BONUS: Not So Fast, End of Year Lists

I'll be reading until the last minute of 2024

I’m simply not making my Favorite Books of the Year post until I squeeze in as much reading as possible before the end of the year. (You’ll see it in a couple of days, I hope.) These are the last few days of the year, designed for those of us in the chilly northeast with good bosses to hang out in our pajamas and mainline all the books that we haven’t gotten to yet. For me, an ideal scenario. For you, a bonus episode of my newsletter where I’ll talk about some great books I’ve encountered recently and a couple of the non-book things I’ve really liked over the past 12 months. To wit, here are some things I loved this year:

Like a lot of homosexuals, I was charmed by the emergence of Chappell Roan when she wasn’t yelling at me. Good Luck Babe was my favorite and most played song of the year - a super queer song by an actually queer pop star. I’m probably too old to enjoy Sabrina Carpenter or Bille Eilish, but Taste and Lunch were on constant rotation for me. Queen Bey’s Bodyguard was my fave song by her in a minute, and it was nice to discover Del Water Gap and Remy Wolf, even if I’m way behind the times. Angel of My Dreams, Lonely Dancers, Spite, Beaches, and some of brat were some of the great songs that sidetracked me from my default of listening to old Fleetwood Mac and Bangles records.

On television, I’ve been portioning the final season of Somebody Somewhere out at a snail’s pace so maybe it will never end. What a special show about loss and revival, the likes of which will likely never be green-lighted again. If you watched English Teacher in a vacuum, it was a perfect new show; that the creator is accused of being a sex pest may derail a no brainer renewal is beyond bleak. (The behavior is bleak, not the consequences.) I winced through Baby Reindeer, which felt like as close as we come to a monocultural moment these days, and I basked in the grandeur of Shogun, a show that probably should end after one season but won’t. I need 20 more seasons of The Boyfriend, the gentle Japanese reality show about queer men’s relation to one another yesterday.

One of my new year’s resolutions this year is to train my attention span to watch movies again and then catch up on many of the classics I missed. I usually try to watch all of the Best Picture nominees, but I’m so behind on that. However, I did get to see some great movies this year, including the erotic tennis triangle of Challengers, the bitchy priest convention of Conclave, and the big movie musical magic of Wicked. Emilia Perez is an insane movie that you will love or hate or both!

I also picked up crochet as part of an overall strategy to put down my phone and scroll less often. I’m not good at it, but I love making flawed things! My goal is to graduate from hats to blankets in the coming year.

Otherwise, I guess I was working or reading? Here are some books I’m sneaking in under the wire of our arbitrary deadline of December 31.

THE LIBRARY IS OPEN

The Wedding People

by Alison Espach (2024)

I imagine going back in time and telling a young idealistic me, working as a volunteer attorney for voter integrity for the Kerry campaign in 2004 that someday I’d be reading a book that Jenna Bush recommended. I’m not so snobby in the Franzenian sense that I’d pass up a book simply because it’s recommended as part of mass market book club, but I never imagined myself having any overlap with the Bush family. In any case, Jenna happens to recommend some pretty great books from time to time, and this is one of them. I really picked it up because it made the shortlist of the Tournament of Books - an online book celebration I follow and comment on every year. But however it came to me, I’m glad it did.

Phoebe, an adjunct professor without a path forward for promotion, has just been left by her husband during a worldwide pandemic with which you may be familiar. Nothing seems to be going right for her. So in an effort to complete a certain goal of hers, she decides to splurge on a trip to a boutique hotel in Newport, Rhode Island she saw once in a magazine and spend some time there. To say more about her plans would be a spoiler, but she arrives in a fancy dress and heels, so no wonder she’s mistaken as one of the wedding people. Yes, she’s the only one staying at the hotel who’s not a guest of a lavish wedding taking place there. But somehow, she does become a titular wedding person.

Somehow, she and the bride cross paths over and over and start to confide in one another, and as the week goes on, the conversations become more wise and insightful, and before you know it, they’re kind of becoming friends? This is despite the fact that this young bride has every detail of her wedding accounted for. besides Phoebe. And maybe her future husband and his family. Twists and turns ensue. And it’s also very funny. This book is lovely, wistful, and often laugh out loud hilarious. It’s heartwarming in the way it shows us the ways that unexpected people can lead us out of our darkest times. But not in a treacly way. This book is worth picking up even if you, like I, believe that our country will never recover from Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).

