Last While In Books: Sorry To These Men

Read time: about 4 minutes

Hello, fellow readers. I don’t seem to have the time to post bookish news updates on social media anymore, so here’s a roundup of some of the more interesting bits of literary news–diverse and otherwise–that I’ve come across recently.

  • Between Daniel Krause winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize and Ben Lerner giving an interview about using AI while being named America’s most acclaimed novelist, I think we can finally put to bed all past, present and future claims that there’s no place for white men in fiction writing. To be absolutely clear, that’s no shade to either of these men on a personal or professional level. I don’t know them and I’m sure they’re both very deserving of their accolades. (Krause, in particular, has an exceedingly lovely reputation in the horror writing community.) But I also haven’t read them and y’all know I read a little of everything that passes my eyes. Interestingly enough, none of the other hardcore readers I know had heard of these guys, either. Lots of the writers I know had, however. Again, no shade, but it’s an interesting observation of the business of publishing and literary acclaim on a few different levels. I was definitely looking like Keke Palmer when the announcement was made. [Wilmington Star, GQ]
  • From a diverse reader’s viewpoint, this year’s Pulitzers were otherwise a bit disappointing. Yiyun Li won the memoir prize for Things In Nature Merely Grow and Gabriela Lena Frank(who is of East European Jewish and Peruvian Chinese descent) for music, with a particularly interesting composition that uses Andean legend to explore climate disaster. But the literary categories in particular seem to have mostly gone in an otherwise predictable direction, awarding prizes to work that shores up the mythology of America rather than re-examines or properly contextualizes it. (Yes, I am talking about that book about the Schuyler Sisters.) [The Pulitzer Prizes]
  • But we still have the International Booker Prize! This year’s longlist is very interesting. I personally am pulling for French and Senegalese writer Marie N’diaye’s The Witch, which is having a bit of a renaissance after being translated into English thirty years after its original publication. [The Booker Prizes]
  • There are a lot of really interesting, trailblazing releases that have just been published and are soon to be, as well. Shay Kauwe’s The Killing Spell is the first traditionally published fantasy novel by a Native Hawaiian author. It’s a magical murder mystery that delves into the complexity of language, power and the intersections of colonized peoples as they move beyond atrocity and begin to gain back a bit of their own. Sounds fascinating, right? [Bookshop]
  • B. Sharise Moore, prolific children’s author and the poetry editor of award-winning Black spec-fic magazine Fiyah, has been chatting on Threads about her upcoming middle grade compendium of African mythological beings. It’s called Curious Creatures of African Folklore and while there’s not a lot of official publisher info out about it yet, you can sign up for updates on her website to get alerts about it. [B. Sharise Writes]
  • Another book that’s on my radar is Ashia S Ajani’s Tending the Vines, which can perhaps best be described as a botanical history of the African diaspora in eight plants. I’m definitely going to get my hands on this one soon. [Bookshop]
  • I’ve waxed poetic about Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko before on this site, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting her next novel as soon as I heard the title. Very excited that American Hagwon will be out in September. By all accounts it’s another epic story of Korean diaspora, this time starting during the 1997 financial crisis in Korea and moving through Australia and Southern California. Can’t wait. [Bookshop]
  • Finally, I’ve got a few pieces of writing out recently as well that I want to tell you about. My essay “How I Became My Own Fun Auntie” (the title is self-explanatory) has been included in the coffee table book Black Women In Bloom, which will be out this summer. [Carefree Magazine]
  • I’ve also got a new short story in the May 2026 issue of Lightspeed Magazine, called Sarah’s Laugh. It’s part of a larger project I’m working on that envisions revolution in a corporatocratic America, and…well, I wish it didn’t feel timely? But I wrote it four years ago, and somehow it does. Please check it out, especially if you’re Team Audiobook. The incredible Janina Edwards performs the story and did a wonderful job. Thanks in advance for reading.[Lightspeed Magazine]

That’s it for diverse bookish news of the last while, fellow readers. Kind reminder that any books you buy from links you find in this blog earn a commission that helps keep the site running, and your local library needs your patronage and book suggestions to keep their shelves stocked and diverse, especially in these times. Now, go and read something good! Peace!

[REVIEW] Crossfire, by StaceyAnn Chin

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: about 3 minutes

Back in the day, I used to attend poetry performances almost as often as church. (And I went to church a lot!) Unsurprisingly, I was especially drawn to the words of other Black women, and while like most people I’m made up of a million different influences, listening to sistren speak honestly and lyrically on love, emotion, politics and identity is in the top ten.

