100 books like Bread & Wine

I didn’t know if I could recommend a play here, but reading this one is how I first experienced it because it premiered in London. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I read its two monumental parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” on a typewritten marked-up rehearsal script someone had lent me.

Quite simply, Tony Kushner wrote THE play for my generation, a generation that lost probably half of itself to an awful plague most people, especially the government, ignored until it was too late. When my lover Jeffrey died, I went to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and wept because Tony had given it to me in his play, a monument for the AIDS generation.

Finally seeing it on Broadway, with Jeffrey, as he was dying, was like having my DNA scratched and resurfaced into something other than who I was before it. It was shape-shifting, soul-stirring, and salve… show more.

I learned so many things that I was not taught in school from this book. As if revealing a parallel universe, I was made aware of the history of LGBTQ life and culture hidden in American history.

I could think about Melville in a new way when he wrote, “..waking next morning I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife”.

Or Emily Dickinson, who remained single but was steadfastly devoted to her close friend Sue Gilbert, who had married her brother. She wrote to Sue: “Susie, forgive me, darling, for every word I say–my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts…”

I was mesmerized by this masterfully written and engrossing page-turner that emotionally landed me in the intimate orbit of Anthony Malone and Andrew Southerland, the book’s two main characters.

Honest and unflinching, it describes a life and culture unknown to me in such a beautiful, romantic way that, although intrinsically tragic, I regretted not being a part of it.

Holleran illuminates a period essential to understanding LGBTQ history, “Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with a moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after what you have dreamed, long for, the face shatters every time.”

Emotionally and historically, I was drawn into this astounding collection of riveting images. Through the direct gaze of the subjects, I could feel the love and tenderness they had for each other.

Frank and honest I felt like I was actually sitting across from the subjects while they were photographed. They all seemed so comfortable, open and free, even though living under the yoke of crushing social constraints that were hovering outside the frame.

Firstly the cover says it all. “The true story of how one baby found his home.” A baby abandoned in the subway is found by Danny, who falls in love with the little guy and convinces his partner to be a foster parent. The couple is broke, but the family rallies with diapers, a crib, etc. I love seeing a gay couple fully loved and supported by extended family and even the justice system. I read this book by myself and smile every time. This is the way the world should be. All accepted and loved. I wish I could have read a book like this to my kids 30 years ago. The book ends with a picture of a real grown-up Kevin and his dads which make the book even more special. The illustrations are fabulous.

Lorrie Moore is another one of my favorite writers and someone I’ve been lucky enough to write about on multiple occasions. Her first novel, Anagrams, is smart, fun, and resolutely—even defiantly—weird. Her second novel, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is all those things and more.

Berie, the narrator, is on a bad vacation in Paris, where her marriage is teetering on the brink of collapse. Instead of dealing with her obnoxious husband, she thinks back to the summer she turned fifteen and the profound friendship she forged with a girl she worked with at a Disney-knockoff theme park in upstate New York.

Like Home Land, this novel has its cultists, and I’m happy to count myself among them. Moore, like Lipsyte, is a stylist as unmistakable as she is unprecedented, someone whose sentences I would recognize anywhere. This slim coming-of-age novel bears all her hallmarks—comic timing, gimlet… show more.

Like many of the Potter books, this book is sort of a puzzle box built around an object that is governed by clear rules. The main character, Molly Moon, discovers a book that teaches her to control animals and people around her with the power of hypnotism. The book drops Molly's character into a clear set of rules and then has fun watching what she does with it, in a way that reminds me a bit of Hermione’s use of that special object in Prisoner of Azkaban. It also is a fantasy about unlimited power. Seriously, what if you could make anyone anywhere do anything you wanted them to?

As much about ideas and the nature of friendship as it is about the city, this slim volume captures, better than any other I know, the visceral feel of living in New York. Fiercely independent, Gornick wanders the city’s streets in the “habit of loneliness,” ever watching, listening, and thinking. A child of working-class Jewish immigrants, she grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s, and writes in a funny, smart, rueful, and tell-it-like-it-is voice that is unmistakably New York. 

Unlike the other recommendations, the plus-sized protagonist in this book is a man. Arthur Opp is a lonely shut-in who has lost his career, his friend, and his family of origin. His main solace is his correspondence with a former student, who, one day, asks him for help in guiding her son, Kel. 

From that point forward, the story is told from the alternating perspectives of Arthur and Kel. Both are plagued by isolation and tragedy. Though Arthur views himself as part of the shared soul of the lonely, he nonetheless begins to welcome people back into his life again and extols the virtues of found family to Kel.

This is a haunting, yet hopeful, book that stays with the reader for a very long time.

I love friendships in picture books, and this one is especially precious as it’s between a Muslim boy and a Jewish boy in Flatbush, New York. A friendship across cultures represented by special foods for each child’s cultural festivals is a wonderful gift to introduce children to.

I especially love how the children lead the way for their families to become friends. With my Iraqi Jewish background, I grew up knowing my grandparents had very close relations with their Muslim neighbors. And, of course, the recipes for rugelach and date cookies, which are included in the back matter, are an extra special bonus for me.