The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

read by Michael Crouch

It’s 1985. Yale’s career as the development director for an art gallery has just begun, his friend Nico has just died of AIDS, and almost everyone he knows is terrified or in denial or both. Nico’s little sister, Fiona, has become the key to a coup that could make or break Yale’s reputation in the art world.

It’s 2015. Fiona is trying to find her daughter, who disappeared into a cult years ago; a random bit of footage has led her to Paris. She’s staying with an old friend, Richard Campo, a photographer who famously documented the ravages of the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s and 90s.

Days pass in Paris. Fiona is frustrated at the pace of the private investigator’s search for her daughter and heads out to seek her on her own. Meanwhile, Richard and his partner urge her to just enjoy the city while she’s there. She’s not so sure she’s ready for the sorts of enjoyment that are on offer, though. Romance, trips through her own past—that’s not where she’s at. She's in too much pain, too worried about her daughter.

Weeks pass in Chicago, and then months. Disaster looms over Yale’s entire community; some people flee, some descend into debauchery, and some get political and fight to be seen and heard. But for Yale, there’s nothing to do but soldier on, try to close the next deal, try not to feel too alone and scared as his friends get sick, one by one. Meanwhile, he’s getting to know the elderly benefactor whose art collection may or may not be a windfall for his gallery. And she seems to know more about him than he thought he was revealing.

This story winds a sinuous path back and forth, back and forth, between a past when nobody knew who would be struck down next and a today shaped by the loss of a generation of young men. We get to be there in that past with Yale. We see what it does to him, what it feels like on a daily basis to be subject to irrational hatred and constantly on the edge of existential terror, meanwhile going through all the normal growing pains of being a young man just getting started in the world. 

And we get to see, 30 years later, what carrying all that history, all the stories of all those extinguished lives, has done to Fiona, how it has scarred her—and, through her, scarred her daughter, who was only a baby during the worst of it.

I wasn’t there for the AIDS crisis in the same way Yale and Fiona were. Although I lived in San Francisco, or within an hour’s drive, during the 80s and 90s, and a relative I hadn’t seen in years died pretty early on, I was in middle school when things really hit the fan. So I was a little young to be very deeply affected, though of course I was aware of what was going on all around me.

I did work at a dry cleaning shop a few blocks from the Castro during the mid-90s, and I remember watching a lot of customers get sicker and sicker and eventually disappear. It was horrible, but they weren’t my community, my family, my friends. I knew I could become infected if I wasn’t careful, but I also knew I wasn’t at high risk. It wasn’t *personal* to me. It was just how things were. (I never believed I’d make it to age 30, but I didn’t think a virus would take me; I thought it would be that cowboy running the White House with his finger hovering a little too near The Button that would get us all in the end.)

The Great Believers makes AIDS personal. You will walk away from this book shaken. You’ll have some appreciation, if you didn’t before, of what a loss to us all was the loss of those young lives. What living in the middle of it was like—it was like a war, but one that you had to be ashamed of being the victim of, one that you kept to yourself as hard as you could if you wanted to have any chance of a happy life. What caring about and caring for so many young men who didn’t make it was like, what it was like to survive and try to build a life after losing literally everybody you cared about.

The book does this all unsentimentally, cleanly, without tear-jerking melodrama. It just lays the stories out, one beautifully-formed slab after another, each atop the last in ways that seem impossible because of the way the story goes back in time, and yet somehow perfect. 

Read this book. Once you start you won’t be able to walk away, and it will hurt, but that lost generation deserves to be mourned. You’ll be glad you didn’t turn away.

You Know Me Well by Nina LaCour and David Levithan

read by Matthew Brown and Emma Galvin

You Know Me Well is a madcap buddy/coming-of-age/caper story for teens, set in San Francisco and an unnamed East Bay suburb (I’m thinking San Ramon?) during Pride Week. Co-written by David Levithan and Nina LaCour, it’s told in alternating points of view of the two main characters, who have sat next to each other in class for close to a year but never spoken. They meet unexpectedly on a painfully eventful night in San Francisco and instantly become each other’s manic pixie dream wingperson.

