Whoa. It’s been a minute! I’m caught up in the craziness of Pride season as a brave soldier who works in the LGBTQ+ nonprofit space. For us, the end of May and all of June are the equivalent of Thanksgiving through Christmas for elves. When I’m not out giving talks or participating in some woke advocacy scheme, I’ve been trying to catch up on things at home. As a result, it’s been a month without a newsletter and an ever-growing pile of finished books to write about.
Before I jump into our books of the newsletter, here are some brief synopses of gay things from around the world to watch (that I’ve recently enjoyed) if you’re in the mood to celebrate Pride:
Maestro in Blue - Greek soap opera with murder connected to a gay storyline with 2 cuties.
Prisma - A story of Italian twins headed in different directions, one genderqueer and portrayed with more nuance than I’ve seen in any other show.
Absolute Beginners - A pair of childhood best friends, boy and girl creatives filming their own movie, have their lives turned upside down with they cast a jock from a basketball camp in their rural Polish village.
Weekend - Why did I wait 10 years to watch this small, lovely miracle of a movie about a one-night stand between two men that tries to expand into something more.
Pride - When I watched this true story of solidarity between the Miners Union and Gay Rights Movement in 80s England a decade ago, I remember being most unaffected by it. But revisiting it kind of destroyed me a little. I attribute this to political instability rewiring my brain to be more unabashedly sentimental.
Happy Pride to all, even the Pope who can’t seem to stop calling me and my friends f*****s!
The books below - each Best of the Year material - all happen to have the bleak, hilarious common thread running through them of how finances control/destroy us all.
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Ways and Means
by Daniel Lefferts (2024)
This is, perhaps surprisingly, the first book I’ve read since the 2016 Election that employs a MAGA orgy as a major plot point. Even if you don’t think that’s something you’d be into - Same! - don’t let that dissuade you from digging into this brilliant book about how finances dictate the way we live, how we love, and the ways we set expectations for ourselves and others. The fact that it clocks the growing undercurrent of fascism beneath the world of corporate finance is just a bonus.
Alistair grew up, raised by a single mother after the tragic death of his hard-working father, with meager means in Binghamton, NY. From the earliest parts of his upbringing, he knew he needed to design his life in such a way to accumulate as much wealth as possible and deliver himself and his mother from their station in life. In fact, his drive to provide for his mother becomes an obsession that leads to questionable decisions that drive the plot into thriller territory. Sometime during his tenure at NYU Business School, he gets involved with a couple - Mark and Elijah - who are also on the precipice of a financial downfall, not to mention a major disruption in their own relationship. Something sinister happens on the way to Alistair’s fantasy bank job, and he’s forced to work for someone with a secret he could have never predicted. Trouble ensues, and I couldn’t stop the pages from turning.
It’s hard (for me) to read about finances, especially bad choices around them. These characters are so well drawn and human, but they’re all failures in their careers, as family members, as artists, and as upwardly mobile queers trying to stay solvent. This book is thrilling in the way it lets no one off the hook for the choices they make around their entitlement to live the high life, and it portrays the typical finance bro with such a banal evil that speaks to our moment in late stage capitalism in terrifying ways. I loved this book, and I’ve never been so happy not to be in banking.
Read it if you like: Working Girl, well written polyamory, nice moms!, queers in trouble, schemes against evil conservatives.
Help Wanted
by Adelle Waldman (2024)
The workplace novel has been around as long as there have been novels. (What are Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Frankenstein if not workplace novels?) But now, we’re in a big box store called Town Square in extreme upstate New York where most other industry has left. The fairly obvious Target stand-in is the setting for this polyphonic novel that spins the workplace novel on its head and may just be one of the most important books of this century so far without ever getting too preachy about it. The novel is at once a fizzy caper set in the workplace as well as an anticapitalist critique of how working classes are forced to operate and a subversion of the workplace novel itself.
The Movement Team (formerly Logistics, changed by consultants to be more appealing to a dwindling workforce market) is in charge of getting everything off the truck and onto the shelves. A multi-racial cohort of workers endures a ridiculous manager who has made her way to Movement to punch up her resume en route to a higher rung on the corporate ladder. When the crew learns that a store manager is leaving and their manager could move up into their place, they have to decide whether to put together a scheme to get their incompetent manager out of their hair forever. Sure, she doesn’t deserve the upgrade, but if she’s promoted then she’s no longer the Movement team’s problem. Plus, a spot would open for one of them to get a promotion. They all need it - we dive deep into their lives that never lack for struggle and rarely earn perks that their own managers accrue, like health insurance or vacation. Still, there is humor and lightness, the way that common enemies create camaraderie among the working masses.
I’ve read that the author worked in a big box store for 6 months to try to derive inspiration for writing after the 2016 election soured her desire to follow up her first novel with more of the same upper class comedy of manners. That’s why the book is full of fascinating, accurate-seeming logistics about the store and people’s lives. Every one of the characters has to alter the way their lives run when even one small change forces a ripple effect. Spending time with blue collar workers, all written in heartbreakingly nuanced detail, rather than the white collar ones who usually inhabit workplace novels is a choice that may humble the reader but condescends to no one. This book crawled under my skin, and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Read it if you like: anticapitalist critiques, Office Space, rotating perspectives, slice of life narratives, sociological novels
Worry
by Alexandra Tanner (2024)
There’s a whole lot of media set in 2019 these days. If not necessarily a simpler time to live through, it seems like a much easier time to write about - the era before our lives got flipped, turned upside down. Again. It’s no shade at all to say that this book firmly implants itself in 2019 with all of its ironic detachment and end of the era when millennials could claim immaturity as their own. I don’t think that I’ve read a book that wraps all of that anxiety, unrest, and passive aggressive resistance culture into as funny a package as this one.
In Worry, we meet two twenty-something sisters living in Brooklyn. One has been there for a bit jumping from meaningless job to meaningless job as she pretends to write her novel and unsuccessfully dates other refugees from reality. The other has just arrived in town to live with her sister after having to move home with her Floridian family after a nervous breakdown she had in college. She has no jobs or prospects and will put her life together while she stays on her sister’s couch. Also, she’s queer now!? The sisters play off each other in the ways that the best siblings in literature do - unable to live with each other without breaking the other down but also loving and understanding them more than anyone else in the world. It would be a lot like Fleabag if either one of them were approaching professional success.
This book is laugh out loud funny, which is quite a feat when you realize how much of the book is mired in the deep anxiety of the characters. The dialogue sparkles and stings. Every interaction these girls have with their mother is horrifying and hilarious. This is a book for the terminally online or anyone who wants to learn about the debilitating condition. It manages to turn conversations about deeply unpleasant things into delightful comic set pieces. The end? Don’t know what to think about that. But as a debut novel, this work guarantees I’ll have my eye on whatever the author does next.
LIGHTNING ROUND -
Everyone seems to love this time travel romance more than I do. I liked it well enough, though, and maybe you will too!
And this book is also quite good, but as a prequel/sequel to another book, I really wanted it to move in a different direction than the work it references.
Some say that a decade ago, the year 2014 changed the internet forever. Hmm.
Until next time…happy reading!