Find Me by André Aciman

Find Me is André Aciman’s sequel to the hugely successful Call Me By Your Name, which came out in 2007 and was made into a film in 2017. I loved Call Me By Your Name - the book especially - and I was excited to see how Aciman chose to continue Elio and Oliver’s stories, but unfortunately I found Find Me to be so. damn. awkward. Almost half the book is devoted to Elio’s father’s romance with a much younger woman that he meets on a train, and I personally feel if your storyline is that generic then you need to be a very good writer to make it worth anyone’s time. There was nothing romantic about the relationship, and it felt awkward and clunky. Within hours of meeting, the characters had decided they’d met the loves of their lives and would do anything to be together, which honestly had me rolling my eyes and laughing out loud. I’m all for an all-consuming romance, and that’s what I had liked about Call Me By Your Name, but with this particular relationship it just didn’t work. There was nothing enchanting about the dialogue, and the setting of the “romance” (on a train and in her ailing father’s flat) didn’t do the lackluster dialogue any favors. Elio and Oliver fell in love lounging by the pool in an Italian villa over the course of an entire summer, and the romance of the setting was a central part of the story (as is clear in the film adaptation).

The second half of the book does turn to Elio, a pianist living in Paris, and then to Oliver, a professor on sabbatical in New York, and then very, very briefly to Elio and Oliver once they’ve reconnected. If you liked Call Me By Your Name, then Find Me is worth reading for these sections, though they don’t really compare to the first book. You could theoretically skip the first hundred or so pages about Elio’s dad and you wouldn’t miss a thing.

I’m always somewhat skeptical of sequels, especially when it’s not clear the author would have written one if it weren’t for the unexpected success of a film or TV adaptation (e.g. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments). That being said, I can’t see how they’ll make this book into a film sequel, given that a large portion of the novel takes place fifteen to twenty years after the events of Call Me By Your Name, and no amount of make-up could make Timothée Chalamet pass for anything over twenty.

The Worst Kind of Want by Liska Jacobs

Rarely do I buy a book that I’ve never read a review of, but I made an exception for The Worst Kind of Want by Liska Jacobs. The cover and blurbs were compelling, it was a signed copy, and it was on display at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, which is an independent bookstore I love and trust. The Worst Kind of Want is Jacobs’s second book, and it’s about an unfulfilled and unhappy middle-aged woman named Cilla who moves from LA to Italy to help look after her late sister’s teenage daughter. In Italy, Cilla begins an inappropriate relationship with the teenage boy who lives next door, which is further complicated by her niece Hannah’s crush on the same boy. Predictably, things do not end well.

I found the book compelling, and I breezed through it because I wanted to know what happened and if and how things would be resolved between the characters. That being said, it wasn’t that great of a book. The Italian setting felt a bit fabricated and inauthentic, and the plot seemed to derive its momentum from increasingly scandalous and dramatic decisions. The conclusion in particular could have been much more subtle, and I found myself rolling my eyes at the story’s climax and denouement. Despite the book’s flaws though, it would make a good beach read, and I can’t deny I was entertained while I was reading it.

How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

How We Fight for Our Lives is Saeed Jones’s debut memoir, following an award-winning poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, which was published in 2014. How We Fight for Our Lives chronicles Jones’s childhood in the South, his time at college in Kentucky, and his years doing an MFA at Rutgers University-Newark. Throughout the book Jones explores relationships with close family, friends, and romantic and sexual partners, and interrogates the question of how to survive and thrive as a black gay man in America.

This is a beautiful book that I would unreservedly recommend. It was blurbed by Kiese Laymon, whose book Heavy is fantastic and similarly explores an intense mother-son relationship and the effects of racism on black childhood (and, later, adulthood). Though a novel rather than a memoir, another fantastic recent release that handles mother-son relationships in a complicated and powerful way is Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman

I first read Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series when I was a child. The three books that make up the series are being adapted into a BBC / HBO program, and the second volume of Pullman’s companion series The Book of Dust was just released this past autumn, so I figured it was time to reread the original books. Over the Christmas holiday I read all 1000+ pages of The Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, and since then I’ve been trying to convince everyone I speak to to read or reread them.

