Books like Mississippi Sissy — picked by fans

"You're always looking for something better," somebody told Jeremy Atherton Lin. His response? "I thought that was the whole point."

When Lin arrived at college, in 1992, HIV was still a death sentence. Newly out, he didn't know, well, how to be gay. So he went out dancing. (I did the gay bars too when I first came out, found a lover at one, and stopped. Lin found a life partner there, too; they've kept dancing.)

This erudite, affecting book merges personal saga with gay history and theory, mapped onto bars in L.A., San Francisco and London (most, due to online dating, now gone). We see evolution in music, dance, costume, even architecture and neighborhoods—and, profoundly, in the blooming and maturing of how queer people see themselves. 

Paul Monette's life could have been mine. (His death, too.) Fear kept us both closeted until full adulthood. All he ever wanted was a lover, one of "the smiling men" he could never seem to touch. (Me, too.) Then he got HIV. (By dumb luck, I didn't.)

Writing in 1991, years before new drugs could have saved his life, Monette was "dying by inches." By then he had found his man—twice, actually—but lost each one to AIDS. His searing anger brought that tragic, terrifying time back to me hard. But rage couldn't hide the innocent, pained boy he shows us he had been.

I was humbled by his self-forgiveness: "I can't judge the world of my first twenty years by the laws of freedom that followed Stonewall." 

Sexual desire, acted on or repressed, is either the text or subtext of every gay man's life.

Edmund White treats sex explicitly and with bracing honesty. His frankness—for example, in describing his fumbling, agonized, danger-courting attempts as a kid to find love—recalled my own youthful risks and failures, but freed those memories of shame.

I've read few of White's many books. (Guess I was jealous of his output and acclaim; better I should have emulated his driving curiosity and intelligence.) His recent death, at 85, prompted me to read this narrative of his long, unruly, ceaselessly questing life.

A sharp observer of trends and sub-cultures, White moved among the famous—writers, artists, intellectuals—and descriptions of and dish about them are an extra, but only slightly guilty, pleasure.

I never heard a more harrowing story of the closet and coming out.

There was no bullying, rape or damnation to hell in Andrew Tobias' childhood. He was a high-achieving, good-looking son of an affluent family in cosmopolitan New York who came to adulthood in the anything-goes sixties. He realized he was homosexual at age 11—then never allowed himself to tell a soul, or have sex (even with himself) until 23. When he finally, tentatively, began to own being gay, he remained twisted up by stereotypes of masculinity and queerness.

Paradoxically, because he was afraid of it, his saga gives a colorful rendering of gay culture around 1970. (And I happen to know that he eventually found self-acceptance, love, and a prominent, honored role in gay politics.)

Known for his Lincoln Lawyer and Harry Bosch crime/mystery series, this novel is the first one about Connelly’s investigative reporter Jack McAvoy.

I really enjoyed the immersion of the protagonist into the journalism newsroom world as he tries to link his brother’s unexpected murder to a series of nationwide murders.

With all odds against him, I liked the way Jack kept fighting the upstream battle to arrive at an astonishing conclusion to the case.

I include this refreshing travel memoir for escapism – something to be savoured as well as to stretch the mind. Written by an open-minded British author, it describes her solo trip around the Islamic Republic on a motorcycle. By turns entertaining, amusing and full of love for a country and people of which she had no knowledge beyond Western propaganda, it is brilliantly written. Pryce challenges her own assumptions, widens her perspective and has a blast in an engrossing, compelling, easy-to-read travelogue.

There is so much wit and humor in this memoir that touches upon the immigrant experience from the perspective of the first-generation adult child. Deb goes on a journey to learn who his parents are as individuals and gains a perspective that is often difficult to achieve in the Indian community because parents don’t often share with their children who they are on the inside. The vulnerability with which Deb shares his childhood desire to blend into the white community in which he was raised was so relatable because I’d had a similar upbringing in another part of the country. This book made me laugh hard, think more deeply, and want to know my parents better.

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend in her 80s, and its soft, sure steps delivered me somewhere moving, complex, and unusual. It opens with a newspaper article that has nothing to do with the start of the story and which I’d forgotten about by the end, not that it would matter if I hadn’t.

Another author might have given the same subjects an operatic treatment, but I loved how quietly it spoke. I still think about Jean, years after reading it, and wonder what she found in life after the story ended. 

I was immediately pulled into a world of deception, greed, and murder.

Despite being traumatized, the main character stays strong. Her description of the luxury cruise ship made me feel as if I were onboard, too. The dark twists and turns throughout this novel, along with the gaslighting of the protagonist, were intense enough that I couldn’t stop reading.

Like the heroine in the story, I was determined to unravel the truth and decide who could be trusted and who might be a cold-blooded killer. For me, this wild ride was exhilarating. But it could be a few years before I consider booking my own cruise.

The first time I read David Rosenfelt’s Andy Carpenter series, I immediately thought that Groucho Marx had moved to North Jersey, gone into law, and adopted a rescue dog. Rosenfelt’s reluctant lawyer hero goes at his oddball cases with a collection of even odder associates. Dry, witty, and a little self-effacing, Rosenfelt’s style brings to life a cast of characters that made me reluctant to put his books down. I started the series with the third book, Bury the Lead, first but quickly caught up. The first book in the series is Open and Shut. Mystery and animal lovers will find a place in their heart and funny bone.