The Books That Matter series, organized and sponsored by the Kalamazoo Gay Lesbian Resource Center, will be different from most book discussion experiences. In this series, each month a “skilled reader” who is sympathetic to if not necessarily part of the LGBT community will select a book that is important to her or him, will briefly introduce it, and will facilitate discussion of it.

The book chosen need not be by an LGBT author or, necessarily, deal directly with LGBT experience or issues, but it does need to matter to the skilled reader and, in the opinion of that reader, should matter to others.

We hope that the variety of skilled readers and their enthusiasm for the texts they choose will intrigue the curious. Certainly it will alert us to the rich range of talent that is available in the LGBT and allied communities in the Kalamazoo area.

Unless otherwise noted each session will meet at 7 pm in the lower conference room, adjacent to the offices of the Resource Center, in the CARES building at 629 Pioneer Street. For information contact Alison at (269) 349-4234.

Click here for past books and presenters.

November 15:
Dr. Christopher C. Nagle of the Department of English at Western Michigan University will introduce and discuss Emma by Jane Austen. Dr. Nagle specializes in literary and critical theory (including queer theory), Romanticism and sentimental literature, and women writers in general and Jane Austen in particular. He is the author of the soon-to-be-published Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era, and, in his spare time, acts in many of the productions of local cinematographer Chuck Bentley. His choice of Austen’s masterpiece Emma will be surprising to those who do not ordinarily think of her characters in terms of sexuality. Chris recommends the Broadview edition of Emma as being widely available in paperback and as having the most authoritative text. Copies of the Broadview edition of Emma are available at the Resource Center library.

January 17:
Jeffrey Angles, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Language and Director of the Japanese Language Program at Western Michigan University, will introduce The Great Mirror of Male Love a collection of forty short stories published in 1687 by the popular Japanese author Ihara Saihaku.
Dr. Angles notes that these tales of amorous and sexual relationships between men were written in an accessible style for the common people and are, therefore, fun to read even today. In reading the stories—and you do not need to read all of them to get the point—one sees that the feelings of the characters do not necessarily differ radically from what one might find today in modern gay relationships. It is also clear, however, that Japanese people during the seventeenth century understood their actions and relationships in ways that are sometimes radically different from how we perceive them in the contemporary West, and about that difference there is much to say.

February 21:
James Dexheimer, cataloguer in the Western Michigan University Libraries, will discuss Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon a 1991 novel about homosexuality in the over-mythologized Old West that has become a cult classic.
Spanbauer, a West Coast writer, is known for what he calls “dangerous writing,” the act of being honest with oneself on paper, and The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is dangerous writing. It concerns a berdache who lives in Excellent, Idaho, and who has many names, and who tells stories, and who asks at one point early in the novel “What’s a human being without a story?”

March 20:
Tom Seiler, President of the Board of Directors of the Resource Center and retired professor of English and Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University will lead a discussion of Was by Geoff Ryman.
The novel was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 1993 and is frequently listed among the best gay / lesbian novels. It concerns people who are linked to one another by L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Ranging across time from 1860s Kansas to California in the 1980s the novel’s characters—some real, some fictitious—include the “real” Dorothy on whom Baum’s book is based, Baum himself, the cast and crew of the film The Wizard of Oz, and John, a gay male actor with AIDs.