So I decided to keep a running list of all the books I've read this year. But I think it's a heck of a lot easier in the long run to just keep one post and add to it rather than try to write individual reviews for things. Longer reviews are linked where they're available.

( Read, 2009: )

I'm going to attempt to be brief, because I am hard at work defaulting on my h/d hols fic DDDDDD: and coming down with my annual sore throat, sigh. D: But in the middle of this I have been updating twitter non-stop to flail my heart out over Nero Wolfe, because this series, even with flaws I emphatically acknowledge, is more or less delightful.

It also may be the most unintentionally homoerotic thing I have ever read in print.

I spammed twitter so much last night about Nero Wolfe that I was in near danger of becoming one of those nightmares of your follow list, so I have now created a new twitter account entirely for the purpose of giving the world play-by-play slash commentary on the forty-plus books in the Nero Wolfe mystery series. Oh, I know. It's too thrilling. I heard your heart leap from here. there are like. 50-something tweets there now, mostly dealing with just the latest 2 books i have read at this point, so you know it is only going to get worse. Fair warning.

Anyway, the all-Nero-&-Archie, all-the-time twitter is @swelltoga, unless I think of something better.

(Though really, I don't see what is better, because "Swell toga" is how Archie refers to the dressing gown that Nero got him as a gift a few years back. That Archie refers to himself as getting "dolled up" in, with no other elaboration. STRAIGHT MEN DO NOT GIVE EACH OTHER DRESSING GOWNS. omg I bet it was canary yellow. I BET NERO MADE SURE IT WAS ENJOYABLE TO LOOK AT, BECAUSE REX STOUT SAID THAT NERO LIKES TO SURROUND HIMSELF WITH THINGS HE ENJOYS LOOKING AT. INCLUDING ARCHIE, OBVS.)

ANYWAY YOU GUYS THESE BOOKS ARE THE SLASHIEST THING I HAVE READ SINCE HIKARU NO GO. THEY ARE EVEN SLASHIER THAN JEEVES & WOOSTER. THEY ARE EVEN SLASHIER THAN HOUSE. AND STEPHEN FRY AND HUGH LAURIE IN GENERAL. AND NOTHING IS SLASHIER THAN JEEVES & WOOSTER, HOUSE, OR HUGH LAURIE AND STEPHEN FRY IN GENERAL. except, apparently, ( Archie Goodwin's epic, repressed homosexual desire for Nero Wolfe. )

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I am fascinated by Archie's jealousy in each of these three instances, because in each case, the jealousy seems increasingly textual and not subtextual. Rex Stout himself was a straight man with a big family, but I really believe that with or without his conscious awareness, he wrote a contextually homosexual relationship into these novels. Perhaps such an emotional context is to be expected given the natural relationship dynamics that occur when two people live together, regardless of gender. Perhaps the homoerotic element is just distracting me from the emotional 'odd coupling' of Nero and Archie, but given the physical nature of Archie's male gaze, that seems unlikely.

I have had no success researching studies of the homoerotic aspects of this text so far, but that could be because I haven't dug very deeply. I am surprised that I have not found more, both because these books are extremely popular, having never gone out of print since their initial mid-century publication, and because I would describe them as *incredibly* homoerotic. Perhaps it's that mystery writing in general has not had its share of queer-lit analysis. I could be completely wrong, I have no experience in this whatsoever. But, for example, I am thinking about Agatha Christie's Mysterious Mr. Quinn, a character I am convinced was written to be coded as homosexual, but I have never found any type of persuasive writing/research on this point, in academia or elsewhere. I've heard that Poirot can be read as homosexual, but I've never read an invested treatment of this type, nothing along the lines of "Watson was a woman."

Speaking to both the lack of critique and to the lack of a fandom, I think the primary inhibitor to both is Nero's size. There is a whole lot that is wrong with this series, starting and ending with its misogyny, but the ostensible size-phobia that is both represented and undermined by Nero's character is a key part of the text. I love that a homoerotic reading necessarily involves a size-positive reading of Archie's fascination with Nero's physique. But there's also a level of difficulty there. I have seen it reading fanfiction so far, where writers get to the part where Nero & Archie have sex and then it's like, so vague as to be completely useless, or just handwaved altogether. I would really enjoy fanfic that fixates on Archie's fixation with Nero's size, and explores it more fully, because a) god, it is so HOT, and b) god, it is so necessary. and c) it is so in-keeping, I think, with the direction the books take themselves.

The other thing that might inhibit a homoerotic reading of the text, as well as slash, is the age difference: in the notes for Fer-de-Lance, Stout writes that Archie is 34 and Nero is 56. But age seems to be completely arbitrary in the of series, since Archie and Nero seem to stay exactly the same ages despite the fact that the novels cover 4 decades from the 30s to the 70s. Plenty of people have got past that.

Possibly, too, there's the fact that one of them is considerably older than the median slash range, more like a Boston Legal-ish age dynamic (which, by the way, TOTALLY PROVES MY POINT! CANON! MARRIED! CANON! sorry, just saying.) that appeals less to the type of audience who would read homoerotic elements into the series.

But yeah, so, seriously, where the hell are the homotextual readings of this series? Or is it assumed to be SO OBVIOUS that these characters are gay that everyone got over it a long time ago? Am I commenting on something that is *so* 1943? (Note: I think there is a possibility I might be. In her intro to Champagne for One, Lena Horne writes of Archie's romantic status as "deceptively 'unrequited.'" And the coy way she throws in 'deceptively' there is, to me, so far inexplicable unless she's tipping her hat to the awareness that Archie's *real* romantic status is: Happily married. Except when Nero flirts.)

With that in mind, I guess my other question would be: honestly, is there any way to read jealousy in this context that is *not* at least partly erotic in nature? Because I am trying it on every way I can pin it, and it just doesn't stick unless Archie's jealousy is of the possessive, unwilling-to-share, unable-to-successfully-acknowledge-his-feelings, fandom cliche variety.

Have i mentioned this series is TOTALLY FANDOM? no seriously, it's like, reading this books you get the feeling that there's some other invisible canon somewhere that Rex Stout dreams up in his sleep, and during the day he just writes massive amounts of fanfic for the canon, turns around, and publishes it as fic. EVERYTHING feels like fanfic. It's crazy. DON'T MAKE ME START QUOTING. *flails uselessly*

Oh, dear. I will be brief next time. There is too much slash in these books to encounter with anything like brevity.