The snow is melting, which can only mean one thing: spring has sprung, and it’s time for another year’s first installment of The Best Books I Read This Season. This winter brought me many reading slumps, or maybe it was just one long, ongoing reading slump, who knows? All I do know is that my focus was very scattered this winter, which I can see among my peers is a feeling everyone has been struggling with this year. But what’s one to do when they can’t find something, let alone a book, to hold their focus? You dig deeper, of course. Indeed, I even surprised myself when compiling this winter’s roundup at how many good books I did find, despite feeling like I was in a continuous reading slump. Good books know how to find us when we don’t know how to find them. Scroll on for the best books I read this winter.
Four Squares by Bobby Finger
Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who — as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner — are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.
Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take. Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave.
Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire by Ashley Spencer
For many kids growing up in the 2000s, there was no cultural touchstone more powerful than Disney Channel, the most-watched cable channel in prime time at its peak. Today it might best be known for introducing the world to talents like Hilary Duff, Raven-Symoné, Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, and Zendaya. It wasn’t always destined for greatness: When Disney Channel launched in 1983, it was a forgotten stepchild within the Walt Disney Company, forever in the shadow of Disney’s more profitable movies and theme parks. But after letting the stars of their Mickey Mouse Club revival ― among them Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Ryan Gosling ― slip through their fingers, Disney Channel reinvented itself as a powerhouse tween network.
In the new millennium it churned out billions of dollars in original content and triple-threat stars whose careers were almost entirely controlled by the corporation. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the pie ― and there were constant clashes between the studio, network, labels, and creatives as Disney Channel became a pressure cooker of perfection for its stars. From private feuds and on-set disasters, to fanfare that swept the nation and the realities of child stardom, culture journalist Ashley Spencer offers the inside story of the heyday of TV’s House of Mouse, featuring hundreds of exclusive new interviews with former Disney executives, creatives, and celebrities to explore the highs, lows, and everything in between.
Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture is Failing Women by Lisa Whittington-Hill
The past decade has seen a rise in documentaries, memoirs and podcasts that revisit the legacies of women wronged by pop culture. With movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, challenging long-standing narratives around female celebrities, it’s no surprise so many believe the representation of women in the media has improved. In Girls, Interrupted, Lisa Whittington-Hill argues otherwise. Pop culture’s treatment of women, writes Whittington-Hill, is still marked by misogyny and misunderstanding. From the gender bias in celebrity memoir coverage to problematic pop culture portrayals of middle-aged women and the sexist pressure on female pop stars to constantly reinvent themselves, Girls, Interrupted critically examines how mainstream media keeps failing women and explores what we can do to fix it. A work of searing relevance, this candid and often cathartic debut marks Whittington-Hill as a cultural critic of the first rank.
You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation by Susannah Gora
The films of the Brat Pack — from Sixteen Candles to Say Anything — are some of the most watched, bestselling DVDs of all time. The landscape that the Brat Pack memorialized — where outcasts and prom queens fall in love, preppies and burn-outs become buds, and frosted lip gloss, skinny ties, and exuberant optimism made us feel invincible — is rich with cultural themes and significance, and has influenced an entire generation who still believe that life always turns out the way it is supposed to. You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried takes us back to that era, interviewing key players, such as Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, and John Cusack, and mines all the material from the movies to the music to the way the films were made to show how they helped shape our visions for romance, friendship, society, and success.
Traveling Light by Katrina Kittle
“Travel light and you can sing in the robber’s face” was the best advice Summer Zwolenick ever received from her father, though she didn’t recognize it at the time. Three years after the accident that ended her career as a ballerina, she is back in the familiar suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, teaching at a local high school. But it wasn’t nostalgia that called Summer home. It was her need to spend quality time with her brother, Todd, and his devoted partner, Jacob. Todd, the golden athlete whose strength and spirit encouraged Summer to nurture her own unique talents and follow her dream, is in the final stages of a terminal illness. In a few short months, he will be dead — leaving Summer only a handful of precious days to learn all the lessons her brother still has to teach her… from how to love and how to live to how to let go. Traveling Light is the deeply moving debut novel from Katrina Kittle, the acclaimed author of The Kindness of Strangers — an unforgettable story of love, bonds, and promises that endure longer than life itself.
