A Year in Reading: Rakesh Satyal

The Book That Will Make You Believe (Even More) in Magic: I would like to add my voice to the overwhelming chorus that has already lauded Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. This book feels like meeting Angela Carter for a wild night of drinking and dancing. The experimentation with form is simply astonishing, and there is a directness in the treatment of sexuality and identity that is both refreshing and deeply affecting. I assume that I’ll reread this book every year for the rest of my life.

The Book That Was Worth the Wait: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness would have been a welcome gift in any year, but it felt especially, painfully resonant during this year of dangerous nationalist sentiment and turmoil—worldwide, that is. This book is unflinchingly unconventional in its structure and unapologetically diffuse in certain parts where other books maybe feel a responsibility to adhere to a more rigid form. And there are descriptive passages of physical conflict that feel like a nefarious type of music shivering on the page.

The Book That Felt Like Emotional Armor: I have rarely read a book that more accurately captures the psychosomatic trauma of being queer in a place that is decidedly homophobic than Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy. Written in blunt, unsentimental prose that nevertheless seethes with anger and laments the trauma of a closeted, hunted childhood, this book will open your eyes and slap the sharpest of lenses on them.

The Book That Will Harness Your Terror: I finally read Jane Mayer’s Dark Money at the beginning of this year, and it was easily one of the most important works of nonfiction that I have ever read. It makes horrifyingly clear how corrupt the financial workings of our political system are, and it holds at its core a maddening paradox: How can families that will do anything to preserve their dynastic wealth create a physical world in which future generations of their own relatives will not be able to live?

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Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novel Blue Boy, which won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction and the 2010 Prose/Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Satyal was a recipient of a 2010 Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and two fellowships from the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. He writing has appeared in New York magazine, Vulture, Out magazine, and The Awl. A graduate of Princeton University, he has taught in the publishing program at New York University and has been on the advisory committee for the annual PEN World Voices Festival. He lives in Brooklyn.