The best books on yearning and revolution

This book is the story of 17-year-old Elio’s summer romance with Oliver, a 24-year-old American scholar who stays at his family's Italian villa. It is achingly sensual, filled with longing, and the bittersweet knowledge that this once-in-a-lifetime affair will be short-lived. It is a relationship that will usher one teenager over the threshold into exquisitely painful adulthood.

Precocious and sensitive, Elio is leaving childhood behind in ways that are exciting, erotic, and welcome… even if he’s fully aware that such an intense passion can’t blaze forever. 

Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall in love as youths before being separated by fate and society.

The novel spans 50 years and depicts historical changes and revolutions in Colombia, as well as universal human themes like love, aging, and death. Its style combines realistic and fantastical elements, with moments of dramatic irony that are almost too neatly coincidental to be true… and yet life imitates art just like that sometimes.

While politics, plagues, and pandemonium ensue, in the meantime people still live their lives, treasure their loves, and hope to survive long enough to experience relief.

People usually recall The Great Gatsby being about yearning (the green light across the water) and the inaccessibility of the American dream. I recommend it for the yearning, but not Gatsby’s longing for Daisy—instead, read it with an eye to narrator Nick’s pining for Gatsby.

Nick’s awe of Gatsby’s stainless optimism is coupled with a dreadful disgust that Gatsby aspires to the vacuous, selfish, destructive lifestyle of Daisy and Tom Buchanan. In the end, the impression from Nick is that Gatsby is too good for this world and the ash heaps in it.

There’s a shocking chasm between the admiration for American ambition and the tragedy of a dream deferred. These kinds of dashed hopes occur in every generation. Do we still love America after seeing the cowardly worst of her?

Set against the backdrop of the sociopolitical turmoil of the 1960s, James Baldwin’s Another Country captures a diverse group of friends in cities both foreign and domestic (NYC and France) who are struggling with interconnected issues of race, sexuality, gender, and class.

As history repeats itself in the 21st century, there is wisdom in reviewing how people survived the last round of radical social upheaval. They did so without losing themselves, nor their opportunities to forge meaningful human connections in the melee.

How do you learn from ex-lovers? How do you make peace with the dead? How do you stay sane when the world is hassling you over unchangeable characteristics you’re working to embrace rather than despise? These characters are trying to build something real on shifting sands, and their stories are still relatable today.

Les Misérables showcases the terrible power imbalance between the poor and the morality police. Jean Valjean is irredeemable in the eyes of Inspector Javert for stealing a single loaf of bread. Fantine is forever tainted by one dalliance with a boy of privilege. Her daughter Cosette is considered illegitimate at birth and exploited at every turn.

These rag-tag individuals find solidarity in the gutter. They reinvent themselves as needed, care for the lost children of others, and fall in love with hope for the future. Some even take to the streets in a revolt inspired by the bloody Paris Uprising of 1832.

While Les Misérables is a beastly long book (what my French lit professor called “un pavé,” a paving stone), Victor Hugo’s characters show the value of perseverance. This resistance manifesto inspires one to fight the good fight.