18 Books I Loved in 2018

Book nerds, unite! The country may be crumbling around us, but at least we have some good reading to keep ourselves informed and/or entertained and/or distracted!

It was another big year of reading for me, and I read book after book that was so good, powerful, and insightful. Critics talk a lot about how we’ve been in a period of Peak TV, with a glut of critically acclaimed TV shows that make it almost impossible to keep up. I feel the same way about books! My library queue is always overflowing, and the next book to be read is always on mind. My bookshelves at home are also overflowing with things I’ve picked up for a few bucks here and there, and while I didn’t get to many of them this year, one of my goals for 2019 is to lay off the library queue and start working through my own purchases. It’s time.

One of my favorite things is when friends and family members ask for a good book recommendation — and I think that often when they ask, they quickly regret it, because I’ll talk for a few minutes and arm them with a list of 10 choices, with finely-tuned caveats about why exactly they’ll like it and why they may not.

As 2018 draws to a close and I reflect on the 90 books I read this year, I figured it’d be best to just write up my favorites — and what do you know? There are exactly 18 books in 2018 that I categorically recommend and loved. Take a look — and let me know if you’ve read any of them!

You can also hop down to the TLD;DR of it all at the bottom of this post for other categories tracking more of the reading I did in 2018. Or you can see them all on my Tumblr or, maybe more helpfully, on my Instagram (@AdamReadzBooks), where I write mini, capsule-sized reviews.

Epic Novels

Four of my favorites this year were what I like to think of as “epic” novels — books that take place over the course of many decades, or across many continents. The type of book that when you close the last page you just think, ummm wow I just read a big, epic book. Here are four that fit this category:

1) Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I loved Homegoing, a book that beautifully tracks two concurrent family trees. The trees start with two women from Ghana in the late 1700s, who had the same mother but never meet. The one sister marries a wealthy white slave owner and the other sister is a slave in the dungeons of her half-sister’s castle. Each chapter than ping-pongs between their two family lines, one chapter for each generation on each side, bringing the reader through the slave trade, slavery in the United States, Jim Crow, the drug epidemic, and mass incarceration, and everything in between.

The book becomes a tour not only through this one family but also a look at how black people have been treated throughout history around the world and acutely in the United States. It’s a heavy book — the weight of history and class and race and the evil things we do to each other run throughout the novel. Maybe most compellingly, Gyasi seems to debate between free will and fate — chance and agency. These characters wind up in their hugely divergent situations because of a combination of circumstance, luck (or misfortune), and race/class. Most often, a character in a generation is born into their situation, and that defines most of their life.

One of the characters, Marcus, sums up the case against meritocracy well:

“How could he explain to Marjorie that he wasn’t supposed to be here. Alive. Free. That the fact that he had been born, that he wasn’t in a jail cell somewhere, was not by dint of pulling himself up by the bootstraps, not by hard work or belief in the American Dream, but by mere chance.” We would all do well to consider this perspective more closely.

2) The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer’s anticipated 2018 novel is a decades-spanning look at feminism and how women in different generations respond to it. It follows a few central characters, chief among them Greer, a meek but ultimately ambitious woman who tentatively and then forcefully gets involved in the gender equity movement during the Obama years; and Faith Frank, the Gloria Steinem-esque face of the feminist movement after writing the Feminine Mystique-adjacent book The Female Persuasion.

Meg Wolitzer is a genius novel writer, and her tack here is especially generous: She centers the chapters around an individual character, writing with a third-person limited view that takes you inside the brain of Faith, Greer, and also Greer’s boyfriend Corey and friend Zee. We hear every character’s smart insights, marvel at their optimism and confidence, but underlining the entire book is a deep self-cynicism that only Wolitzer can capture quite so perfectly. Every character is an expert at self-doubt. They want to do the right thing, but they also want to do what’s best for them, and sometimes, those things are not in line. How do we grapple with that?, the book asks. How do we make an impact without embarrassing ourselves or hurting others? How should we approach mentorship and friendship and romance?

The Female Persuasion is not an epic book because epic, enormous things happen in it — they don’t. The conflict is quite small and intimate, closer to the conflicts we all face every day: Those little annoying decisions you have to make that may hurt someone’s feelings or make someone feel sidelined or give someone great joy. It’s epic because it spans decades and deals with real human decisions in a way unlike any other writer I’ve read.Meg Wolitzer’s books strike me so strongly because they are about the little moments in life that can drive you crazy, and by seeing these characters struggle with them, sometimes in a way that makes them come off like assholes, we learn better how to approach these moments in our own lives.

3) Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Another long (nearly 500 pages) book about the many generations of a family — this one a Korean family that immigrates to Japan, where they face racism, classism, war, and shame. One of the unique things about Pachinko is that it is written with a super matter-of-fact tone, which I’ve rarely encountered. Min Jin Lee tells tells tells — and despite that (because of that?), you feel deeply for these characters and their lives, big and exciting or small and simple.

The author has an interesting perspective on class and misfortunate, underlined in a quote from the character who is the most obvious “villain,” if one exists at all: “Pay attention,” he says, discussing his idea that people whose lives are charmed/successful pay a success tax and people whose lives are filled with hardships pay a shit tax. But the people who he has the most disdain for are people who pay the mediocre tax. “The ones who pay the shit tax are mostly people who were born in the wrong place and the wrong time and are hanging onto the planet by their broken fingernails. They don’t even know the fucking rules of the game. You can’t even get mad at ’em when they lose. Life just fucks and fucks and fucks bastards like that. Those losers have to climb Mount Everest to get out of hell, and maybe one or two in five hundred thousand break out, but the rest pay the shit tax all their lives, then they die. If God exists and if He’s fair, then it makes sense that in the afterlife, those guys should get the better seats. … But all those able-bodied middle-class people who are scared of their shadows, well, they pay the mediocre tax in regular quarterly installments with compounding interest. When you play it safe, that’s what happens. The tax for being mediocre comes from everyone else knowing that you are mediocre. It’s a heavier tax than you’d think.”

It’s also one of the most insightful titles I’ve seen in a while. Pachinko is a pinball-like game in Japan, and the characters in this story are the balls, shoved through life violently and randomly and forced to ask themselves whether and how they can take control for once.

4) Less by Andrew Sean Greer

A few friends I’ve spoken with are in no way fans of Less, a cringe comedy about a gay 50-year-old man who is a semi-successful but quickly fading novelist. I think some of the disdain for the book comes from the fact that it won the Pulitzer Prize, which seems to mark a selection as IMPORTANT in all capital letters.

I don’t think Less is that important, and I don’t know if it needed to win the Pulitzer Prize, but when you strip that away, I think it really is a charming, fun book about success and what we’re supposed to want from life. I liked reading aboutArthur Less’ traipses through New York, Mexico, France, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan, learning lessons about love and legacy and the shortcomings of genius.

It’s a distinctly gay novel, providing great insight into the pressures gay men face to not be a “bad gay,” and how the world has changed in just a few decades, from sexual romps through the city to pressures to settle down and marry. It’s also a great investigation into what love is really about. One character reflects on the end of his marriage positively, explaining to Arthur that after an amazing road trip, he called it quits. Arthur reacts with sadness, saying that obviously something failed, but the man continues: “No, Arthur, no! It’s the opposite! I’m saying it’s a success. Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it will end in a billion years? No, it’s the fucking sun! Why does a marriage not count?”

Little insights like this — perspectives that I’ve never really considered — made Less one of my favorites this year.

Intimate, Short Novels

Three other novels that I loved this year were shorter and more tightly focused on a specific few characters, which typically makes for a fast, engaging read. These three you can hammer out in a few days, but they do a lot with less:

5) History of Violence by Édouard Louis

This is a really short book — an autobiographical novel, informed by the author’s assault and rape in his home in Paris.

It is brutal to read, especially as we hear story after story every day of people who have experienced sexual violence.

What I liked about History of Violence is that it’s not simply a torturous examination of what happened and how it crippled the writer — it’s a book that asks smart and uncertain questions about shame and consent and blame and self doubt. I really connected with it and recommend it.

6) Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Black Swan Green is the story of a young boy with a bad stutter in a small suburb. It functions like a collection of coming-of-age short stories, so each chapter could be self contained. Together, the sum of the novel is beautiful and funny and charming.

As a stutterer myself it was strange to see David Mitchell so succinctly and directly articulate things about stuttering (or stammering, as his character refers to it) that I’ve felt for years but never quite been able to explain. The protagonist refers to the stutter as “hangman,” and he walks the reader through how he can anticipate when “hangman” is going to come and hold his words hostage. The stuttering piece is baked in through the entire book, unlike anything I’ve ever read or seen before. It rears its head when the character copes with middle school bullies, parental drama, class presentations, and thoughts about war, mentorship, and crushes. I really appreciated this one.

7) The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Another Wolitzer selection, which may be cheating because she’s just one of my favorite authors, but The Wife is really good — and it’s so short you can devour it more quickly than you may have thought possible.

This one is the story of the wife of a prolific novelist, and we meet the characters just as the novelist is selected to win a high-profile, Pulitzer-esque, career-capping award in Finland. As they prepare for the trip, we jump back through time and get to know the couple, including how they met and began their romantic relationship as an affair, how they built their lives together, how they relate to their three children, and how they approached fame and success and literature.

