Books like Adjustment Day — picked by fans

A daring satire on race, politics, and cultural identity in America that somehow manages to be both outrageous and deeply sobering.

Beatty’s voice is like Richard Pryor meets Zora Neale Hurston—sharp, fearless, acerbic, wickedly funny, and incredibly smart.

Notably, although Beatty is an American writer, his book was published in the UK (likely because America prefers to live in denial about race) and went on to win the Booker Prize in 2016.

I found this a fun and brilliant story. I actually read it to my three nieces when they were 5, 7, and 11. It was great hearing their opinions on the story.  It’s one of those books that can be understood on different levels. 

In the simplest form, it is exactly what is written on the pages—a story about some farm animals who take over the farm. However, there are many layers to this simple tale. 

I love being able to re-read a book and understand it on a different level each time. To me, that is excellent writing, especially when combined with a fun and entertaining tale.

Just to get this out of the way: Adam is one of my closest friends. We both started our second novels New Year’s week of 2014 on a trip we took for the explicit purpose of starting new novels. I spent the next ten years trying to write my book, but Adam finished Sensation Machines in a more reasonable time frame. It was published in the summer of 2020, a basically impossible time to promote a book because we were all in lockdown. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that summer, but still.)

It is a marriage story, a murder mystery, a cultural satire, a tech farce, and a reckoning with all the lessons we failed to learn from the last financial crisis. And it’s a great Brooklyn novel, in the tradition of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (also a second novel!) and Jonathan Lethem’s The… show more.

In an age of codified and tropey stories with uninspired characters and safe plots designed to satisfy whatever market drivers the Big Five publishers are pushing, Trump Sky Alpha gives me hope. It is not about aesthetics, or one-dimensional coffee shop, shirtless Brads, or conforming political views. It is bonkers, aggressive, and hilarious. 

In the aftermath of a nuclear war initiated by Trump, the “Orange Man”, an American journalist, finds herself in a containment zone, documenting the defunct internet’s wild humorous takes: viral memes and twitter’s heated exchanges. The journalist’s assignment soon uncovers references to an enigmatic figure, only known as Birdcrash, one who might know how to stop Trump from flying in a luxurious zeppelin for "the very best people who look terrific.” Yes, you read that right. 

The men who fought the American Revolution were often young, in their teens and twenties, and the war coincided with their transition to adulthood, interrupting the traditional passage into beginning a career and forming a family. Ruddiman recaptures what it meant for the revolution to happen not just at a particular time in the nation’s history but at a particular time in the lives of the men who fought it. For officers, the war was an unmatched opportunity to enhance their social status because it cemented their reputation as gentlemen—especially when they really weren’t genteel by any other standard. It’s a reminder that status mattered a lot, even in an army fighting against aristocracy.

As the eminent American author Willa Cather herself admitted, Alexander’s Bridge “is not the story of a bridge and how it was built, but of a man who built bridges.” And significantly, an American man. Early in the novel we are introduced to an English acquaintance of Bartley Alexander who liked him “because he was an engineer.  He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his idea about Americans was that they should be engineers or mechanics.” This can be read therefore as a judgment on American masculinity—this was Cather’s first novel in 1912 and in light of her later writings, was uncharacteristic in having a male protagonist. Alexander’s professional success as a bridge engineer was not matched by his personal life. He could span rivers but not the gulf between his marriage in Boston and his affair with an Irish actress in London. Because of insufficient resources his greatest bridge,… show more.

A recognized classic, and one of the first books to bring gender theory, masculinity studies, and the new cultural history to the academic study of dueling. Nye looks at French dueling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a manifestation of evolving ideals and norms of masculine honor, at a time when France was becoming less aristocratic and more bourgeois. This is the book that first convinced me that dueling could be a legitimate topic for serious historical research, and not just some quirky random sideshow.

Pettegrew, a historian, also portrays Roosevelt as brute-in-chief at the turn of the 20th century, but he zooms out and describes other social forces in the United States that contributed to the emergence of the militaristic definition of manhood. These include the mythologizing of the Civil War as a noble display of male honor, divorcing the war from its roots in slavery and mistreatment of Blacks. He shows how the advocates for stronger men—and dependent women—“self-consciously used Darwinian biology to classify brutishness as an essential and natural male trait.” The book provides a fascinating and comprehensive look at the complicated ways in which gender stereotypes have been created and perpetuated in America.

I wept through the first chapter of this book. Again, it might not appear as a mental health book on its surface, but as I was invited into a deeper understanding of how culture, and specifically what we call ‘patriarchy,’ shapes us all, it shook me to my core.

This book helped me understand that this is a shared cultural burden and that while I might “benefit” from it, I am not strictly the ‘problem.’ As it relates to mental health, it helped me understand that the emotional castration our culture imposes on young boys who become men leads to anger, violence, and trauma, seen most evidently in the oppression of women. That trauma hurts us all and underlies almost all mental health issues. 

This is a solid edited volume that has contributions from leading scholars of Mexican history exploring straight and gay sexualities from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in different parts of the country. The chapters examine a wide range of interesting topics including cinema and movie going, public bathhouses, prostitution, elopement, and mariachi culture to untangle how masculinities are historically constructed and to interrogate the concepts of macho and machismo.