I think I enjoyed the books as a child in part because they weren’t written specifically for children. The story is expansive and complex, following two children named Lyra and Will as they move through multiple parallel worlds on a quest to save humanity. Rereading the series as an adult, I picked up on Pullman’s critique of religion much more than I did as a child - the book is in part a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which definitely went over my head as a kid. I also had the somewhat comical experience of realizing that what I initially took to be elements of fantasy were actually just the setting of England. The entire setting of Lyra’s Oxford felt fictional to me as a child, but now I realize that things like a “scholar’s retiring room” and college wine cellars actually exist. Even little details like Will eating Kendal Mint Cake were things I took to be fantasy when I first read the series.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage tells the story of Celestial and Roy, a young black couple in the American south. Through a combination of unfortunate happenstance and racist policing, Roy becomes wrongfully incarcerated for a rape he did not commit. The book follows Celestial and Roy’s relationship during Roy’s five-year imprisonment and in the weeks after his unexpected early release. We learn about their backstory and their families, and much of the story is told through letters exchanged during Roy’s imprisonment. The book is heart-wrenching and upsetting and important. It brings to life America’s prison industrial complex and the consequences of structural racism, and would be a good book to read alongside Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

(I’ve tried to write the following two paragraphs in a vague enough way that I don’t reveal major spoilers, but if you’re concerned maybe skip them.) While I liked the book overall, I did think that Celestial felt very underdeveloped as a character - we saw little of her internal struggle, and much more of the effects of her choices on Roy. I wanted to understand Celestial and see things from her perspective, but it felt like the second Roy was handed his sentence she decided their relationship was over. We saw much more of the strategies she used to survive (distance, apathy, seeking comfort elsewhere) than the internal struggle that led to those choices. As a result, her actions were harder to understand and her love for the men in her life felt shallow.

I both liked and did not like the book’s ending. It struck me as a bit too neat and tidy, and made me think about our desire to see all the loose ends of a story tied up. Even in a book full of trauma and injustice, the reader, and likely the author, want things to work out for the characters in the end. In this case, while I was happy for the characters, it also felt like they were puppets being led in a specific direction for the sake of the story’s closure. I never like when a person we’ve not heard of before is introduced in the last quarter of a novel purely so that everyone has a happy ending, and in this case it felt disingenuous and antithetical to the message of An American Marriage. The heartache of broken relationships can’t be resolved in days, but within a week of Roy’s release from prison everything was a bit “happily ever after.” While I don’t wish for anything less for the characters, and would certainly not condemn them to perpetual suffering, the book’s conclusion too neatly wrapped up the story Jones tells about the damage wrought by incarceration in the United States. That harm does not end when a person is released from prison, and it felt like this might have been a place to force the reader to sit with the discomfort of an untidy ending.

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

The Man Who Saw Everything is Deborah Levy’s third novel in a row to be nominated for the Booker Prize. The book’s protagonist is Saul Adler, a historian who, when we first meet him in 1988, is 20-something and about to leave for a research trip to East Germany. By the end of the novel we’re caught up to the present day, and Saul lies in a hospital bed back in London. Levy plays with time, memory, and history to get us from point A to point B, which simultaneously makes the book more interesting and more difficult to follow. At times I found myself wanting the book to be over so that I could read something else, but I think that’s mostly a reflection of my lack of patience when it comes to uncertain plot lines.

This is first work of fiction I’ve read by Deborah Levy though, and I liked it enough that I would read her other novels. This is also, weirdly, the only book I’ve read from the 2019 Booker Prize longlist. I read six books from the 2018 list, and in general felt that list was much more compelling than last year’s. Hopefully 2020’s longlist inspires more reading and excitement.