Wolitzer can write about gender like no other novelist, and that’s again evident here. “Everyone need a wife; even wives need wives,” she writes. “Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. ‘Listen,’ we say. ‘Everything will be okay.’ And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.”

Books to Make You Smarter

Nothing like a good nonfiction book — or nonfiction book of essays — to get you educated in 2018. Here were four faves from this year:

8) Educated by Tara Westover

This is a stunning memoir, one of the few that I’ve ever read that I just couldn’t put down — Westover’s life is more interesting than anything an author could have dreamed up for a fiction novel.

Her story is the story of a girl born into a survivalist, fundamentalist household in Idaho, where she is not allowed to go to school or to a hospital and doesn’t even have a birth certificate because her father and his faith mistrust the government. The family turns abusive and dangerous, and eventually Tara leaves Idaho to enter school, where she learns for the first time (in her late teens) about the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, science, and more.

This book is a forest fire of abuse, enlightenment, and a greater understanding of what we can do with our lives. So lovely and important.

9) Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister, one of the most essential voices writing about gender and politics today (regularly for New York), released this new book exploring women’s rage and how it has created change. The book looks at history but is more focused on developments since 2016, and it was released at just the right time — during the hideous confirmation fight of Brett fucking Kavanaugh.

One of Traister’s gifts as a journalist is her deep empathy for others — her understanding that lots of people are often flawed or could be better or have hurt people without meaning to. She walks through how men have hurt women, how white women have hurt women of color, how rich women have hurt poor women, and how everyone is a little messy.

Her tone is not uncertain — she is very certain in the power of women’s rage — but rather, it questions assumptions and provides probing analysis that leaves honest room for error, a rare phenomenon in this world where every idiot with a Twitter account claims to understand 100% of everyone’s motivations. Traister’s book expertly details the #MeToo movement, but more than being a primer on the hashtag and rehashing the stories that have turned our stomachs for over a year now, she links the movement to history and finds at its root a deep anger — at being ignored, oppressed, held down, and disbelieved for far too long.

10) Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli

The book’s title is the request that Luiselli received frequently from her daughter when she would share stories of the migrant children she translated for in New York’s federal immigration court.

Luiselli is rarely able to answer — we don’t know yet how this crisis of refugee children from Central America seeking asylum in the United States ends, because we are in the very throes of this struggle.

Luiselli ingeniously and heartbreakingly structures this tight extended essay around 40 questions she needed to ask migrant children as part of her job — and one of the first questions sounds simple: “Why did you come to the United States?”

Why does anyone come to the United States, Luiselli counters in her narrative, which is full of restrained rage and tension and compassion for these children. “Why did you come to the United States, we ask. They might ask a similar question: Why did we risk our lives to come to this country? Why did they come when, as if in some circular nightmare, they arrive at new schools, in their new neighborhoods, and find there the very things they were running from?”

We must do better for these children and the many families who we turn away — the families we are now criminalizing for seeking a better life. This slim book opened my eyes and stirred my passions in an important way.

11) Hope in the Dark

At this period in history when everything seems to suck, the book that gave me most comfort was Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, a radical, anti-capitalist thinker whose tone runs counter to so many of the radical, anti-capitalist thinkers I’ve read in the past. Too often, these writers are cynical and negative — I agree with what they are saying in essence, but I wish they could say it more positively, without writing everything off and giving us no way forward.

Solnit doesn’t do that. she discusses the very real problems facing the world, but she conveys a sense of hope that is reassuring and beautiful and inspiring. It’s neither optimistic or pessimistic, she makes sure to underline , writing in a later book that “optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing.”

This was written during the Bush era, then republished with additional chapters in 2015, but the lessons here are especially resonant now. She talks about how progressives should stop the in-fighting, curb the despair, and start looking and working toward real change.

Here is one of my favorite passages of the book:

Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world’s real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity — seeing the troubles in this world — and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable. … Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say it because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. … Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed

Books About Love

There’s nothing like a good romance, and this year I read a lot of them. None of them had quite the starstruck, beautiful, heart-melting, saccharine qualities of a Hallmark movie (actually, a lot of them were sort of fucked up, and the book that Love Simon was based on actually comes closest to “sweet”), but I loved them as they investigated self-image, sacrifice, devotion, sex, desire, and identity. Here are four great ones:

12) Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Conversations With Friends is a novel about female friendship, growing up, and non-monogamy.

It’s one of those books that wraps you up in a characters’ life and puts you in her head, allowing you to enjoy her wit and smart observations and start to hate her dripping cynicism and emotionally withdrawn attitude.