Mark is a boy who has been in love with his best friend, Ryan, for years (think Michael Novotny and Brian Kinney). They’ve fooled around, but for Ryan, that’s all he wants and all it ever was ever meant to be. Kate, meanwhile, has been long-distance in love with her best friend’s cousin, Violet—or at least the idea of Violet, since they’ve never actually met.

On the eventful night in question, Kate is actually going to get to meet Violet in person for the first time, and Mark and Ryan are encouraging each other to be brave at a party at a gay bar they’ve used fake IDs to get into. It’s set to be a magical evening… but falls completely apart. When Kate runs into Mark, they both need a friend very badly, and Kate decides, in a very straightforward way, to ask for that.

It ends up being both of their salvation, and their friendship is at the core of the book, though there’s romance and coming-of-age stuff going on, too. David Levithan’s unrealistically happy coincidences abound, but you can’t mind them; you want the characters, who have more than enough on their plates, to be helped along by fate and by wealthy Instagram fairy godfathers as much as possible.

The scenes in LGBTQ+ settings really shine—the jockey shorts dance contest and the LGBTQ+ poetry slam (for which a few actual not-bad and quite plausible poems were written) in particular. Less shiny is the character of Kate’s mean-girl best friend, whose actions and motivations are contradictory. Kate’s reasons for remaining friends with her are opaque to murky though most of the book, but they do become clearer toward the end. It’s a forgivable rough patch in a thoroughly enjoyable book.

Verdict: read it. It won’t change your life, but you’ll be glad you got to meet these kids and spend some time rooting for them.

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

I devoured this book in one sitting. Yes, it is a quick read—but it’s also a compulsively engrossing one.

Each page is a dictionary entry, a definition of a single word, in alphabetical order. But the definitions are idiosyncratic memories and emotions, definitions-by-example. And these examples are snippets from the life of a relationship--beautiful little snippets, as clear and specific as snapshots.

The snippets are set up in alphabetical order, not chronological order, so the narrative emerges like the image in a pointillist painting as the artist adds first ultramarine, then phthalo blue, then cadmium red, and so on—one image suddenly swimming into focus as others become temporarily more obscure, but what it’s being obscured by is detail that’s building up another section of the image, or linking one figure in the painting to another.

Which makes this sound very high-brow and maybe difficult to comprehend, but it’s not. The little “snapshots” are each so engaging, so clear, so poignant in small and large ways, that you just want to read the next one and the next one. And it’s no harder to understand than your own life, or a rambling story told by a friend who is rambling as they try to figure out where they went wrong in the most important relationship in their life.

If I told you absolutely anything about the narrative, I’d be robbing you of the joy of discovering it for yourself. I won’t do that. This book is compulsively readable and you can do it in an evening. Go do it. You won’t be sorry.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

read by Michael Crouch

Oh my goodness, what a sweet story. I don’t mean sappy—I mean the protagonist has a fantastic personality (airily witty, a little insecure, loving, impulsive, just precocious enough to be adorable and just bad enough at stuff to be believable) and ends up in a ridiculously bad situation and muddles through it as best he can and ends up… well, I won’t spoil it for you.

The setup: Simon Spier is a closeted gay teenager who has somehow managed to make contact, anonymously, with another closeted gay boy at his high school. They deliberately don’t know who the other is; they call each other by code names (the other boy calls himself “Blue”) and they communicate without details that would out them to each other. Within that anonymity, they develop a super close bond that is just starting to feel romantic as the story begins.

And then, disaster strikes. Simon forgets to close out his email account on a school computer, and another kid, who has a crush on one of Simon’s female friends, finds it, takes some screen shots, and uses the information to blackmail Simon into playing wingman for him. It’s not entirely that Simon doesn’t want to be out as gay—he does, he’s just waiting for the right time. But he feels sure that if Blue gets outed, he’ll never speak to Simon again. And that’s just unacceptable.

Hijinks ensue, and this book is plot-based enough that I don’t dare say another word about them. So there you go.

