But it's our fault for doing this anyway. When we were small we had an elaborate (written) schedule of which stuffed animals we would sleep with on which night, so that our other stuffed animals would not feel neglected. And you thought we were an asshole.

Today's Theme Song: Bruce Springsteen, "No Surrender"

No. 3: Tom Spanbauer, The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon

There are books you read and then there are books that break open your whole idea of what a book is supposed to be, books that rip out your heart and gut you mercilessly, books that run you down like a big old train of love and joy and sorrow. We spent a long time thinking about what we could say about this ruthless scalpel of a book, this book that makes you remember history is only a set of stories and all people have told all kinds of stories, more stories than you ever could have thought possible, all along. "If you're the devil, then it's not me telling this story," says this book, and from the very first line you know you're in trouble. The Man Who Fell In Love With the Moon is a little miracle of a book, new-minted and impossible; we could tell you what it is about, or what it does, but we wouldn't be doing it justice, and if we told you the plot you would laugh at us, and if we tried to explain the way this book moved through us and destroyed us and then remade us you wouldn't believe us, probably. More than anything else, Tom Spanbauer (in this and the equally gorgeous, mesmeric In the City of Shy Hunters ) writes about choosing to love yourself when the whole relentless misery of the outside world lines up at your door and tells you not to; about sex and death and identity, about racism, about fear, about queerness, about memory, about courage. We love this book in a way that doesn't make sense. The first and second and third time we read this book we cried hard enough to shake every broken and lonely thing out of our heart and get back up freer. That's all we can think of to say about it.