4 Books Like The Weight

Reading Gibson is like going home, but it's a home that's carefully designed to fascinate and frighten you in equal parts. His descriptions of scenes and settings are enough to keep me engrossed in his books; his carefully woven plots are the icing on the cake.

A year ago, if you had asked me if the world needed another retelling of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, I would have said "sure, the same way it needs more ads for prepared meals and online therapy during podcasts."

But this book is a very different tale on the Arthurian Legends. The knights are flawed in fascinating ways that might just have you looking in the mirror. The classic battle of good against evil holds a great deal more nuance that many other versions while Grossman turns the love triangle that often sits as the center of these tales on its head.

This book looks pretty intimidating when it sits on your shelf, but it's well worth it.

Clearly patterned in response to Lolita, this story of a love affair with an underage girl turns on that girl's emerging sense of herself as maybe less girlish than everyone imagines. Her predator is weird, and unhinged, but less self-assured than Humbert Humbert; he's a veterinarian, and all his allusions are to the medical problems of farm animals. And there's another key difference between this book and Nabakov's: When he becomes obsessed with his "heavenly favorite" he sinks into her world, and we experience the whims and silliness of young girl life—a total delight in small doses. Absolute genius.

Forthcoming later this winter, Mega Milk is a memoir divided into discreet chapters based on various aspects of the dairy industry. Central to the story is the author's relationship with their parents, feelings about dairy, and commiseration with cows. (Their trans-ness, which disrupts and leavens each of these in different ways, is *not* central to the story, and the lack of scrutiny given an author's transition is refreshing and smart.) What marks the book is curiosity, and what I felt most compelled by while reading is where the author went that I would not have gone, and what the author thought that had not occurred to me. A relatively simple premise, compellingly drawn into a full, quirky narrative, preorders of Mega Milk are my go-to holiday gifts.