A review by floral_heckler
Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M. Lavery

challenging reflective medium-paced

4.0

I’m not sure how to rate this book. It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve finished. I love and respect the form, but I didn’t want to read all of the essays. Some of them were so specific in what they were referencing, but didn’t explain what they were referencing, and so I couldn’t really understand them. They made me feel like I’d skipped the required reading before a class, and then showed up to a lecture and was appropriately befuddled. But then, I would just skip them, nothing more or less than that. It felt right for such a deeply personal collection of essays, that some would be so personal that I wouldn’t “get” them, because I wasn’t familiar with the work that the author was basing their whole essay around, or riffing off of, or creating a fake dialogue between fake characters. 

The prose reminded me of poetry, or Shakespeare, in the sense that I didn’t always understand what each of the individual words meant (or even some of the sentences), but if I stuck along with it and kept reading I could pick up on the flow of the words, and a meaning would arise from that flow. 

I also REALLY liked that so much of the text alluded to in this book was the Bible itself. Seeing a queer and trans person reference the Bible and demonstrate their deep knowledge and understanding of a text that is so often weaponized against the LGBT community felt very right to me. It demonstrated that queer people and the Bible / Christianity aren’t naturally at conflicts with each other—that’s a fabrication of Christians who happen to also hate gay people and weaponize the Bible against us. There are a lot of stories in the Bible that can resonate with anyone, even (especially?) a trans person. 

In conclusion: it was weird, it was confusing. I liked it.