Read it if you like: tender heartwarming stories, bridezillas, unexpected chemistry, all the ways life can be funny and sad at the same time, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance.

Headshot

by Rita Bullwinkel (2024)

What are the odds that in the past couple of weeks I would have run into my second book that contains ladies boxing? Is ladies boxing having a moment? When we celebrate Women in STEM, do we include the sweet science? Apparently we do! And that’s great. I do not like boxing at all, and therefore I do not watch it. It’s violent and upsetting and apart from knockouts, it’s rather subjective. But even a boxing hater like I can understand what a fantastic literary device it makes. The one-on-one dance in the ring, the coaches unable to help in any way from the corner, the pure physicality, the possibility that only one person leaves the arena standing. These are all conceptually exciting tropes.

So, take all of that and map it onto the already tumultuous life of teenage girls. We land in Reno at a boxing training facility where a tournament for teen girls is about to begin. The featureless facility could be any big box retailer from the outside, and the author tells us several times over the course of the collection of short story bouts that the arena, the city, the tournament itself is “dusty.” They never say so, but it’s implied that while the boys may get Vegas, the girls get Reno.

We meet 8 young women, all with backgrounds that they bring into the ring with them. Each of the chapters is a fight on the bracket. Some participants include: a lifeguard who messed up a big moment, a legacy fighter in a family of champions, two cousins who grew up training together, a bona fide weirdo who plays her eccentricities to her strategic advantage. Throughout the fights, we learn about the girls’ pasts and get a glimpse of their future, and the stakes from this one weekend are laid bare for us to read. And the stakes are high! And the futures are fascinating - one of these boxers will someday become a wedding planner due to her deft attention to details and ability to (literally) roll with the punches. We also meet the girls in the present throughout the course of play-by-plays for each fight. The sportswriting is electric, and it kind of made me boxing-curious.

This book is on a whole lot of year-end best-of lists, and I can see why. It’s a taut thriller that made me care about each of the characters and fascinated me by drilling down into the incredible details of a sport I don’t (or didn’t) think I cared about. Everyone watches women’s sports. We can read about them too.

Read it if you like: short stories, propulsive narratives, sports writing, brackets, books that Barack Obama liked.

Look Up, Handsome

by Jack Strange (2024)

Gay. Holiday. Romance. Every year, I try to treat myself to a gay holiday romance around the week of Christmas. If I don’t have a pile up of library books, and there aren’t any pressing reading needs that present themselves, I dig in to something heartwarming and predictable. If the fates allow, you could say.

This particular gay holiday romance takes place in Wales where our hero Quinn continues to live in his hometown, continuing his late father’s vocation of bookselling in his very own store, Kings & Queens - the village’s only queer business and the region’s only queer bookstore. Wouldn’t you know that trouble is on the horizon, though? Quinn’s stepfather owns the lease to the store, and he’s ready to take the store back from Quinn to be a ticket booth for a construction project he’s working on. On top of all of that, he sparks feelings with an author from the town who’s visiting for a book festival. This particular author, Noah Sage, is handsome, gay, and flirtatious. And, uh oh, taken.

Noah and Quinn do a dance, not unlike a boxing match, getting to know one another all while Noah’s mom, a Hollywood legend turned hermit, longs to tell her own story. Will the quaint town rally to save the bookstore? Will Noah’s mom find her voice with the help of Quinn? Will Noah and Quinn find themselves under some mistletoe and iron out the complications of new relationships to share a kiss or two? The answer to all of these is: of course! The point of romance isn’t suspense or wildly surprising endings, it’s going along on the journey of love and experiencing the happy ending we all deserve, especially amidst the chaos of the holidays.

Read it if you like: gay stuff, holiday stuff, romance stuff, Welsh stuff, books about bookstores.

LIGHTNING ROUND

So many people seemed to love the new Sally Rooney - a book EVENT of 2024 - but it didn’t sing to me like her past 2 novels. My loss, probably!

I really enjoyed My Friends by Hisham Matar, a book getting some award attention, but I didn’t write about it because I didn’t have much more to say about it beyond it being a lovely book about folks living in exile from their own country.

You may want to start the year with a “retreat of the mind,” check out Meditations for Mortals. I picked this up after the election, and I loved the way it provides simple steps for a more uncomplicated life.

Until next time…happy reading!