Joe Milan Jr.'s 3 favorite reads in 2023

During the last gasps of summer, I was blessed with a copy of this book. I'd get my lunch, bring it to a bench in a park in my rural Midwest town, and read stories about guys struggling to make ends meet by lawn mowing, a wife and husband hiding out with neighbors in a barn while a flood tears through the thumb of Michigan and a guy who keeps vigil on a bridge in a dying town trying to keep his community safe.

The stories here talk about working class and rural America, with a kind of hope that you don't expect in our moment. I’d finish a story, look up in the trees, smell the farms in the air, and feel like I could tackle the rest of the day, even though I usually read too long and was late getting back to work. 

There's one story left in the collection I haven't read because it would break my heart to finish this wonderful debut collection. I’ll finish it when the first snow dusts the ground.

Imagine if a Thomas Pynchon book got chopped and blended with a story of K-Pop fandom. That’s how I think of Y/N (Your Name). It’s a book excavating the shafts of our global moment of how we can be connected yet feel so alone, and how our connections are less social media but more tribes of fandom (where following the Grateful Dead was a niche thing, today, it seems to be the thing for those in their 20s.) 

The book gets into the head of a young Korean-American woman living in Berlin who finds meaning in “The Pack of Boys” and drops down the rabbit hole of surreal obsession. She goes to Korea in search of meaning in her celebrity and meets along the way all sorts of dreamers.

I don't even rightly know if I liked the book: I'm usually not a fan of the surreal. It made me angry and hopeful, and it just won't stay away from my mind whenever I hear someone talk about "artistry." That's when you know it's good because you want to find others who read it so that you can argue about it with them.

When a detective book can surprise, it's gold. If it can surprise you, be heartfelt, gritty, smart, and funny, you know you've found something special.

This book is about a lot of things, but ostensibly, it’s about a drug addict, Felix, who is investigating the death of his friend, Marina. But really, the book wanders, like the mind of someone clobbered by the hardships of life, of drugs, of living in Scotland in the hangover of colonialism, and of a political moment where the disadvantaged are being forgotten. The book has the heart of the wounded.

It reminded me of Your Republic is Calling You (Young-Ha Kim) in that they both speak to what wounded people have to do to get by (the lies we tell ourselves and more). I'm not Scottish, but even though this book hasn't made its way over the Atlantic, I loved its sincerity.

Here's one of my favorite quotes that shows what I mean about “smart.” ‘Masculinity is a con from people who needed guys to die on battlefields; then when that was over, being a man was having a job. Worrying about being five minutes late to make money for someone else.’