100 books like Arkansas

Anyone who ever had a cold, demanding, and impossible boss can relate to Andrea Sachs, a young intern who needs to work for one year for Miranda Priestly, a character based on Vogue’s Anna Wintour.

Andrea is a well-adjusted young woman from a privileged background but she’s not without deceptions in her ambition. She takes a job at a fashion magazine even though she has little interest in fashion and it’s a job that “a million other girls would die for.” She also becomes like the boss she detests as her star rises and her personal life falters.

This fun and indulgent popular novel is a roman-a-clef about a young woman who chooses her own suffering and eventually finds her better self. She also gets revenge when she writes a successful novel about her ex-boss.

I was 12 or 13 when I first read The Catcher in the Rye and I was gobsmacked.

It’s a work of fiction but it was obviously autobiographical because it was so intimately detailed and genuinely rendered. It was like eavesdropping on someone’s psychiatric sessions, the narrative of a patient who holds nothing back from his doctor.

In Holden’s voice I heard so much of myself including a contempt for phoniness as well as a reluctance to enter adulthood. Holden doesn’t hold back on embarrassing details: an encounter with a prostitute and her pimp that goes wrong, and just before his breakdown, he lets you know he suffers from the most unpleasant of intestinal disorders.

The honesty of this book makes it both deeply sad and terribly funny and let me know someone else was like me. 

This celebrated graphic novel is a haunting masterpiece by a gifted artist who uses words and imagery in his coming-of-age tale. 

If I were to describe the plot and its setting in snowy Wisconsin, a reader might assume this is something completely mundane, a bland slice of teenage life. But Thompson beautifully renders the ecstasy of first love as well as the devastation of romantic disappointment in a way that everyone who has ever loved and lost will recognize.

The other thread that weaves through the narrative is Craig’s rejection of the Baptist faith he was raised in, something that defined his family and was the center of their lives— and that’s something else I relate to. Blankets is a warm and deeply true confession.

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs was the most vivid memoir I had ever read, a frank account of an acutely bizarre childhood.

The author had been sent as a boy by his crazy mother to live with her psychiatrist, a mental health professional who was just as crazy and presided over the most dysfunctional household ever described in a book. After I finished reading Scissors, I wondered what the consequences were for the author as an adult.

The follow-up, Dry, answers that question in a more fascinating memoir that is drenched with the lurid details of the life of an addict and his struggle for recovery. Augusten holds nothing back.  After reading Dry, I felt as if I had been an addict.  

Jill Nalder is one of the great heroes of the AIDS crisis in eighties Britain. Her story features in the TV series It’s A Sin. This is her memoir and it’s an uplifting and heartbreaking read. Jill is one of those miraculous allies for gay men who fought to get more information about AIDS distributed more widely. It’s thanks to people like her that AIDS is no longer a death sentence.

Of the very, very many books about writing and reading, Alexander Chee’s book of essays is among the best. His prose is honest and soul-baring and his descriptions are the kind you wish you’d thought of. The collection is basically a coming-of-age story divided into anecdotal episodes—as an exchange student wanting love in Mexico, working at a famous gay bookstore in San Francisco while AIDS decimated his community, and time in academia. Chee has an affection for his readers and students that is engaging. He’s also a great Twitter presence and like Jacob, also a looker. At a Christmas party we both attended, we discovered we are Leos, so, we’re basically bonded for life. 

This book affected me very deeply because it’s set in the 80s and 90s when I was in my twenties and thirties. It describes with astonishing accuracy the political cruelty that abounded at that time. For me, the real hero of the book is Leo. He’s not only gay but also Black which makes him a double target for the prejudice of the time. The way he tackles it head on in the book is breathtaking.

Benjamin Justice is a broken man—a former prize-winning journalist whose career (and life) has been shattered by the death of his lover and a scandal surrounding his best-known writing. Recruited by his former boss to assist an up-and-coming journalist, Ben finds himself investigating a murder that occurred outside a gay bar. The series is tightly written and casts a dark glamor across gay life in ’90s California.

As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz, to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.

Maybe Next Year, by Dave Hughes, a coming-of-age love story of two young men that touched my heart. It's all about Bryan and Chris, two high school guys that have been best friends for several years, and what happens when they discover their feelings for each other are more than friendship. They come from two very different family backgrounds and will have a lot to navigate.