After All by Mary Tyler Moore
A moment of recognition for the first edition hardcover of Mary Tyler Moore’s out-of-print 1995 memoir that I found at an used bookstore for $11 this winter, please! She was America’s darling: actress, producer, star of the golden age of television. Her work on The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show brought her multiple Emmys, followed by critical acclaim for her acting on Broadway and in film. Now, in her witty, candid, heartbreaking autobiography, Mary Tyler Moore tells all, about the Dick Van Dyke nobody knows, Elvis — her sly, seductive co-star in Change of Habit — how Carl Reiner taught her to cry while being funny, Robert Redford’s confession after casting her in Ordinary People, about former First Lady Betty Ford’s inebriated debut on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and years later, her phone call that saved Mary’s life. The actress spares nothing as she recounts her traumatic childhood, two failed marriages, her own alcoholism, the tragic death of her son, and her third, happy marriage to a cardiologist eighteen years her junior. Moving, inspiring, and brutally frank, After All will touch every reader’s heart and soul.
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul
In this debut essay collection, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humor to share her fears, outrages and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with Internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father’s creeping mortality — all as she tries to find her feet in the world.
Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean by Jason Colavito
A fresh and long-overdue reassessment of James Dean, examining his life and legacy as a queer man. Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and —for some — threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the fascination he has always inspired are inseparable from his identity as a queer man whose complex sexuality shattered the norms of mid-century American society. (When asked whether he was a homosexual, he reportedly said, “I’m certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.”)
Today, even though it is widely accepted that Dean was gay or bisexual, the story of his life and personal character continue to be colored by the prejudices of an earlier era and the work of often unscrupulous biographers and journalists. Drawing on exhaustive new research (including more than four hundred previously secret pages of Dean’s personal and business records), The Secret Life of James Dean is a revelatory reassessment of the man and his legacy. Free from sensationalism — but unafraid to confront the difficult facts of Dean’s life — it deploys modern insights into sexual diversity to transform our understanding of James Dean’s story, and the stories of boys and men like him.
Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya
Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners.” Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland.
But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives? Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.
Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good by Beverly Donofrio
I reread this for the first time in over a decade and loved it just as much as the first time. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read, and way better than the movie. Beverly Ann Donofrio wasn’t bad because she hung out with hoods — she was bad because she was a hood. Unable to attend college, she lost interest in everything but riding around in cars, drinking, smoking, and rebelling against authority. After her teenage marriage failed, Bev found herself at an elite New England university, books in one arm, child on the other. Then, furnished with ambition, dreams, and five-hundred dollars, she took herself and her son to New York City to begin a career and a life. An outrageous and touching memoir, Riding in Cars With Boys is about becoming middle-class and the compromises made between being your own person and fitting into society. But mostly it’s a story of a teenage mother who, as her son grows up, becomes an adult herself.
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum
Who invented reality TV, the world’s most dangerous pop culture genre, and why can’t we look away from it? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary,” Emily Nussbaum unearths the surprising origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who created it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.
Nussbaum traces four paths of reality innovation — game shows, prank shows, soap operas, and clip shows — that united in the Survivor format, sparking a tumultuous Hollywood gold-rush. Along the way, we meet tricksters and innovators — from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; Bachelor mastermind Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray, the visionary behind The Real World — along with dozens of crew members and ordinary people whose lives became fodder for the reality revolution. We learn about the tools of the trade — like Candid Camera’s brilliant “reveal” and the notorious Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and the moral outrage that reality shows provoked. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates what made the genre so powerful: a jolt of authentic emotion.
What were the best books you read this winter?
Jeffrey Reads 