What I loved about this book: well, Simon’s personality, which I already discussed. And the fact that any character you spend any time with at all is also a distinct personality, and all the interwoven and complex relationships including a few intense friendships (the kind most people don't have past high school), and the moral ambiguity and complexity of the situations and people’s reactions to them. Also the many cultural references—I’m the wrong age to get many of them, but I enjoyed the way they were tossed around in a way that made the characters and setting more grounded in reality and I ended up googling some music.

Oh, and I understand this has been made into a movie called Love, Simon. It's probably pretty good. But I've already got these characters in my head just the way I want them to be, in part because Michael Crouch did such a fantastic job with the reading for the audiobook. So I'm going to hold off on watching it, for now at least. I'm sure my curiosity will get the better of me eventually.

Basically this book is better than it needs to be, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

read by Michael Levi Harris

So what we have here is a kid who calls himself a “fractional Persian”—raised “American” in the U.S. by his Persian mom and blond “Übermensch” dad. (He loves Persian cooking, for example, but only speaks enough Farsi to be polite and talk about food.) He nerds out about Star Trek, Tolkien, Harry Potter, and, of all things, tea. He’s a little overweight and get teased at school and doesn’t have many friends, which makes him a constant disappointment to his dad. In fact, Star Trek is just about all he has in common with his dad. That, and depression, and a chronic inability to express himself.

He’s also smart and thoughtful and, it turns out, pretty decent at soccer, a.k.a. non-American football—and a really good friend. But we don’t know about any of this at the beginning of the story, and neiher does he. Well, maybe the smart part, but not the rest.

Things start to move when the family takes a trip to Yazd, Iran, to visit with the grandparents he’s never met in person before. His grandfather is formidable and his grandmother is sweet and he’s expected to make friends with the neighbor kid, Sohrab. Which actually turns out to be the greatest thing ever. Because Sohrab is super interested in Darius, and draws him out, and helps him feel like it’s okay to be himself, fractional or not.

What I loved about this book: it made me fall in love with Iran and with Persian culture (and made me super hungry for Persian food). The relationships were varied, three-dimensional, believable, relatable, and central to the story. The drama was dramatic indeed… but also understated (way more Benjamin Alire Sáenz than, say, Francesca Lia Block). There was tons of representation, most of it very off-hand, all of it spot-on, especially regarding depression. And Darius himself was such a sweet, dysfunctional nerd. I feel like I went out with him, or maybe I was him, in high school.

Highly recommend for all fractional Americans and most anybody else.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

read by Lin-Manuel Miranda

It’s 1987 and 15-year-old Aristotle Mendoza has a whole summer ahead of him, with all the freedom and potential for adventure and boredom that that implies. He needs to get away from the house one fateful, stifling day, so he heads for the public swimming pool. He doesn’t know how to swim, but he can still splash around and cool off. As it turns out, there’s another bored 15-year-old there—his name is Dante, and he offers to teach Ari to swim. Ari’s not sure why he takes Dante up on this odd offer, but he does.

Aside from bonding over their similarly odd names, the two couldn’t be more different. Ari is a working-class kid, the youngest of four, though his oldest brother went to prison when Ari was only 4 years old and both of his sisters grew up and left the house years ago. His Vietnam-veteran dad is withdrawn and uncommunicative, and his mom pushes him to succeed. In response to all this, Ari has developed an uncaring, tough-guy exterior and is completely out of touch with his own tremendous store of pent-up anger and sadness.

Dante, on the other hand, wears his enthusiasms and admittedly odd thoughts and points of view on his sleeve. The only child of affectionate, well-to-do parents, he’s somewhere between happy-go-lucky and neurotic. He’s also as close to openly gay as a teenager can be in El Paso, Texas in 1987.

The two accept and even enjoy each other’s differences, and they make each other laugh. Soon they develop a friendship that can survive anything… even Ari saving Dante’s life. But sooner or later Ari is going to have to figure out who he is and who he wants to be, and what that means for him and Dante.

