but pretty much all the characters are defined by a kind of extreme, hopeless nihilism that makes for rather bleak reading – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Suzuki doesn’t wallow in it to the point of self-indulgence, but still, I probably would have liked this more when I was younger. Anyway, I found it interesting, but a little goes a long way, so I’m not sure how soon I’ll try her again.

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Chairman of the bored,

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