I’m sitting here on the eve of my birthday while a repairman works on the our hot water heater, which exploded during the birthday dinner my husband took me out to last night. What layered reminders of how the march of time comes for us all. Outdoor temperature: 35F degrees. I’m wrapped snugly in a blanket and using this moment as a meditation on any residual gratefulness that exists after Thanksgiving Day. Also, would that we all could go out like a hot water heater - not with a whimper, but with a bang, and impacting everything and everyone it its wake. Maybe it was a Sagittarius, too.
Another rotten moment from which we learned lessons about gratitude this week? The town where I live just painted a crosswalk in the rainbow colors of the Progress Pride flag as a sign of inclusivity and an invitation to sashay across the street. The project was organized and funded by a local Girl Scout who needed to do something for her community. This was great! (Note that the town Facebook page was activated immediately. Was the supergay project funded by any bigots’ taxes? No.)
Not two weeks after the last drop of paint dried, someone vandalized it by driving over it and dropping gallons of white paint on Thanksgiving Eve. Waking up to a literal whitewashing the colors felt a little on the nose as far as metaphors go, but nonetheless, it happened. Once again, the Facebook group sprung into action, but for good. The town denounced the violence, multiple people offered to pay for a repaint, and on the holiday, city employees and other folks rallied to restore the crosswalk to all its gay glory.
Turns out the brilliant Girl Scout organizer anticipated potential vandalisms and certain touchups, so she raised money for extra paint. And the vandals did not anticipate the whole town coming together to exemplify the spirit of inclusivity. Gratitude!
It’s end of year best of books list time, and you’ll get mine at the end of the year. We’ve got a whole month of reading the remains! Come on, people! Here’s some good books below, and 2/3 of them ended up back-to-back lesbian love story dystopias somehow. The gay agenda lives.
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
The Future
by Naomi Alderman (2023)
One of my favorite things to do is to hover online on Tuesday afternoons to see if I can catch the exact moment when the Philadelphia Free Library adds the new electronic books to their collection. I’m rarely lucky enough to catch the moment, but a couple of weeks ago I caught them and got access to first pick of the new releases. The only one I was able to get my virtual mitts on was The Future, which I picked up almost solely on the basis that I read the author’s previous outing The Power after it ended up on a list that Barack Obama put together.
The Future is a dystopian romp that posits a not so implausible timeline wherein the very richest people on the planet are designing lavish underground bunkers where they’ll live out their lives when they’re alerted that the end of the world has arrived. How will they know? They’ve taken care of that too, designing an AI program that lets the elite know when it’s time to hit the road and get to the bunker. It’s not a spoiler to let you know that stand-ins for Musk, Bezos, and more are alerted early on that the apocalypse is upon us.
All this is happening amidst a queer love story, flashbacks to escapes from a Biblical cult, replicas of Reddit pages for doomsday preppers, and an elaborately planned heist that could change the course of the world. This book is *packed* full of ideas and plot lines and has an impressive handle on technological vernacular that never makes the prose feel clinical or cold. There are a lot of twists and turns! I did not always understand what was happening! But ultimately, the book is a lot of fun, even when it doesn’t always work. If you’ve ever mentioned at the Thanksgiving table that there should be no such thing as billionaires because they accumulate and hoard wealth on the backs of the labor of others, this book could be for you!
Read this if you like: future dystopias, viral outbreaks, books that would make great miniseries, twists/turns, eating the rich.
Land of Milk and Honey
by C. Pam Zhang (2023)
More dystopia! Unlike above where a viral outbreak - much stronger than COVID - is said to have leveled the earth’s population, this novel imagines a heavy smog emanating from America, natch, covers the world and destroys almost all vegetation. (We’re just entering the post-COVID novel boom that will imagine myriad ways to end the world, all horrifying and plausible!) Amidst this natural disaster, we meet a nameless expat chef biding her time in London as she awaits in vain the reopening of American borders. She’s deep in debt after a fire destroys her dead mother’s apartment, and creatively wilting with no food to cook.
When an opportunity comes along to work as a chef atop a newly formed mountain nation/research facility somewhere in Italy, you don’t have to tell her to think twice to take it. She jumps into the job headlong and is greeted by a whole bunch of weird things that I shan’t list here, and of course, she falls in love with her boss’s beautiful daughter, a research pro and foodie with mother issues who is trying to save her little corner of the world.
This book is about 25% gorgeous phrases about foodstuffs, which made it a timely read before Thanksgiving dinner and almost hard to look at in the immediate aftermath of it. (It reminded me a bit of a now closed down Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia where all the menu items had a lush, paragraph-long description.) The rest of the sentences are gorgeous too. In fact, the book is a bit light on plot, but chock full of beauty. I’m not being shady when I invoke Aretha.
The book also had the added bonus of being easy to cast in my head. I kept thinking of Melissa King and Kristen Kish from Top Chef and Stanley Tucci. You might too. I wasn’t in love this author’s previous book, but I’d recommend this one for anyone trying to find a little beauty at the end of the world.
Read it if you like: even more dystopia, complicated lesbian love, reading menus, looking up foods you’ve never heard of, sentences that float like sighs.
Trade
by David Agnew (2023)
Being an active twitter user (I’ll never call it X) is pretty much the worst these days, but it’s still something I’m unwilling to let go of completely because of the community I’ve built there. Whether I’m talking sports, award shows, LGBTQ+ stuff, local issues, or books, I’ve met some amazing people to have conversations with while dodging Republicans and insurrectionists. Occasionally I’ve gotten so lucky that someone recognizes my love of reading and actually sends me a book to read, and I’ll transparently tell you that this is one of those books. Lucky for me (and maybe him?) I really did like it, so I’m happy to talk about it here and recommend it to you!
Along a Maltese marina, an American journalist and a Canadian student fortuitously meet. One is staking out a megayacht because his friend, a handsome gay socialite, has disappeared and may be on it, while the other is in search of the same boat because of a painting that has just been sold at auction for many hundreds of million dollars. As their paths converge, they realize that their interests and lives may be intertwined in ways they never imagined. They each recount what has led them to the marina through flashbacks that take us everywhere from Paris to Saint Tropez to Rome to the Amalfi Coast, through circuit parties and mansions. Did I mention that all the characters are gay and there’s also lots of sex?
The mystery of the book kept me guessing the whole time, and the escapist fare is A+. When someone is nice enough to send a book, you get to thank them personally for the reading experience and also ask them their thoughts on their work. What he told me serves as a much better recommendation for a queer book than I could drum up myself: “That’s all I wanted, to be honest—something that wasn’t for kids and wasn’t about interminable suffering.”
Read it if you like: European travel, big gay parties, horrible older men, sexual tension, art history.
LIGHTNING ROUND
Bookriot does such a cool end of the year list that never, ever looks like anyone else’s.
NPR’s annual Books We Love concierge is more overwhelming and insane every year.
Powell’s staff routinely makes me feel like I’m never reading enough, especially with their end of the year wrap up.
Until next time…happy reading!