22 Books For Every Summer Moment – GQ
Best Multiplex Read: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
This pulpy homage to old-fashioned movie novelizations, which looks like a mass-market ‘70s paperback, is just as much fun as the film it’s based on. It’s also not a strict retelling. While the book barely mentions the film’s bravura ending sequence, it does have lots of juicy new details about Brad Pitt’s character Cliff Booth, a boatload of trivia from the golden age of Hollywood, and critiques of German and Japanese cinema that feel suspiciously like the author speaking. If you love the movies but don’t want to go back to a movie theater just yet, this is a great alternative to HBO Max.
Best Emotional Read: Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
If Brandon Taylor isn’t on your radar, change that immediately. The Booker-nominated novelist is one of the most exciting young writers working today, and his new short story collection, Filthy Animals, is a powerful suckerpunch right in your Feelings. Several of the stories follow a queer Black grad student named Lionel as he recovers from a suicide attempt and gets involved with a couple of dancers in an open relationship. It gets messy. Taylor has a gift for pulling readers into emotionally fraught territory and delivering them to the other side a little battered but better for it.
Best Family Vacation Read: To Raise a Boy by Emma Brown
The Washington Post investigative reporter spoke to hundreds of boys and men to research her new book about the state of boyhood and masculinity today. “I had thought a lot about the challenges girls face growing up, having been a girl myself, and frankly I think I just thought being a boy was easier. And what this book taught me is that being a boy is not easier,” she told GQ. “It’s such a fraught experience for the boys and young men I spoke to, and I wish we could see that more clearly” To Raise a Boy is a great read for any parent, regardless of whether they have a son or a daughter.
Best Journey: Ramadan Ramsey by Louis Edwards
After 18 years, the author of Ten Seconds is back with a new novel. This one follows Ramadan, the son of Syrian refugee and an African American woman whose family has lived in New Orleans for nine generations. Ramadan’s father left him and his mother before he was born, and when he turns 17, he decides to track down his dad, a journey that will take him from the Mississippi River to Aleppo. Stories about sons searching for fathers are common enough, but Edwards is an extremely uncommon writer. Ramadan Ramsey is a clever, moving family novel that will transport you across the globe, even though borders are still closed to many of us.
Best Rage Read: Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
Few books pull off the twin feats of Patrick Radden Keefe’s devastating portrait of the pharmaceutical dynasty whose runaway invention, OxyContin, tipped off America’s opioid crisis. First, the book is a sweeping expose that provides startling new insight into a national tragedy. Then, perhaps more impressively, it’s a carefully-told thriller of familial ambition and dysfunction. This is a drama worthy of a novel: A story of avarice and of hubris and of a vast fortune made in the merging of medicine and marketing. For decades, the billionaire Sacklers worked hard to keep all of this secret—and to keep their name off the family business. Keefe shows us exactly why.
Best Political Read: The Engagement by Sasha Issenberg
How did America get same-sex marriage? How did an idea burst into national consciousness, divide the country, and then—seemingly overnight—become so thoroughly accepted that it now seems strange that it ever inspired enormous debate? Sasha Issenberg takes us back to the beginning, noting that gay rights activists regarded marriage as a rather low priority for decades. But in the early 1990s, the issue was thrust into the political arena by increasingly powerful traditionalist Christians. “Not until opponents feared the threat of gay marriage,” Issenberg writes, “did most gay-rights leaders find it worth fighting for.” The ensuing battle is told through the activists, political strategists, and the lawyers who took up the issue across the country. Particularly fascinating is the deep-in-the-trenches reporting on the operatives who tussled covertly—like those behind a secret Mormon project to torpedo gay marriage. It’s a book full of surprises, even if the happy ending is evident from the start.