Introducing Book 'Em, Zach-o
An outdated and tortured bit of wordplay for a modern look at reading.
Welcome to my newsletter, where I plan to dole out the book recommendations that many folks in my life ask for on a pretty regular basis. As a person of book nerd experience, I’m often asked to tell people with vastly different reading tastes what they should be reading. So, what I’ll do on a semi-regular basis is let you know what I’ve loved or appreciated lately, tell you why, and give you some contextual hints around whether it might be a Book For You, or not.
My book selections, much like my life choices, tend to run a bit on the queer side. I just simply can’t suspend my willing disbelief long enough to spend time in worlds where there isn’t some kind of queerness. Of course, I read books by straight authors and books with straight characters. (No one is perfect.) Anyway…
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
The Town of Babylon
by Alejandro Varela (2022)
As the saying goes, you can’t go home again. But as a person who derives from a small, provincial town in Northeastern Pennsylvania where much of family still lives, I know for a fact that many of us have to go home again more and more as you age, often with startling regularity. Such is the case with Andrés, the main character of The Town of Babylon which is a (definitely) wistful (maybe) roman à clef on going home again to see the people you love when you no longer have anything in common with the people you grew up around in your formative days. It’s also a Trojan Horse for a treatise on the suburbs and their public health effects, for better or worse, on everyone around them. If that sentence sounds boring to you, I assure you that there are so many spoonfuls of medicine in this novel that you don’t even realize the medicine is going down.
Andrés is a queer son of first-generation, Latine immigrants whose relationship with everyone around him from his hometown is fraught with complexities. He comes home with the intent to help his mom take care of his ailing father, and all of them are still in mourning after the untimely passing of his lone brother. He’s also using the trip as an opportunity to escape some tension that he’s experiencing with his own partner of many years. Despite his reluctance, he decides to attend his class reunion of his (very white) high school where he encounters a gaggle of Trump supporters, engages for the first time in over a decade his now-married-to-a-woman ex-lover, and clocks the absence of his closet childhood friend.
Andres reconnects with people he's lost - including his best friend who is in a mental health institution and reflects on the ways in which suburbia abuses people who (racially) look different, who immigrate from other places, and who are queer. But it’s also very funny, employs tennis as a metaphor quite a bit, and the author is very attractive (if that’s important to you!) It's the first novel that I've read that reckons with how liberal and queer folks can return in a post-2016 world to the small towns and suburbs where they were raised, even to visit. It also tackles the euphoria and destructiveness of first queer love in such a resonant way. It's an incandescent and deeply wise banger of a debut.
Read this if you like: Gay drama, tales of going home again, sinister suburbia, family sagas, criticizing Karens.
The Latecomer
by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2022)
I will read just about any book about sibling relations, especially when said relations are promised to be unhinged. Korelitz wrote the book on which the HBO coat porn and Nicole Kidman drama The Undoing was based. ( I did not watch it, but my twitter timeline was full of capital-R Reactions.) She also wrote The Plot, a bizarre and twisty thriller that is also going to be adapted for television at some point soon. I read that one, and I was tantalized. This is a woman with a demonstrable record of making pages turn.
So, I picked up this one after seeing on goodreads that someone said that the book is not for everyone, but if you liked The Interestings or Fleishmann's In Trouble, then it’s definitely for you. I was very into those books, and the goodreads reviewer was correct that The Latecomer was very much my shit. An unhappy and absurdly rich couple goes through an onerous fertility journey and has triplets, and these children are, as Tolstoy predicted, miserable in their own unique ways. They grow apart from each other and their parents and cause strife wherever they go - as I imagine most rich people do while coming of age. Their mother, as a way to fill her own emotional void and spite everyone around her, goes back to her doctor to retrieve a frozen embryo, and boom. Eighteen years after the birth of the triplets, the latecomer - the titular role! - arrives.
Obviously, this turns the whole world of this family upside down, which was to be expected. But what I didn’t expect was all of the twists and turns the story takes and how many of them are legitimately heartwarming. I was drawn in by a plot that promised to be bananas - and, it was - but this book excels most when the narrator traces the fault lines of the family and finds ways to bring these monsters back together. I also gasped at one of the deaths and could not believe that there are references to Rachel Dolezal.
Read this if you like: A nicer version of Succession, Finger Lakes antiquing, sibling rivalries, schadenfreude for conservatives, Rachel Dolezal jokes (!)
Brother Alive
by Zain Khalid (2022)
I just had COVID for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I would not recommend the experience. 0/5 Yelp stars. It was annoying for many reasons, including how smug I had been about avoiding it for so long, but thanks to vaccines, my husband and I were very lucky to be merely inconvenienced by the disease rather than put in any grave danger. One of the things I was not expecting was just how much the brain fog would disrupt and muddle my life at the peak of the infection. I think I had imagined that COVID would be a fun way to catch up on television and books, but instead I had zero capacity to focus and even less desire to keep my eyes open.
When I emerged from the fog, I wanted to really sink my teeth into a book that would feel challenging for my little brain, to jump start those neurons into engaging with LITERATURE again. Brother Alive came highly recommended by Alexander Chee - who has never steered a reader wrong - as part of his project curating book boxes with Boxwalla. (You’ll notice it’s recommended with Town of Babylon, seen above, which I had already read. Kismet!) ((You’ll also maybe notice that this author is also attractive, which is starting to get a little annoying, frankly.))
I’m not even sure exactly how to explain this book. Multi-cultural coming of age story? Queer fantasia on the Muslim experience? Anti-capitalist manifesto? An examination of mental illness through the lens of magical realism? Yes, it is all of those things somehow. The reader is a pinball hitting all of these bumpers. It also works, bound together most likely through the beautiful prose. An imam takes in 3 infants - a Nigerian, a Korean, and someone from Middle Eastern provenance - and raises them as brothers, and then disappears back to Saudi Arabia once they are old enough to abandon. Why? It’s part of the many mysteries at hand.
Time after time I found myself thinking, “I wish I thought of that.” This a book of many ideas, all of them. I’m still meditating on what the ending means, but I know it will stay with me for a while.
Read this if you like: Brother stories, Mohsin Hamid, flashbacks, New York City stories, immigrant narratives, the tension of queerness and religion.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Maybe you’re in the mood for a m/m romance set in the world of a non-trademarked The Bachelor franchise where THE Bachelor falls for a cutie behind the camera?
Perhaps you’d like bench press a hefty tome to learn literally everything there is to know about the fight for same sex marriage as an insane, sitting Supreme Court Justice encourages the far right to ban it again?
Maybe everything is too damn much and you’d like to focus on how to do nothing?
Maybe you agree that everyone should pick up a beautiful history of a brutal time and be engrossed by our distressing and depressing recent past?
You may be dreaming of disembarking from your spaceship on a chilly planet with arranged marriages between soft boys and sinister political dealings to keep them apart?
Until next time…happy reading.