Hey, Teacher, Leave Them Kids Alone
Educators are crossing the line, and is WWI hot right now?
Book bans are sweeping the nation. Again. It’s once again moral panic o’clock in America, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Progress is more like a pendulum than a freight train, and there’s always going to be cyclical - and cynical - backlash to forward movement. I guess even less surprising is the fact that 4 in 10 banned books are so prohibited for the simple fact of having queer characters. I’m so glad to hear that so many folks aren’t giving up and have plans to fight back because I’m exhausted. I’d urge you to stay connected to this news and support your local library. (I’m even currently suspending my one-sided fight with the Philadelphia library after they moved the limit on reserving electronic books from 10 to 6, thereby destroying the system I created.)
None of the books below would be safe from bans these days; they all contain some combination of queer characters and/or young women finding themselves. They also contain straight men grooming young women into sexual situations and violent scenes from war, but I suppose those aren’t the kind of things book banners seem focused on trying to prevent.
In any case…
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
I Have Some Questions for You
by Rebecca Makkai (2023)
The name on everybody’s lips this reading season is I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. It’s the must-have accessory for the reading set. Those of us that have read and loved The Great Believers have had our hearts set on digging into this one for quite a while. And…it’s very good!
There are a lot of characteristics about the book which make it certifiable Zachnip. We’re set at a rustic boarding school in New Hampshire where there’s a whole lot of coming of age. (It’s always fascinating when novels are dropped into boarding schools since it’s one of the only ways you can tell coming of age stories and and have them live in a world mostly free of parental figures.) Bodie Kane, our heroine, returns to Granby, where she was sent to recover what she could academically from a broken childhood and where her roommate for a semester was murdered. Bodie is teaching a mini-mester of classes including Film Studies and also Podcasting. Can you imagine such a thing? Her Podcasting students start to dig into the murder from Bodie’s past and begin to confirm her suspicions that the person put away for the murder may not have been guilty at all.
I’ll be haunted by this one for a little bit, but do note that this book is not a crackling mystery in the normal sense. Bodie spends just as much time dwelling on the mystery of (her) life as she does on the rekindled mystery of her classmate’s murder. We meander into issues of #MeToo, cancel culture, and how true crime obsessions are rotting all of our brains. (True!) For the whole of the novel, the narrator speaks to an unknown recipient of her thoughts, for whom, as it turns out, she has some questions. But really, she has some questions about complicity for the reader, too.
Read it if you like: Coming of age, boarding school drama, the world of podcasting, keeping up with your reading friends, unearthing your desire to take cool classes you never had the option to take in high school or college.
The Rabbit Hutch
by Tess Gunty (2022)
I almost didn’t pick this one up. I did for two reasons: 1. It was the one book standing in between my completist status for The Tournament of Books, and 2. I wanted to see what kind of book could have beaten two other books I loved All This Could be Different and Town of Babylon for the National Book Award. Plus, the description of the book is as follows:
The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest.
This all sounds very dry and sad. Having grown up in a town that industry has left behind, I usually avoid poverty porn. But, as is happening more and more these days, my instincts were proven wrong again. The Rabbit Hutch is not only profound and nuanced, but also extremely bizarre.
The book feels a bit like a connected ring of short stories that stretched itself into a novel. (Compliment) I loved that it never condescended to the small town where it was set or to the people in it, all of whom burst off the page struggling to find themselves. For a novel whose themes center on the breakdown of institutional safety nets and how the extraction economy is slowly killing us all, it’s also very funny in parts. It’s a worthy award winner and very much worth your time.
Read it if you like: Dark humor, small town vibes, books about the way we live now in America, a focus on the neglected, the Midwest
The World and All That It Holds
by Aleksander Hemon (2023)
*Carrie Bradshaw voice* As I was watching All Quiet on the Western Front and reading this novel at the same, I couldn’t help but ask myself was culture these days World War One or World War FUN***?
The World and All That It Holds - a title that I have repeated correctly approximately zero times - just goes to show you how I’ll pick up books with queer characters despite the other thematic elements. I would normally not be interested in a book about WWI, but if you add 2 queer guys navigating their own conflicts between battles, I’m in! I did experience slight pause when I realized that this author wasn’t part of the community, but I’m happy to report he writes our soldiers with tender care and obvious research. (I’m not the kind of reader who demands that only queer people can write about queer people, though I do wish more queer authors were able to make a living in the publishing industry.)
Our main protagonist gets home (Sarajevo) from college (Vienna) and is forced to take over his father’s pharmacy rather than go out and see the world. However, one day he chases down a soldier he kissed, and he gets his attention just feet away from where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was being assassinated. Like a gay Balkan Forest Gump, this guy is right there when history happens. This kicks off a wartime journey where he makes a chosen family on his way from Galicia to Shanghai. Love and life happen in between, like it always does. Another testament to the fact that no matter what history you prevent folks from reading, we’ve always been here.
One filagreed touch about this book I loved was that the prose was laced with other languages (like Spanjol or Ladino) without translation, and you have to figure it out by yourself. It’s beautiful and mysterious that way.
Read it if you like: Sex scenes in mud pits, wartime drama, learning about parts of Europe that had different names once upon a time, Jews/Muslims falling in love, sad stuff.
***Note that this book is not what I would call fun! I was just making a pun.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Maybe you’d rather a boarding school YA romcom where no one is murdered? I would get that. This one’s got twins!
Perhaps you need a primer on why drag culture is so important and why the far right fears it so much that it wants to eradicate it? Philadelphia famous bloggers take us on a journey.
I’ve never wondered what Sontag would think about a camp book about Camp, but you might.
Until next time…happy reading!