100 books like Cantoras

Many books that tackle the AIDS crisis tend to focus on queer meccas like New York City and San Francisco, but Makkai’s The Great Believers illustrate just how hard the virus hit Chicago.

Jumping back and forth between 1985 and 2005, the book follows a close group of gay men and their straight allies as their communities begin to come under attack. In 1985, Yale Tishman is on the verge of great professional success just as his dreams begin to slip through his fingers.

Meanwhile in 2005, Yale’s friend Fiona Marcus finds herself looking for her runaway daughter in the streets of Paris, while also coming to terms with what she had to give up to care for these men. A masterful book. 

There were only three Tales of the City books when I picked up my first copy. There are now nine of them, spanning 40 years.

First written as a newspaper serial, the collected Tales explore the lives and loves of a diverse group of folks living in the same boarding house at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Among them is landlord Anna Madrigal, an early trans icon, and gay everyman Michael ‘Mouse’ Tolliver, a hopeless romantic looking for love in the Castro.

The book is an easy read with short chapters, lots of dialogue, and zany plot twists. What I love most is how much these characters – some of whom are estranged from their biological families – start to feel like close friends whose lives you get to follow. 

A perfect fit for the not-the-same-old-queer novel list, Taylor’s story features a Black gay biochemist who is working on his degree at a Midwestern university.

I love this book for the intimacy in its portrayal of the protagonist, Wallace, the way his thoughts and feelings and decisions are revealed with such precision. I felt his joys and his pains so clearly.

A science nerd gay character! What’s not to love?

Las Penas, New Mexico, is the setting for this moving novel that follows a year in the lives of the Padilla family. Valdez Quade creates characters with dazzling depth, and you’ll root for the Padillas as they stumble through twelve months, where everything they know is upended and destabilized.

The way this book portrays community reminds me of a favorite Sally Rooney quote from Normal People: “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”

Conklin’s collection of short stories offers storylines that are utterly and marvelously original.

These queer characters are quirky, but not quirky for the sake of being quirky. They are so fully themselves, and their passions drive them through their relationships and actions so believably, that you don’t question the strangeness of the situations for a second.

Mainly I just love the big heart in Conklin’s stories. Their prose, the actual word choices, are a delight in the same way the characters are—they surprise you and yet are spot-on right.

I can’t resist a book set in Oakland, very near to where I live.

I also love a novel that tells deep truths, and Nightcrawling does that, showing the horrors of police abuse and the failures of the justice system. However, this book isn’t “trauma porn.” On every page, protagonist Kiara owns her story, drives her agency, makes the best choices she can in the moment, and loves with a huge heart.

The way she finds her way to queer love is organic and beautiful.

It’s a common occurrence for the latest generation to think they invented everything, but Mordden sets the record straight and deftly answers the question posed by his book’s title: It’s been going on for a long, long time…

Epic in scope, this brick of a book opens at an underground gay bar in Los Angeles in 1949 and ends on Gay Pride Day in New York City in 1991. In between, we’re introduced to a boatload of queer characters from across the US, all trying to survive the trials that life throws at them.

At some point, many cross paths. It’s all here folks: raids on gay bars, secret affairs, falling in love, sex work, the birth of the pride movement, the torment of AIDS. I didn’t want it to end.

I always have time for what Kai Cheng Thom has to say. A work of non-fiction, this collection of enlightened essays and prose poems should be required reading for those of us interested in queer liberation.

From her earliest pages, it’s clear that Thom is not afraid to have difficult conversations or ask the tough questions, but she unpacks so many of today’s important issues with empathy, honesty, insight, and wit. Ultimately, she’s asking us to look inward and examine how we treat each other as members of the queer community.

What kind of future do we want for ourselves? For those we consider our family? This work remains hopeful and solutions-oriented without being saccharine or unrealistic.

I cannot say enough wonderful things about this heartfelt novel in verse about Tam (Redwood) and Kate (Ponytail) who fall in like while finding their authentic selves. Kate (like Peyton in my book) is a perfectionist—she’s got her list of boxes to check. But then Tam comes along, and Kate is set on an invigorating path of discovery. K.A. Holt’s brilliant poetry dazzles as she shares two journeys that are often joyful, satisfying introspective, and completely engrossing.

I fell absolutely in love with the world Fannie Flagg creates in this book and with her fascinating way of weaving together a complex, compelling, heartwarming story about family and small-town life.

I really admire all the women in this novel–Idgie and Ruth from the past storyline and Evelyn and Ninny from the “present-day” storyline. I also love the mysteries and secrets at the novel’s heart and the way I was kept guessing all the way to the end.

This book made me both laugh and cry, and it has been on my short list of the novels I love most ever since I first read it many years ago.