Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book that was turned into a musical.
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

This book is a mood. The narrator can be in a flower garden, and she can make the lilacs sound sinister and the azaleas downright hostile.

The narrator's future husband comments on her "unusual and lovely" name, but we never find out what it is. Du Maurier said later that she could never come up with a name that fit. But her namelessness seems nicely symbolic: especially at the beginning, she feels like nonentity, terrified of everyone, completely overshadowed by Maxim's first wife, Rebecca. We're told that Rebecca died in a drowning accident, but from the start it feels like there's more to the story.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, is hostile to the narrator, usually in passive-aggressive ways. She briefly pretends friendliness in order to give "advice" that leads the narrator into humiliation, then tries to taunt her into suicide. In large and small ways, she reminds the newcomer that she can never replace the legendary Rebecca.

*SPOILERS FOLLOW*

There's really no way to discuss this book without talking about the ending. At first I thought this was going to be a "Jane Eyre" situation where the first wife was locked in the attic. But no, Rebecca really is dead - because Maxim murdered her. The last part of the book is all about how Rebecca was a Bad Woman who deserved to die. She was constantly unfaithful, and she told Maxim she was pregnant with another man's child. The people who know about the murder (the narrator, Maxim's agent, even the magistrate) are entirely focused on protecting Maxim from the consequences of his actions. This is made to seem okay with the revelation that Rebecca had her own reason to deliberately goad Maxim into killing her.

Even before hearing the reason, the narrator's reaction to learning of the murder is relief. She'd been obsessed with the idea that Maxim still loved Rebecca, and she's thrilled to learn that he hated Rebecca, and loves his wife instead, yay! Du Maurier's descriptive powers are amazing, but I'm thinking this guy's love isn't such a prize, and the narrator seems more of nonentity than before.

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Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book by a blind or visually impaired author.
Agent of Change, by Ronald Linson.

This story is loaded with sensory detail. For instance, a character wears camouflage  on a rooftop with no greenery around, so he stands out "like a road flare." Elsewhere: "His clothes feel pink, blue, and green, and the sound of his breathing smells like roses and vinegar."

This is a brief novella (about 50 pages) where the narrator has been hired to travel back in time to stop a mass shooting - without harming the shooter. As often happens with time travel stories, the changes create complications down the road. The twist at the end makes perfect satisfying sense.

Popsugar Writing Challenge category: A book written for National Novel Writing Month.
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal

This story, the start of a series, is billed as "Pride and Prejudice with magic." There are a lot of familiar tropes from Regency romance and Austen: parents scouting for husbands for their daughters, titled nobility trying to hide how broke they are, social climbers, and the occasional scoundrel. But this version of England also has "glamour," the ability to magically create illusions, including images, sounds, and even smells. 

The heroine is a literal plain Jane, skilled at art, music, and glamour. Her sister, Melody, is less talented, but sought after for her beauty. At first they're interested in the same man. But then another man comes on the scene, and another - and, inevitably, one of them is a scoundrel. One realistic touch: when Jane and another woman try to expose the scoundrel, people are quick to believe his denials, even when Jane offers tangible proof. Jane's magical abilities are essential to the resolution, but the core of the story is always the characters' emotional lives, not just the magic. 

This being a romance, Jane winds up with the right man, and other characters' storylines get tied up in a satisfying way. As for the scoundrel, I think it's possible he may show up in future books.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book whose title starts with X.
Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets, edited & translated by Marlon L. Fick & Francisca Esteve.

This is what I love about the Popsugar challenge: some of the books I need for it are already on my shelf. And others are books, like this one, that I would never have thought to pick up. I love poetry, but I know zip about Catalan language or literature. What I found was a book of very accessible, interesting, beautiful poems. The title (pronounced zhay-zha) is a Catalan word for a rare type of wheat that the editors use to symbolize beauty and excellence.

The volume includes ten men poets and four women. We get Teresa Pascual's poems of rural life, Celia Sanchez-Mustich's arguments with God, and my favorite, Manuel Forcano's love poems.

You feel the body
like a mountain that gives its stones
to make into houses. You feel the tenderness
of a statue in the hands of an archaeologist.
The joy of a sundial
at dawn.

There are also a lot of poems about poetry, like Rosa Font Massot's "All the Seas:"

One book is all books:
light of the cosmos, letters of thousands
of existing alphabets, lost or not yet come to be.
One voice is the voice of all those who do not speak,
the voice of the forgotten, the voiceless:
it is yours and mine.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A memoir that explores queerness.
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto, by George M. Johnson

This book is aimed at teens, particularly Black and/or queer boys who are trying to understand themselves and their world. George grew up stereotypically "feminine," hung out with girls, and had other queer people in his extended family. The whole family had his number early on.

