Pride Reads, June 8 2023
Pride 2023 reading (books)
by Carl Bettis
For Pride Month 2023, any book I start reading this month will be by an LGBTQIA+ writer. The two I'm currently reading are by dead authors, but fortunately there's a plethora of good books by living LGBTQIA+ writers as well. From recent reads, I can recommend Jeremy C. Shipp's The Merry Dredgers and Hailey Piper's Queen of Teeth.
Thoughts on my current reading:
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
I realize now that many Oscar Wilde quotes I've seen come from this book. But Lord Henry says most of the quotable bits, and he's not a person one should take advice from, except maybe on wine selection. He reminds me of Hannibal Lecter (in the series, not the movies): what we'd now call a sociopath, recklessly experimenting with other people's lives. Even though Lord Henry is probably a self insert, it's a self-mocking one, and we shouldn't take his beliefs to be those of his creator. The narrator's, maybe: "There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceaased to love." I don't know yet whether the anti-Semitism belongs to the author or only to the characters.
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927 - 1979
Every once in a while I'll pick up the complete poems of some writer I know from a few pieces that have been in countless anthologies. Sometimes it turns out those few over-familiar poems are the only decent ones they wrote. (I'm looking at you, John Skelton.) With Elizabeth Bishop, it's more like, "Why have I never seen this one before? And why wasn't she a Nobel laureate?" I have a new addition to my pantheon of creators.