(Side note: if you’re a Black millennial from Denver do you remember Cafe Nuba? It’s hot and…?)

Stacyann Chin was one of the poets I always made time to see, so I’m shocked to see that 2019’s Crossfire is her first and only full-length poetry collection. There are poems in here that I heard once 20 years ago and still remember, yet you mean to tell me they’ve been in print less than a decade? How?


Chin is both singular and emblematic. She’s a Jamaican of African and Chinese descent, a out and horny lesbian, a single mom, a documentarian, an activist, a deep lover, and one of the originators of Def Poetry Slam. Her work covers all of this territory and then some, but always through the lens of emotion. We believe and do and move because we feel, right?

It’s those feelings, and how perfectly Chin captures the rage and joy and love and confusion and longing of being fully human in a world with increasingly little tolerance for being so, that have kept her poems in my mind over the years. Revisiting them feels a lot like sitting in a dark cafe/club on a Friday night in your 20s, nibbling words with your beer and allowing yourself to feel what the work week wouldn’t allow.

But it’s not nostalgic. There are quite a few newer poems in this book that address what it’s like to still feel, believe and care deeply about the workings of the world as we get older. There’s grace for questions about what’s coming and how we connect meaningfully to the past. There’s frustration with the frictionless ahistoricity of some modern iterations of the struggle, but no real bitterness.(Although sometimes there’s anger, but that doesn’t automatically equate to bitterness.) Things change, and grow, but not always in the way you hoped. That doesn’t mean they can’t be pruned and nurtured. It doesn’t mean they won’t eventually blossom. It’s words like the ones in this book that help us see how.

She also cusses about the president the way only a Jamaican can, and that alone is worth the cover price.

Meaningful aging and eternal words to Crossfire.

(Fellow readers! While I tend to read with more of an eye for the future, not the past, every once in a while a book reminds me that the life I lived is just as cool at the life I’m living and I think we all need a little bit of that in our spirits now and then. For more diverse poetry that reminds you of the now and the then, check out this booklist, courtesy of our very own Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Full disclosure–anything you buy there will earn both me and the poets pennies. But pennies add up! Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW]Once Upon A Marquess, by Courtney Milan

(Buy this book here!)

Read time: 2 minutes

After her father’s death and her brother’s disgraced exile, Judith Worth is tasked with caring for her three younger siblings and keeping the family name in good, if socially lowered, standing. When a challenge to her hard won domesticity arises, there’s only one person she can turn to for help–the Marquess Christian Trent, who happens to be not only her scorned first love but the man whose testimony was the cause of her family downfall.

(Somehow, the latter doesn’t matter as much as it should. It should really matter, though.)

Usually this is where I scold you all about how romance is all the same and we read it for the setting and characters, but this one is a bit different. The Victorian setting is vividly rendered and the cast of characters are lovingly created but the romance itself is…kind of odd? I could not figure out why these two like each other. Sure they have cute banter and matching neurodivergencies, but there are glaring issues of the main guy’s righteous betrayal and addiction to laudanum hanging over this couple that just aren’t discussed enough to feel resolved.

That said, I still enjoyed this. Courtney Milan excels at writing relationships that aren’t romantic, and that’s the best thing about this book. Judith’s stalwart but imperfect care for her siblings, including her autistic-coded sister, is really beautifully done. So is her friendship with a local who has no idea she was once a Lady. Neurodivergence, poverty, addiction and even a pretty horrifying human trafficking subplot are also handled well, if a little glibly at times. Milan has a way of creating communities that are so interesting to read about that they can overshadow the romance, but I can’t be mad at that, even if does make the spicy scenes feel a little out of place when they happen(and when they do, they’re almost clinically frank.)

It feels strange to recommend a romance novel for everything but the romance, but hey, there’s a first time for everything.

Continued sobriety and buckets of cat toys to Once Upon A Marquess. 