If you can possibly get your hands on a copy of the audiobook version of this, do (pro tip: you can probably download it from your library for free). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lively and nuanced reading makes an already-fantastic story spring to life.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Narrated by Michael C. Hall

For Valentine’s Day this year, my partner took me to a special screening-with-dinner of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was just about the perfect date. I’d seen the movie maybe half a dozen times, all told, but never on the big screen, and he’d never seen it at all. I fell in love with it all over again, warts and all—and the warts, I admit, are a pretty disfiguring blemish on what is otherwise a crown jewel of a movie.

To start with, you have Audrey Hepburn playing the quirky, unapologetic gold-digger, Holly Golightly. The point of view character, Paul Varjak, is also something of a whore (though in the service of his art), and is played by a very debonair young George Peppard. The two are a perfect match, because they can each love other for who they actually are; there’s no need for pretense between them. But of course it can never work, because they both depend on their lovers for money and neither of them has a dime of their own, and nobody ever heard of open relationships or polyamory in those days.

In case you’ve never seen the movie, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Go see it! Seriously. Be prepared to cry at the end, but also, be prepared to have to stomach some breathtakingly casual racism—not just part of the scenery because 1961, but mined, over and over again, for laughs, because ha ha, we’re all white folks together here and aren’t those people funny. But if you can and are willing to handle that, see it. It’s a masterpiece and I cry every time.

I had never, in spite of my love for this film, read the book it was based on. Hadn’t realized it was based on a book at all. But it turns out that it is: it’s based on a novella by Truman Capote, and the novella is just as flawed and just as much of a jewel as the movie.

(Ah, a dying art form, the novella. And yet it shouldn’t be. I get that books are expensive and people want a lot of bang for their book-buying buck, and so publishers favor enormous tomes these days. And I do love me a really good, meaty, enormous tome. But haven’t we all read at least one bloated, flabby enormous tome too many that should, and in the hands of a good editor would, have been a really excellent novella?)

The basic setup is the same as the movie. Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak are neighbors in an apartment building in New York City; he’s an aspiring professional writer, and she’s an aspiring wife of somebody rich. Ideally, somebody rich who isn’t a complete rat, though really, any man who refrains from trying to take advantage of her situation pretty much qualifies as a non-rat; she has a generous heart. She has a lot in common with her cat: they share a fiercely independent but deeply affectionate nature. She’s also a runaway from her own past as a child bride from Texas.

She has to hide all of this from the wealthy men she seeks, with a great deal of success, to intoxicate, and whom she hopes to lure into marriage so she can be financially secure at last. But she doesn’t hide a thing from her neighbor, Paul, who after all isn’t anywhere near the demographic she’s seeking. Which means he gets to know the real Holly—the Holly she has invented for herself, who contains but is far more worldly, self-assured, and fun-loving than the Lulamae Barnes she used to be.

Paul, meanwhile, struggles to get published, and struggles with an extremely low sense of self-worth: as a man, he should be able to be a self-sufficient success. He starts out nonplussed by his flighty neighbor; he appreciates her beauty and the vulnerability she radiates and the unexpected things that happen when she is part of his world, but is taken aback by her chosen path in life and her pursuit of it with a predator’s cold, clear, unswerving sense of purpose. Eventually, of course, he falls in love, and things—not hijinks, exactly, though some of them closely resemble hijinks—ensue.

Many of the scenes in the book are written exactly as they ended up being portrayed on the screen. Capote’s gift for description—of people’s appearance and surroundings, directly, and of their character through their words and the way they speak—is tremendous; anybody having read the book first would be delighted at the faithfulness of the film adaptation.

However, there are numerous differences, large and small. Paul Varjak isn’t a sugar baby in the book; his empathy for Ms. Golightly is harder-won than that, and slower to develop. There’s a major character in the book who is written out of the movie script. And the racism, just as breathtakingly casual in the book as in the movie, is mostly aimed at a different target and isn’t mined for laughs; instead, it rears its head as a method of describing-without-describing just how flawed a person Holly Golightly is, as well as being generally in the background because 1958.

Still, the story is intriguing. It’s written with such skill that not a single necessary or desirable detail is left out, and yet not a single unneccessary word is left in. As one would expect, the characters are more complex and fully-fleshed-out than in the movie.

Oh, and the ending is different. I won’t spoil it. Read the book!