I Regret Reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar on my Phone

I have always been theoretically opposed to EPUBs. I believe there is something important about how a book looks on the page. Still, I buy books to read on my phone so that I am never without one. Years ago, I’d just read silly ones, like Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians series, books I felt were not diminished by the phone screen. More recently, I began to buy ones that I couldn’t easily find in bookstores—Roberto Bolaño novellas, for instance. Then, I started to choose books I felt skeptical about, things I wasn’t sure I’d like. I read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that way, a long book made to feel even longer by my phone’s tiny pages. (I did like it more than I expected.)

A few months ago, I bought Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! on my phone. My friend Ish had recommended it to me, and I wanted it immediately, didn’t want to wait for an order to arrive in the mail or to have to troll bookstores searching for it. I’ve nearly finished. I was skeptical at first. The book could be gross, sometimes gratuitously violent, bro-y in a way that felt a little like reading Salman Rushdie. As I near the end, I find I don’t want to finish. I’m in love. Martyr! is a book that makes me want to write, to make art. It’s dark, funny, political but not self-important. It’s woke in a way that pokes fun at how seriously people take political correctness, while also demonstrating how serious identity issues can be—how life and death racism, xenophobia, colonialism, sexism, and homophobia are. It’s a book I want to share with someone else: my partner, my friends.

I know there is family sharing on Apple Books. It’s not really the same.

As I near the end, I wish I read Martyr! on paper. I wish it were easier to go back and re-read sections, knowing what I know now.

But mostly, I wish I could share my hard copy with someone else. There is something intimate about lending someone a physical book. Even if you don’t mark up the pages, even if there is nothing to differentiate your copy from someone else’s. I think there is a trace of you left on the paper, like when you’re walking through the neighborhood where you fell in love and you think, that’s the place where we had our first date, that’s where he kissed me, that’s where I first noticed the funny look he gets when he looks at me, that’s where I began to have the sneaking suspicion he loves me. And even if you never Sharpied your names on any wall, the street feels like it has a trace of you, in memories so strong you think everyone else must be able to feel them, too.

I want to give you this book. I want you to laugh where I laughed. I want you to fall in love where I fell in love. I want you to want to make art with me, too.

By the way, in case you want to know what my Substack is about, I wrote an About page.