Explore our list of favorite books for summer that celebrate love and equality in unique ways and inspire meaningful conversations.
Passport invites readers into unexpected worlds both real and imagined. Hidden Libraries celebrates the curious and often overlooked sanctuaries where knowledge is preserved in the most unconventional places. Mothers and Sons offers a poignant look at the intricate emotional dance between generations, capturing the depth of love, loss, and reconciliation. And All Friends Are Necessary reminds us that chosen companions can shape our lives just as profoundly as family.
Real Marriage by Mark Grace Driscoll
Once upon a time, there was a Supreme Court that granted same-sex couples throughout the United States the right to marry. It’s hard to imagine such a decision coming from today’s justices; a reminder that the queer community must cherish and continue to fight for our rights. Loaded with hundreds of new and historic photographs, Love: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli. $55. rizzoliusa.com) by Frankie Frankeny with John Casey, is a powerful and sometimes surprising chronicle of the road to same sex marriage, setting it in the context of the overall gay rights movement. There are stories of couples who went to court in pursuit of the right to marry as early as the 1970s; a photo of a formal, if illegal, marriage ceremony for two anonymous men in 1957; and explorations of many landmark cases that paved the way toward the Obergfell decision in 2015. There are also verbal and visual portraits of couples who have married since that decision just a decade ago, Pete and Chasten Buttigieg among them. The book is no mere coffee table keepsake; its extensive text is rich and readable. Give yourself a wedding gift.
Hidden Libraries by DC Helmuth
The Weapons of Mass Instruction is a fleet of three pointedly oxymoronic bookmobiles created by artist and poet Raul Lemesoff that roam the streets of Buenos Aires. Built on the frames of old Ford Falcons (the cars favored by one-time Argentine dictator Jorge Videla) and resembling military tanks, their exteriors are constructed of bookshelves. Turning symbols of war into tools of enlightenment, Lemesoff sends them on missions throughout the city, distributing donated volumes to children. These “Think Tanks” are among the finds in D.C. Helmuth’s delightful, if mistitled, Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories ($24.99 Lonely Planet. dianahelmuth.com), a bucket list itinerary for globetrotting bibliophiles. Among the photo illustrated essays, you’ll discover a futuristic cocoon-like library in Azerbaijan’s international airport where passengers are free to take a book or leave one behind (this leads to a remarkable collection of volumes in many languages); a library tucked beneath the turf of a Japanese farmscape; and the international Haskell Free Library, which has a thick black line running across its floor to indicate which books are shelved in Vermont and which ones are in Quebec. Of special interest to the queer community: The online, activist-operated Banned Book Club, which lends free downloadable copies of titles deemed unsuitable by American libraries (thebannedbookclub.info).
Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett
“Shaping narratives. Presenting events in a particular order. It’s what I’ve spent my whole life doing,” writes Adam Haslett in his tender, wrenching third novel Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown and Company. $29. adamhaslett.net). But rather than writing about himself (at least directly) Haslett, the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for his debut novel, Union Transfer, and nominee for a Pulitzer Prize for his second, Imagine Me Gone, is sharing the thoughts of Peter Fischer, a 40-year-old immigration lawyer, as he describes the process of presenting an asylum seeker’s case to a judge. Workaholic Peter would prefer focusing only on the life stories he crafts for his clients and repressing his own. He’s cut off contact with his mother, keeps a distance from his sister and her family, and hooks up for casual sex, but he won’t allow himself access to deeper romantic feelings. Peter’s defenses, however, begin to falter after he’s assigned the case of an asylum-seeking young Albanian man, a victim of his own family’s homophobic violence. In parallel chapters, we spend time with Peter’s mother Ann, a former Episcopal priest who came out as a lesbian and founded a women’s retreat after her husband’s death. The experiences of parent and child resonate with each other poetically and, in the end, prove to be linked by a shared secret. Haslett artfully refracts Peter and Ann’s relationship off of other mother-son pairs throughout the book, especially in an unexpected and soothing coda.
All Friends Are Necessary by Tony Moniz
A gentle, generous novel of Gen Z, Tomas Moniz’s All Friends Are Necessary (Algonquin. $28. tomasmoniz.com) honors situationships of all sorts. Set just a few years in the past, the story is built around a ragtag cadre of friends who form an invaluable mutual support system in the face of personal crises and, later, the pandemic. Our guide to this group, and the greatest beneficiary of its compassion, is Chino Flores, set emotionally adrift when his marriage falters after his wife has a miscarriage. He moves from Seattle to the Bay Area to heal and reconstitute. As Chino warily re-enters the dating pool, he connects with both women and men. It’s typical of the book’s easygoing vibe that bisexuality is not a source of drama and isn’t even discussed. In fact, there’s no major drama about anything in the book; reading it is a hang with some cool characters. Munoz effectively conveys several Bay Area settings: Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco’s Mission District, and particularly the rural Russian River area, where Chino, a former biology teacher, feels his love of nature and children come blooming back to life.
AIRPLANE READ OF THE MONTH
Its not the end of the world by Jonathan Parks Ramage
Jonathan Parks-Ramage is the first author to have two books selected as PASSPORT’s Airplane Read of the Month. In 2001, we praised his dark debut Yes, Daddy as “piggylicious pulp.” His ambitiously bonkers new page turner It’s Not the End of the World (Bloomsbury. $29.99. jonathan-p-r.com) is a mash-up of social satire, sci-fi, soap opera, and horror set on the edge of the apocalypse. It’s also got gobs of rough gay sex. Set in 2044, the story centers around Mason and Yunho, an obscenely rich Los Angeles couple on the day of the $100,000 baby shower for their impending bundle-of-joy. Much of the city is either on fire or choking on noxious fumes, but “this is why they, like so many other wealthy Californians, booked the boutique climate engineering service WeatherMod to clear whatever fatal miasma hovered in their backyard.” The country’s political climate also seems to have only worsened since present day, with a House Anti-American Speech Committee empowered to punish “crimes of artistic sedition.” Both snark and gore ramp up quickly (a mutilated body is “still breathing tartare”) as Parks-Ramage pulls the reader into a breathless B-movie world situated somewhere between “Mad Max” and “The Real Housewives.”
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