When we’re not scrolling on SSENSE, interviewing celebrities, or thinking about pants, your favorite GQ editors like to read—a lot. But what are the best books to read this month? We’re so glad you asked. Earlier this year, I made a resolution with my two close friends to read two books a month. We started a monthly book club to keep us on track, and now, I’m bringing it to work.
Whether your New Year’s resolution was also to read more books, you’re looking to curb blue-light-induced migraines, or you just need a new title to performatively plop on your nightstand, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a round of novels (remember those?), memoirs, sociological texts, and photo books that your friendly neighborhood GQ staff enjoyed in May.
Finding Me: A Memoir, by Viola Davis
Three years ago, a Breakfast Club interview clip of Viola Davis promoting her memoir Finding Me took me out of a major slump. In it, she recalls a quote she reposted on her social media: “You haven’t met all the people who are going to love you in your life yet.” She adds, “When you meet all these people who are going to love you, they do not want to meet a vengeful person.” We often get stuck in nihilistic thought patterns that we forget that life isn’t something that just has to happen to us, but an experience we can actively shape. This book has done more for me than five years of therapy. I recommend listening to the audiobook, because the EGOT-winner herself narrates it. —Heven Haile, Editorial Operations Manager
Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Though the premise of this book is pure drama, Brodesser-Akner’s snarky voice and gossipy tone manages to keep it juicy and surprisingly funny from top to bottom. I should caveat that I have a particular affinity towards books about characters on the verge of, or actively experiencing, mental breakdowns—and that’s precisely what you’re getting here. If reading about spoiled rich kids turned into maladjusted adults embroiled in toxic family drama sounds as good to you as it did to me, then you should grab a copy. —Camille Ramos, Coordinating Producer
Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism, by Macaela MacKenzie
Women’s sports is escalating in growth, influence, and coverage—but they’ve been fighting the good fight for much longer than the recent rise in attention over the past few years. This book helps paint the bigger picture of why the fight for equity in women’s sports goes beyond just athletics and into economic equity for women in general. —Brauna Marks, Visuals Editor
I Make Envy On Your Disco, by Eric Schnall
Sweaty, sun-kissed, often about the reckless, sexually-charged self-discovery of the young, the coming-of-age novel is a summer staple for a reason. Eric Schnall’s winsome debut I Make Envy On Your Disco, however, is a reminder that coming into yourself is a lifelong project—and that sometimes that can happen in your late 30s, against the grey, cold climes of Berlin at the turn of the millennium. That city in transition is the perfect backdrop for this perceptive, melancholy story about a New York art advisor who flees to Berlin to escape the anxieties of middle age and long-term relationships. Full of techno, espressos, hot serpentine boys in cafes, well-timed musical cues (from Ace of Base to Edith Piaf), and the occasional tab of ecstasy, it’s a comforting, elegantly-written reminder that there’s life after twink death. —Raymond Ang, Associate Director of Editorial Operations
Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now, by Eleanor Coppola
I read this a while ago but pulled it off the shelf again while editing this Francis Ford Coppola interview a few weeks back. Eleanor, who died in 2024, was Coppola’s wife, creative partner, and secret sharer of 62 years but also a writer/director in her own right. You might know her documentary Hearts of Darkness, an essential portrait of her husband battling self-doubt and all manner of jungle madness in the Philippines while shooting Apocalypse Now, which he’s convinced is going to be a career-endingly bad movie; Notes, drawn from Eleanor’s diaries during the Apocalypse era, is no less action-packed and glamorous but also more intimate and thorny in its depiction of Eleanor’s relationship with the angst-ridden and sometimes feckless Francis Ford. Parts of it feel like a high-‘70s Lost in Translation, even before Eleanor takes Sofia on a train to Kyoto. —Alex Pappademas, Culture Director
The Harvard Black Rock Forest, by George W.S. Trow
This book-length essay, originally published in The New Yorker in 1984, is an almost hypnotic piece of avant-garde magazine writing and reporting—so obliquely rendered as to nearly elude summary. At the surface, it’s a story about the management of a laboratory-forest gifted to Harvard for the study of silviculture. (Yawn? I know.) But it becomes a wholly idiosyncratic and deliriously self-indulgent (non-derogatory!) journey through history. What do the letters of Teddy Roosevelt, the market-value method of accounting, and Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa’s 1966 address to the Royal Society all have to do with a 3,800-acre Hudson Valley forest? Something about how the fallenness of our world stops us from knowing it, freely and simply. —Matthew Browne, Sr. Research Manager
The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, by Jamie Kreiner
When Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction came out a few years ago, many reviews noted that our propensity to easily lose focus was not just a modern problem exacerbated by new technologies, but rather a situation that has afflicted humans since time immemorial (or at least in this case, since monks started keeping records of their mental intrusions). Reading about how monks grappled with a “parallel commitment,” juggling concentration on a higher power with more earthly obligations, was especially compelling. “A good renunciation story was aspirational but impossible. The world could not be left behind, not completely,” she observes. One potential solution? “To tackle distraction,” Kreiner writes, “it was crucial to identify something worthy of total concentration.” After all, whether sacred or secular, many of us wish to transcend the petty interruptions that keep us from reaching the divine (whatever that might be). —Julia Pagnamenta, Research Manager
Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style, by Jason Jules & Graham Marsh
So many advancements in African American men’s fashion have been aspirational in nature. This was as true during the US mid-century as in our more recent hip-hop style palettes. Black Ivy’s deep captions and ample photos explore, in page after vivid page, Civil Rights Era style icons—ranging from artists to academics to athletes to activists—who pull inspiration from Brooks Brothers’ crisp yet staid prepwear. In the process of Black adaptation and recontextualization, upper-class WASP signifiers such as button-downs, sack suits, and penny loafers were transformed, via remixes and mashups, from cold to cool. And on a personal level, thanks to this essential volume, as a literal child of the ’60s whose classic fashion sense is often mistaken for white preppy instead of being seen as drawing from my true Black inspirations, I finally feel seen. —Gaylord Fields, Copy Manager