And yet, no one normalized it for him by saying, "It's okay if you like boys." He had to figure out dating and sex in the silence of the closet, and he describes an early sexual experience that was physically painful. He also describes the tangle of confusion, betrayal and shame when he was molested by an older cousin (now deceased), and how this too was something he thought he had to keep silent about.

For years George fantasized about being a girl, because that was the only way he could picture being with a boy romantically or sexually. He finally figured put that he isn't trans - he just had no model for a gay relationship.

The book-banning crowd is inevitably upset by the graphic sexual descriptions, but part of his reason for writing it was to demystify, to stop treating sexuality as unspeakable. Adolescents are going to think about sex, and in his own early experiences he had no information to draw from except porn, which isn't exactly known for being realistic. There are undoubtedly teenage boys right now hiding away copies of this book, thrilled to learn that there are other boys with the same feelings - and looking forward to talking about it out loud.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book set 24 years before your birth.
Code Talker, by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila.

I had an easy time with this category. If you can't find a good book set during World War 2, you aren't trying.

The memoir covers Nez's whole life, not just the WW2 years, but that's the focus. Nez grew up herding sheep on the reservation in New Mexico, and like many Native children, he was forced to go to a boarding school where English and Christianity were mandatory. The boys defiantly spoke Navajo in secret - and their perfect fluency in two languages was what made the code possible.

The code itself had a simple concept, but was kept safe by the fact that pretty much nobody outside the Navajo Nation spoke the language. It was declassified in the 60s, and is included i the book. Each English letter was represented by one to three Navajo words that started with the at letter in English; for instance, the letter "A" became the Navajo word for apple, axe, or ant; a code talker might use them interchangeably in the same word. Important words also had Navajo code terms (eg, the Navajo word for potato meant hand grenade.) The Japanese eventually learned there was a Navajo connection to the code, and they tried but never succeeded in capturing a code talker.

Nez doesn't hold back on describing the horrors of war in the Pacific. The code talkers were there in the foxholes, exchanging messages on trop movements and trying to stay alive. Nez describes what sounds like PTSD after his discharge, and he used traditional healing and rituals to find his way back.

Despite a difficult start in life and some traumatic experiences in the war, Nez comes across as optimistic, proud of his country and what he did to help preserve it.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about video games.
The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, edited by Daniel Goldberg & Linus Larsson

This is a collection of essays on video games and gamers. Some pieces are about game content, such as religious/spiritual aspects and game architecture vs. real-world architecture. The more interesting ones (to me, anyway) are about people.

The book came out in 2016, in the wake of the misogynist harassment scandals that rocked the gaming world. The collection includes essays by some of the women who were targeted, including one who saw people become outraged at the success of her very non-traditional video game about depression. Two others discuss the spectrum of sexism they encountered, from intrusive attempts at online flirting, all the way to rape threats, death treats, and doxing. Other essays discuss racial aspects: harassment in multiplayer games, playing the "bad guy" as an Arab gamer, and even trying to find an avatar with realistic-looking Black hair.

Inevitably, with video games, the subjects of sex and violence come up. One essay notes that while video games are endlessly creative in portraying violence, sex tends to be treated only as an achievement or reward for making the "right" in-game choices. In another essay, two authors discuss how they can't dismiss all criticism of violence in video games - but they can't resist that dopamine rush either.

The underlying theme of the collection seems to be about gaming becoming more expansive - about who gets to be called a gamer, about what games can do. A video game simulating the effects of severe depression may seem like a strange choice, yet it opened up new worlds in gaming.

Popsugar Reading Challenge category: A book about pirates.
​Grania: She-King of the Irish Seas, by Morgan Llewelyn.

This novel is based on what's known of the life of Grainne (Grania) Ni Mhaille, sometimes anglicized to "Grace O'Malley," legendary Irish pirate and clan leader of the 16th century.

For a book about pirates, this one spends a lot of time on dry land, dealing with political intrigues, clan alliances and feuds. Grania is a clan chief's daughter, and she steps in as clan leader after his death. The Irish struggle against English colonialism dominates the story, and drives Grania and other seafarers from trading to raiding.

Grania's personal life is equally complex: two bad marriages, a few love affairs, and a second-in-command, Tigernan, who loves her unreservedly. Grania's children are raised mostly apart from her, and while this is often the case for men in her position, it seems to affect her more as they reach adulthood as almost strangers.

Grania appears to view herself as unique; she doesn't put other women in her crew or agitate for more women in power in Ireland. But she's endlessly fascinated with what she's heard of her fellow "she-king," England's Elizabeth I. The whole book builds toward their inevitable meeting.