"The Four Profound Weaves" by R.M. Lemberg is a slippery read, short but not fast. It feels like an oral story recently captured on the page in the structure of Lemberg's sentences and paragraphs, the repetition of certain words. Like a recently uncovered folktale, it's patterns and rhythms and truths that only feel modern because of how central one protagonist's grappling with the truth of his gender at a late age (both protagonists are in their sixties) is to how he moves through the world around him and awareness of gender, both with respect to trans people and issues and gender beyond the limitations of the binary, is so in this immediate moment. But I think it's only the directness that is modern, as scholars of queer history continually find evidence of trans and non-binary lives not being, for lack of a better term, a modern development. Consequently, there are stories dating back to the oral tradition that reflect that, albeit not always directly or in the language we recognize.
Sometimes "good" feels like the wrong word to describe a reading experience, not because the book wasn't, but because the stronger thing about it is how it's interesting, in structure or voice or content. "The Four Profound Weaves" was definitely interesting.