Yesterday was a glorious, glorious day. Yesterday was Anansi Boys day!
For those of you who don't know, Anansi Boys is the new novel by my personal lord and savior, Neil Gaiman. I've been looking forward to it for...okay, years. And I wasn't at all disappointed. (Yeah, I finished it already. What? Like I was going to read just a little bit of it and stop.) It was terrific--it made me really happy, which few books can do. I'm going to post a more spoilery reaction later, but right now I just want to say: yeah. Go read it.
However, Anansi Boys wasn't the only awesome new book to come out yesterday. Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff also debuted. I had the privilege of getting to read this book a few months ago (one of the few perks of employment at Barnes & Noble? Occasional review copies), and it's fabulous, one of the reasons this has been The Summer of My Crush on Canada (the other being, of course, my dear Rodney McKay, and I really can't go a whole post without at least mentioning SGA, can I?).
Rakoff is an essayist--his previous book is Fraud--and in this collection, he delivers two essays in particular that just floored me. "Love It or Leave It" is about Rakoff's decision, after 22 years of living in New York, to become an American citizen--and his subsequent very mixed feelings:
This all feels like monumentally bad timing, or possibly the entirely wrong move altogether. Just two days prior [to his swearing-in], the front page of the paper had two news stories. The first was about how Canada was on the brink of legalizing gay marriage, and the second told of an appeals court in the District of Columbia Circuit that ruled that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are legally outside the reach of the protections of the Constitution.
Ouch.
Equally ouchy is "Beat Me, Daddy," an examination of what the fuck is wrong with the Log Cabin Republicans, "the largest gay and lesbian organization in the GOP." Rakoff, who is gay, puts a lot of effort into trying to understand why anyone would want to ally themselves with a political party that, well, hates them, and the result is fascinating and, frankly, heart-breaking. A lot of Rakoff's essays are like that--but you should still totally read this book. In fact, that is why you need to read this book: because we need to be talking about this stuff, and Rakoff's a great person to lead the discussion--unflinchingly, and with humor.
So yeah. Shoo. Go read.
