Reading Room

Queerty’s Fall Reading Recommendations: David Rakoff, John Boyne, And More

Labor Day is well under way, which mean the dog days of summer are almost over. (Woof.)

In June, we offered a list of the ten best beach (or pool) reads for the summer. As a follow-up to that list, here are some more titles worth checking out as the summer winds down and fall approaches.

 

 

 

 

Click through to see Queerty’s end of summer book recommendations.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel is the final work of the great, late David Rakoff. Rakoff, openly gay, was a frequent contributor to NPR’s This American Life. He died last August at the age of 47 after a long battle with cancer.

Though he wrote several nonfiction books, this is his first novel. It tells the story of several unrelated characters who are linked by acts of generosity or cruelty. Rakoff tackles a number of big themes in the book, including those implied by the title, as well as sexual orientation, sexism, and AIDS. But here’s the twist: The whole thing is written in rhyming couplets. The affect: absolute hilarity. It sounds weird, we know, but the book totally works. It is a bittersweet parting gift from a writer who will be sorely missed.

The premise of Frederic C. Rich’s dystopian novel Christian Nation, released last month, is enough to make anyone shudder. It imagines what could have happened if McCain-Palin had won the 2008 presidential election, and if President McCain had died in office, leaving Ms. Palin to run the country.

Yikes!

In the book, Rich paints a disturbing portrait of a nation whose government slowly marches to the Right, eventually using martial law to implement full-blown theocratic rule. Against this backdrop he tells the stories of Sanjay, a gay internet entrepreneur who takes up the flag against the evangelical forces, and his friend Greg, a lawyer who at first tries to live his life despite these changes, but who eventually decides he cannot sit idly by.

What makes the novel scary, but also so engrossing, is that it doesn’t feel outside the realm of possibility.

While we’re on the topic of politics… Even if you’re not political junkie like we are,  you’ll love Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America, released earlier this month. Since the election results added great momentum to marriage equality, the book is particularly relevant.

Longtime Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz offers an inside peek at the Obama-Romney presidential race. He traces the highs and lows of Obama’s first term, as well as the vicious Republican primary, and talks about how both laid the groundwork for one of the most contentious elections in recent history.

Balz writes about the colorful cast of characters that emerged during the Republican primary, including Herman Cain, New Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and the oh-so-lovable Michele Bachmann, and how Romney managed to clench the nomination from them all, only to squander it later with his now infamous “47%” comment.

Balz also writes about the Democrats, most notably Bill Clinton and the killer speech he gave at the 2012 Democratic convention. Balz reports that Clinton doesn’t care much for Obama, and that he only gave the speech out of party loyalty… and to set the stage for Hillary’s 2016 run. (We knew it!)

If you’re looking for a book with high stakes and moral implications, Collision 2012 has it all. It’s so juicy you’ll likely devour it in a day or two.

Alison Wearing’s childhood was largely carefree childhood. Until she was 12, when she realized that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Her father loved to bake croissants, wear silk pajamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. He eventually came out in the 1970s, yet remained determined to find a way to live both as a gay man and also a devoted father.

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. For years, Alison concealed her father’s sexual orientation from her friends. Over time, however, she came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide.

Balancing intimacy, history and downright hilarity, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a funny and captivating true tale of family life: deliciously imperfect, riotously challenging, and full of life’s great lessons in love.

John Boyne’s novel The Absolutist is not your typical war story. It tells the tale of Tristan Sadler, a young man disowned by his family, who enlists in the English army in 1919. He hopes of prove himself on the battlefield, but instead finds an unlikely lover in another solider.

This poignantly told story of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in the gruesome trenches of World War I will break your heart, and the many twists and turns the plot takes will keep you turning the pages. Just be sure to have a box of tissue handy. You’ll need them.

Melissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing manages to be both informative and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time. In it, she examines the origins of the vulgarisms we use in everyday life.

Mohr looks at the obscenities of ancient Rome — which were remarkably similar to our own — and unearths the history of religious oaths in the Middle Ages, when swearing (or not swearing) an oath was often a matter of life and death. She discusses the advancement of civility and corresponding censorship of language in the 18th century, the rise of racial slurs after World War II, the physiological effects of swearing (increased heart rate and greater pain tolerance), and answers a question that preoccupies the FCC, the US Senate, and anyone who has overheard young children at a playground: are we swearing more now than people did in the past?

The book is quirky, hilarious, and it just might expand your repertoire of words to choose from the next time you slam your finger in the car door.

A new collection of steamy gay erotica is sure to have readers even more hot and bothered this summer.

Sensual Travels: The Best of Gay Travel Erotica edited by Michael Luongo features stories about sexual encounters that span a variety of countries, including Spain, Russia, France, Japan, Lebanon, Brazil, and more. Whether traversing desert sands, steamy jungles, or the urban playground, these erotic encounters all have one thing in common: they pack a very sexual punch.

Contributors to the book include Felice Picano, a member of the original Violet Quill group, and fellow Lambda Literary Award winners Lawrence Schimel and Trebor Healey, along with erotic writers Simon Sheppard and Sebastian V, the actor Jesse Archer, and several others.

The guilty pleasure is available in paperback or as an e-book, and is worth the money for the cover art alone (which, by the way, we had to crop because the model’s throbbing member violated our site’s guidelines.)

For nearly a century, The Great Gatsby has enthralled readers as the defining work of the jazz era: optimism, booze, excess, destruction. Few people have embodied the zeitgeist of the roaring 20s as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. While countless authors have struggled to paint a picture of the Fitzgeralds and their oft turbulent and self-destructive marriage, Therese Ann Fowler’s decision to recount the life of Zelda Fitzgerald through a fictional lens in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald allows her to build a narrative of the Southern debutante turned flapper celebrity that is utterly engrossing, hauntingly realistic, and entirely devastating.

From Zelda’s upbringing in small-town Montgomery, to the underground jazz halls of prohibition New York City, to Gertrude Stein’s Parisian artists’ salon, to coastal mansions in the French Riviera, Fowler takes readers on an adventure they won’t soon forget. We come to know Zelda as more than the spouse of a literary giant, but instead, as an artist in her own right — at the time, many of her own writings were published under her husband’s name. A woman ahead of her time, Fowler positions Zelda’s desire to establish herself as independent from her husband as her Achilles heel that ultimately elicits scorn from her family and friends.

Queer author Peter Cameron’s 2012 novel Coral Glynn tells the story of a woman who arrives at Hart House, an isolated English manor, the in very wet spring of 1950. Coral is sent to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, who is dying of cancer. Hart House is also inhabited by an odd group of people: disgruntled housekeeper Mrs. Prence, Major Clement Hart, and Mrs. Hart’s war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. When a something goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow descends upon its inhabitants.

A period novel observed through a refreshingly gimlet eye, Coral Glynn explores how quickly need and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical.

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