It’s a sexy, moody book with a realistically drawn romance/affair as the window dressing and a unique, somewhat uncomfortably close friendship at its core.

13) An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

This book is so gorgeous and heartbreaking, and it’s rightly received a lot of accolades for its beautiful section comprised solely of letters between a man wrongly imprisoned for a rape he did not commit and his wife, who is building a life for herself without him. That section tracks how the marriage dissolves with distance and the changing personalities of the couple, and it’s wonderful/terrible.

But An American Marriage is much more than that. It’s an intimate and subtle interrogation of racism, our justice system, and black class and power systems. It’s a book where you agree with everyone and you also think everyone is wrong, in some way. It’s an examination of how we can love multiple people in different ways and the decisions we make when we are forced to choose. And it’s also an investigation into masculinity and what it means to be a man. You see this alluded to again and again, maybe most interestingly when Roy receives his 12-year sentence to prison:

“Roy stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man wails like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointments to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirit just last year.”

14) Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Yes, I loved Love Simon, and yes, I loved the lovely young adult book that the film was based on.

The story centers on a gay, very cool teenager who comes out and tries to navigate high school while dealing with puppy love. I’m so happy this book exists — not just because it’s a gay teen romance that doesn’t rely on tragedy or (too much) on angst, but because it is really sweet, readable, and relatable. From Simon to his parents to his friends, there are a lot of characters to fall for here, and the book provides a perfect young adult escape into something sugary sweet — including lots of smiles, a few laughs, and definitely some happy tears.

15) The Pisces by Melissa Broder

This book is essentially what would happen if The Shape of Water was not bleak/dramatic and did not take place during the Cold War, swapped out the charming mute protagonist for a self-involved, horny mess of a Sappho-obsessed woman, and replaced the Creature from the Black Lagoon for an insanely hot, abs-and-all merman in California.

Yes, the main character fucks a fish — a merman, to be exact, and the scenes are strangely hot?

The book was written by the woman behind So Sad Today. She has mastered the art of the happy-sad, funny-bleak tone, and she’s really weird. There’s no getting around that. It makes for a great, ingenuous story about a depressed woman who has lost her passion and vision for her career, regretfully dumps her boyfriend-ish of many years, and then falls in love with a merman. It’s partly an allegory for depression and sex/love addiction and partly an earnest exploration of what you’re supposed to do with your life. This managed to be fun and sexy without being stupid, and it added up to a lovely read.

Chilling Cultural Satires

These books sort of defy classification — but all three of them are biting critiques of our society — whether it’s white people’s treatment of people of color, our obsession with consumerism, or our reliance on the Internet. Take a look at these three very good Black Mirror-y dystopias:

16) White Tears

White Tears starts slow — mostly ordinary but very readable. It’s the story of a two white guys, Carter and Seth, with a special appreciation for music and a certain skill for creating it who just graduated from school and have started their own studio and business. The immediate success is largely thanks to Carter’s enormous trust fund/allowance — he’s the son of a business mogul worth billions. In addition to being a well-connected privileged music snob with a bottomless bank account, Carter is a collector of old records, especially post-WWI blues songs, largely and/or exclusively sung by black artists.

The second quarter of the book introduces the mystery — Seth, who likes to record ambient sound while walking around New York, picks up a beautiful blues tune from a man in Washington Square Park. Carter hears it, is mesmerized by it, and pressures Seth into producing it into a full track. Carter posts it online, choosing a name at random — Charlie Shaw — and disguising it as an authentic record from the 1920s. Immediately, it picks up traction on collectors’ sites until one collector, over a tense online chat exchange, demands to meet with the boys. Seth does, and throughout his conversation with the old man with decades of collecting experience, Seth is told repeatedly that Charlie Shaw is not a made-up person — he’s an old musician, and the song Seth recorded is a legendary collectible item. Carter apparently just happened to stumble into the world’s eeriest name choice coincidence.

It would be too much of a spoiler to write out the plot details of Acts 3 and 4, but suffice it to say that the mood and tone shift immeasurably, with the most compelling results I’ve read in a really long time. I grazed on White Tears for three or four days until passing the halfway mark — and from there, I couldn’t put it down, devouring the last half in less than a day.

It is a painful read, a haunting look at the injustices our country is built on. It is a searing satire of cultural appropriation, a Black Mirror episode for the vintage crowd. It’s a thriller — but not in a cheap way. It is filled with moments of mania and lunacy and suspense and seemingly psychedelic plot points.

