Alma Matters
Be careful who you meet early on in your life, they just might influence you forever.
This newsletter arrives with fortuitous timing, as many of us will return home for the holidays and once again be near to those people who unknowingly set us on a course of becoming who we are. Maybe this year you will confront them with gratitude, maybe with chilling silence, perhaps with a hug and a look directly in their eyes as you make them deeply uncomfortable by telling them how much they mean to you. Maybe you’ll end up having awkward sex with them, which happens in at least one of the books below, but I won’t say which one.
I mention this only because it’s a running theme in the novels below - the pathos regarding the people in our past. I don’t plan to tie up all of these newsletters up in a tidy theme, but the books I’m talking about this week happen to fall into one - meeting people early on in your life who have a profound effect on everything that happens after. The past isn’t even past, baby. Sometimes the past DMs you when you least expect it!
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)
Remember that episode of Sex and City when the girls are at brunch and Charlotte suggests that they should just all be each other’s soulmates? Down with boyfriends, up with girlfriends! The eternal optimist of the group proposes that they cast romantic love to the wind and celebrate the deep connection of friendship - a different kind of tenderness and intimacy, but capable of being a love story nonetheless! (Warning: Do not watch And Just Like That if you want to see how this all turns out years later.)
There are never enough stories about how our friendships, in all their complexity, hassles, and joys, end up being among the great love stories of our lives. I have good news for you, though, because Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is one of my very favorite novels of the year and is a celebration of platonic friendship as a sacred love worth protecting, and it centers a man and a woman no less. I can’t recall reading a book that does that. Sadie and Sam run into each other in the dead of winter in an Ivy League square in Boston and become reacquainted after a period of estrangement. They’ve got a complex past with one another, and more importantly, they’ve got a future (that will involve more estrangement - friendship can be hard!) Together they become partners in a creative endeavor, designing and developing video games, and their destinies intersect to generate alchemy.
Note: I am not a gamer. I do no understand videogames that follow Super Mario Bros. 3 chronologically. I still loved this novel. The games bind the friends and story together, but the rest of the novel takes place over the next decades and dig deep into identity, disability, forgiveness, connection, and non-romantic love. The novel is fun and wistful, and it’ll make you want to pick up the phone and call your friends. Can’t recommend this one highly enough.
Read it if you like: video game nerds, mixed race families, platonic relationships and the hot guys who come between them, disability narratives, tearing up and holding a book to your chest when you finish it
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
by R.F. Kuang (2022)
Ugh. This title. It’s giving Birdman. Fun story, though. I was recently at an event honoring local leaders and I got to have a quick conversation with the keynote speaker, a local State Senator. His speech was about collective power, and he employed the rhetorical trick of taking us through the etymology of power to get to convey why it’s so important. (Latin, potere, to be able.) He asked me what I thought, and I used my few moments of face time to launch into a pitch about Babel, a novel about the power of words, their etymology, and how language and translations are tools of colonialism. He backed away slowly and didn’t indicate whether he’d read the book. He should. It’s great!
First, this book is not a Young Adult book, even though the cover does give a whiff of YA whimsy and the protagonists are young folks. Robin is rescued from his home in Canton in the early 1800s by a professor after everyone is his family dies from an ultra-contagious flu. He’s brought to England where he’s trained by said professor, whose intentions are increasingly murky, to take advantage of his aptitude for learning language to become a translation student at Oxford’s prestigious and mysterious Royal Institute of Translation, aka Babel. While there he meets a cohort of students from similar extractions and varied locales, and many twists and turns follow.
This book is a doorstop brimming with capital-I ideas. It’s almost too full. The British and Chinese begin a war over opium, and the students have to confront their own complicity. There’s Magical Realism elements, as silver bars hold the meaning of words within them. There are a lot of very interesting lessons in etymology, if that’s your thing. It is mine, and I’m thrilled to have learned where ciao comes from. I loved this book and how it grapples with translation, revolution, organized resistance, and magic(k).
Read it if you like: the intricacies of language, know it alls, willing suspension of disbelief, anti-colonial narratives, moods a la Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Tell Me How to Be
by Neel Patel (2022)
This one is a stunner for many reasons: shifting narrators from the same family, excellent ruminating on race and sexuality, and a canon entry for queer hot mess characters. Akash and his mother Renu tell their stories on parallel tracks, and like ships in the night (also running parallel) they always seem to pass one another without connecting. When Renu decides to sell the family home after the passing of her husband, Akash must make the trip home from California to Illinois to confront his demons. But his mother has demons too. The family has to learn how to demon hunt together.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons why this novel stood out to me. I seek out and read queer stories, and when they are accompanied by straight stories, well, I usually merely endure those. (Sorry, allies! Love you!) But this novel is the rare case where the straight story is just as compelling as the queer one, and they couple to create something really special. I loved both of their flashback arcs that focused on the ones that got away - or did they?
If this story sounds a bit maudlin, I can tell you it’s also quite funny and there are happy endings (zing!) amidst the melancholy revelations. I read it several months ago, and I still think about it often.
Read it if you like: family sagas, first times, wistful regrets, South Asian stories, moms who kind of like their gays sons a tiny bit more than their straight sons culture
LIGHTNING ROUND
Experience kindred spirits who are so personally bad for each other but also so professionally good for each other.
Enjoy the splendor of friends in translation - this time in Korea - and never think of Kylie Minogue the same way again.
Celebrate that your friendships are not as toxic as this one that may or may not lead to…murder.
Until next time…Happy reading!