Even though I’ve already read at least one book this year reporting that social media will destroy us all, sending us all through mental health deterioration while it unravels democracy, I’ll likely remain on Facebook forever because of its purest expression and sole remaining utility: the neighborhood group page. My small, super liberal town 5 minutes outside of Philadelphia has a very active page, seemingly set up for older conservative folks to complain about something and everyone else in town to subsequently pile on them in the comments section.
One recent circular conversation involved a person taking a picture of a (locally and famously festive) house that put up its holiday decorations in the first week of November, and saying “A little early for this, don’t you think?” Reader, the townfolk went IN on this person. Why are you taking pictures of people’s houses? Why does it matter to you people put up holiday decorations*? Why are you always so negative? (Complete with screencapped receipts of former negative comments throughout the year from the original poster.) Then the backlash to the backlash. Rinse, repeat. Hundreds of comments. May it never end!
By the way, everyone should be allowed their own calculus for when they allow the holidays to enter their lives. Around here, we put up the tree and various other indoor/outdoor decor the weekend before Thanksgiving, weather permitting, and holiday music is allowed either after Thanksgiving or my birthday, whichever comes first. But you do you!
Other insane interactions on our Facebook group involved a recently painted crosswalk to celebrate LGBTQ+ communities. (At 300 comments and counting.) Some folks believing they represented the silent majority were concerned about their taxes contributing to a sense of acceptance and community. (Fear not, it was a Girl Scout project!) This was reminiscent of last summer when someone was concerned about how much of her tax dollars went towards the production of a poster for Juneteenth. The poster, Linda, has since been banned from the group, but her name and spirit are routinely invoked as an admonition.
We won’t even get into Crabcakegate 2022.
In any case, the book recommendations below on this episode are all by authors whose previous work(s) I’ve loved.
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Family Meal: A Novel
by Bryan Washington (2023)
Bryan Washington seems to me like our new Haruki Murakami. You know what you’re going to get with Murakami - variations on the themes of jazz, cats, emotionally repressed Japanese men who take forever to express themselves, the occasional devastating loss that leaves people alienated and lonely. With Washington much smaller oeuvre we’re starting to fall into some key identifiers within his work - a sad loss or abandonment, queer men learning to love their own bodies, complicated queer friendships, amazing food, Houston, Japan, and cobbling together chosen families. I’m not complaining. Apart from Texas, this is basically exactly what I want!
After he broke our hearts in Memorial, he returns with his second novel Family Meal. Estranged friends are reunited after each of them goes through their own particular tragedies. One returns to Houston from Los Angeles after the death of a longtime partner. He’s lost and putting his life back together slowly when he runs into his former best friend with whom he grew up after his family took him in as a young child. This other friend lives aimlessly as he works in his family bakery after the death of his father. Their reunion is spiky and sad, but as we learn more about their situations through flashbacks and multiple points of view, we may be headed towards a life-saving resolution for both.
Also, there are ghosts.
What I love about Washington is that he’s able to explore the trauma in queer lives without allowing that to be the defining feature of his characters. Everyone feels fleshed out like a real person, and just like real life tragedies as we know them, there are moments of inspiration and levity and real love. He’s also a master of sense of place. I joked above about Texas, but the way Washington brings Houston alive - the gentrification, the immigrant communities, the food scene - is really something special. I can only read so many books set in NYC every year, so I’m always thrilled to stumble in novels that revel in their setting. And more books about complicated friendships, please!
This book is incredible. No matter how we try to move on, there are some things we can never leave behind.
Read it if you like: delicious food descriptions, queer sexual situations, gay bars, hauntings, holding a book close to your chest and sighing once you close it.