I don’t want to say anymore because I really think the surprise and the way Kunzru expertly sneaks up on the reader, indicting wealth and injustice and our country’s reliance on collective cultural amnesia, is so powerful and a central part of the read. Damn. Selected quotes here.

17) What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky

This late-2018 collection of essays from Heather Havrilesky had me on a rollercoaster of feelings. The book is ostensibly a critique of American obsession with consumerism — which is a bit ironic given that Havrilesky has spent much of her career as a television critic/writer. Throughout the first few essays, I found myself nodding vigorously, agreeing with Havrilesky’s take on Disney world, our desire for more plastic, more stimulation, more more more.

Soon I found myself wondering whether Havrilesky was being too harsh. Could she lighten up a bit and not pick on the person who wrote The Lifechanging Magic of Tidying Up? How does she both have problems with people who want too much AND people who want to clean up and become minimalists? It didn’t quite add up.

But by the end, Havrilesky brought me back around, exploring consumption and heroics and villainy in interesting ways, and by the final few essays, you get the sense that Havrilesky is cynical because she is mad, and lost, and confused — she knows that something is dramatically off with our society, but she doesn’t know how to fix it, and she is exhausted of screaming into the Internet void that we must fix this before we choke on our own climate change stimulants. Her book is a really nice way to grapple with the many challenges our world faces, and I recommend it.

18) Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Sabrina is so good and so unsettling. It’s rare that a graphic novel feels so heavy and involved.

It’s about a young woman who disappears and is later found to be murdered, and the murderer filmed the killing, which leaks onto the Internet. In the aftermath, Internet users circle like vultures, and the Sabrina killing becomes the latest tragedy that these trolls latch onto, painting it as a “false flag”. It unites conspiracy theory assholes and truthers in a way that makes you as a reader doubt what you yourself believe.

Sabrina plays a fucked up little magic trick on readers — or at least it did on me. The conspiracy theorists are written so convincingly, and Drnaso gets you into the protagonists’ easily-manipulated head that I thought at first it was apologizing for the truthers. But it’s more disturbing than that: Drnaso is showing you how easy it is to slip into that shit. It’s a thrilling and messy condemnation of our toxic online culture, unrelenting news cycle, and societal fascination with the grisly.

TL;DR: The Short List

Books I loved and categorically recommend: White Tears, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, The Wife, Homegoing, The Female Persuasion, Less, Pachinko, An American Marriage, Hope in the Dark, The Pisces, Tell Me How It Ends, Black Swan Green, Educated, Conversations with Friends, Good and Mad, History of Violence, Sabrina, What If This Were Enough?

Books I don’t categorically recommend, sorry: Lincoln in the Bardo, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Black Deutschland, Children of Blood and Bone, Feel Free, Bel Canto, Lethal White, Sick, Rules for Revolutionaries

Books I loved while reading but now look back at with kind of a shrug: The Power, History is All You Left Me, Fire and Fury, The Immortalists, Circe, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Books that made me cry: White Tears (how appropriate), The Wife, The Immortalists, Two Boys Kissing, Homegoing, Tomorrow Will Be Different, Hide, Pachinko, Tell Me How It Ends, History of Violence, Good and Mad, Hope in the Dark

Books that made me laugh: Two Boys Kissing, The Pisces, Black Swan Green, Marriage Vacation, The Position, What If This Were Enough?, Ready Player One

Books that are very quick reads: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, The Wife, How We Get Free, Why Are We At War?, Two Boys Kissing, Gratitude, Tell Me How It Ends, History of Violence

Books that are pretty to look at (graphic novels + comics): Here, The End of the Fucking World, Imagine Wanting Only This, Daytripper, Tenements Towers & Trash, Black Panther, Incognegro, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Archie Vols. 1–4, Bottled, A Contract with God

Books that were better on the screen: The End of the Fucking World, Black Panther

Books that made me smarter: Locking Up Our Own, There Goes the Gayborhood?, Bowling Alone, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, Good and Mad, Rage Becomes Her, Call Them By Their True Names

Books that are classics that I finally read: Bowling Alone, Tales of the City, Stoner, V for Vendetta

Books about social justice that are instructive: Bowling Alone, Engines of Liberty, You’re More Powerful than You Think, How Change Happens, Hope in the Dark, Necessary Trouble,

Books about social justice that didn’t quite do it for me: There Goes the Gayborhood?, We Were Eight Years in Power, Rules for Resistance, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, This is an Uprising, Rules for Revolutionaries

Authors I read multiple books from: Meg Wolitzer, Rebecca Solnit

Books I reread and still loved: Boy Erased, Hide

Books I read in a book club: Black Deutschland, An American Marriage, The Wife, Clybourne Park, Sick, Stoner