The Bee Sting
by Paul Murray (2023)
The girls are really dropping doorstops this year. That’s the first thing you need to know about The Bee Sting - it’s clocking in somewhere between 600 and 700 pages, depending on your method of reading. This novel is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it’s not even the first book about the late 2000s Irish economic crash I’ve read in the past couple months. It’s also by the author who brought us the tragicomic masterpiece Skippy Dies more than a decade ago. I remember loving that book, but I have no idea how it holds up! Feels like it should have been made into a movie or something by now. That was also about 700 pages. Paul Murray has a lot to say.
He really does, though. This is a book bursting with BIG ideas about the way we live now, and lots of them. It’s about a family falling apart at the seams as they go from rich to not very rich at all. It’s darkly funny, but this is not an Arrested Development tonal situation. The father in the family tries his hardest to hold the family together as the car repair garage and sales lot he inherited from his dad hurdles toward bankruptcy. The mother, used to a certain standard of living, reels as money flies out the door and her choices come back to haunt her. The daughter is drinking her way through the Irish scholastic equivalent of her senior year before leaving for university in Dublin, the sooner she never sees her family again, the better. And the son is making friends of ill repute online because no one else will talk to him.
Of course, we travel back in time, deep into people’s memories to figure out exactly how arrived here. Just when I thought this would be my book exclusively about straight people for the quarter, queerness sneaks into the story in a couple of clever ways. I may have taken issue with some of them, but I’m sitting with that. It’s also maybe a climate change book? Like I said, a lot of ideas are tossed around in here, and even though not everything landed for me, I mean that as a compliment. I think it would be a good Booker Prize winner, for what it’s worth!
Note: There is a stylistic choice that I hated SO much in this book that I felt like flinging it across the room, but I’m very glad I stuck with it even if I maintain that the choice is very, very bad.
Read it if you like: family sagas, Irish history, multiple viewpoints of the same storylines, long books that feel like a full meal, fortune tellers
10 Things That Never Happened
by Alexis Hall (2023)
Alexis Hall identifies as a “Genrequeer writer of kissing books,” and my goodness, are they prolific. They release a couple of books a year, and I think that’s neat. For those of us who crave a queer romance once in a while, it’s comforting to know that Hall is proliferating a seemingly never ending source of them that we can dip into when we need them. Far as I can tell there are several different segments of the AlexisHalliverse, and the one in which this latest book resides is slightly related to the recent Boyfriend Material series, which I’ve loved. (One of the characters here is a schoolmate of one of the gents in Boyfriend Material? Ok!)
And so, we’re in jolly old England where our hero works in a northern Bed Bath & Beyond surrogate, and things are not going swimmingly. His staff is lovable but messy, and the math is not mathing as of late. On top of it all, he’s not exactly passionate about his vocation. It’s not a surprise when his boss in London summons him to the main office for a dressing down and a performance improvement plan. While on a tour of the flagship store, he ends up getting fired by said boss and also accidentally getting a concussion which gives him the opportunity to fake amnesia. After all, you can’t get fired if you don’t remember being dismissed. Having no one to check him out of the hospital so far from home, the boss takes him home to monitor his condition. Will absolutely non-HR-compliant sparks fly? You’ll have to read to find out.
If we’re talking tropes, this is both a grumpy/sunshine and enemies/lovers romance. We pretty much know how this ends, and that’s the beauty of reading romances! I will say I was shocked how moved I was by the last couple pages - that was some emotionally manipulative sleight of hand that I appreciated. (Again, this is why we read romances!) A good bonus is that in a year that feels devoid of new queer Christmas-related romances, this one has enough holiday themes and parties that it definitely counts as one. Go ahead, get cozy!
Read it if you like: sexual tension, crazy families, the beyond in Bed Bath & Beyond, Boyfriend and Husband Material, Christmas romance.
LIGHTNING ROUND
My own personal telenovela is the exorbitantly excessive The Morning Show which was more bonkers than ever in its third season.
I miss Buzzfeed News booklists, and this oral history article took me back to such a specific time in ridiculous and wonderful internet history. They won’t make them like that anymore.
By the time you read this newsletter, the Tournament of Books longlist might be live?