(Fellow readers, this wasn’t the spiciest romance I’ve ever read, but if you want spicy diverse romance look no further than this booklist. It’s part of the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, where I curate booklists for and about everyone. If you buy a book there, I get a commission, and that commission keeps this website going, and with what’s left over, I buy books, then I review those books and then I tell you about the bookshop and vicious cycle achieved! Thank you in advance for contributing to it, or visiting your local library and doing the same. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: 4 minutes

One minute Coast Guard meathead Carl is rescuing his absentee ex-girlfriend’s prize Persian cat from a tree in the middle of the night. The next, every building on earth is smashed flat and at the behest of an alien voice, Carl and Donut(the cat) are forced to flee into the creature-filled underground dungeon that suddenly appears. Cue sentient talking pets, silly magic weapons, boss fights, NPCs, anti-capitalist critique, and plenty of other LitRPG shenanigans.

At my big age I think I’ve finally learned that I don’t have to love everything I respect. While many of my generation are grieving the ideological failures that are current events and the world is moving steadily past my individual politics, there are a lot of things that are socially good that I just don’t vibe with, personally.

So while Carl’s story has a surprising amount of depth and provides a lot of needed emotional affirmation for people who are discovering that they must express their dissatisfaction with the status quo despite their apparent privilege and comfort…

…I, perhaps have been Black and grown and countercultural for a little too long to fully appreciate this. Fellow readers, you might feel similarly.

It’s fun, easy reading, packed with scatological millennial humor and nerd lore. Carl is one of those ultra-regular PNW dudes who probably shovels his neighbor’s sidewalks for them, and that heart is apparent and enjoyable throughout. This is a story about learning to do good wrapped in fart jokes and level-ups.

But the ultra-white, side-of-right lens this story is told through lends itself to some well-intentioned othering that doesn’t make sense to us over here in the multicultural literary bazaar. The first boss fight turned my stomach–I almost closed the book when I realized what was happening. Immigrants, the elderly, the disabled, working-class POCs–all cannon fodder, albeit often the well-portrayed badass type. Even the cat is every edgelord girlfriend joke with fur, albeit subverted via XP and Carl’s emotional arc.

This isn’t a bad book, generally speaking. I just genuinely forgot that there are folks in my ideological neighborhood who think and talk like this.

There’s a lot of things I personally dislike about the book. But I also can’t piss on someone else’s parade because it takes a different route than mine.

By this I don’t mean that any of the things that made me–and will probably make you–uncomfortable are okay. They’re not, at all. I mean that everyone has to start somewhere, and I’ve been reliably informed that Carl grows past this in later books, or at least that these books are a launch pad for a certain demographic of people to either Do Better or remember to keep doing what they already are. A lot of people are finding a mix of ideological inspiration and silly cathartic humor in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is perfect for them. Most of those people have the same social goals in mind that I do, ultimately, and even though we’d probably get on each others nerves and clearly do not read the same books or have the same sensitivities or see the same people as the default in our every day lives–not everything is for me. This is for the folks it’s for, and those folks are not me. It’s fun and inspiring and emotionally resonant and character developing for those people. I don’t have to try to be a part of everything that does some ultimate good in the world, and I don’t have to read everything that says it does, either.

In other words, Carl is a goofy white boy, but they need love and protest literature, too. Carry on!

A French pedicure and bottomless cat treats to Dungeon Crawler Carl.

(Fellow readers! Listen, if you like these books, I totally get it. Were I reviewing this for a different publication, I may have taken a gentler, more mainstream approach. But this right here is Equal Opportunity Reader and you can’t do what this writer did with immigrant, Black and mentally ill characters in this book and not have me say something about it. Yes, he writes about them sympathetically and the people who do them dirty are the villains–but they’re also all victims or muscle, and in these parts we’re #ownnormal, not cannon fodder or story foils. Speaking of, for a booklist of #ownnormal fantasy stories, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop and be aware that if you buy one, we get paid a commission that helps keeps the blog alive and not in an underground bunker. Now, go read something good! Peace!)

[Hear Me Out] A Year of Deeper Reading

Read time: 13 minutes

(To skip to the booklist, click here.)

I’m still here.

Fellow readers, I almost quit the internet last year.

And last month.

And last week.

And about an hour ago.

Rest assured, this isn’t some “goodbye, cruel virtual world” post. You’re stuck with me for the virtual moment. But like many, the events of the past year or so have made me reconsider how I participate not only in the real world, but the virtual one.

(Warning: this is a really long post.)

It’s strange, but even though much of my life and career is built around constantly articulating difficult concepts, I’m having a really hard time crystallizing what exactly it is that I’m finding so hard about the world of social technology over the past few years. Between corporate-driven enshittification, bots and gen AI trying to forcibly ruin everyone’s conversational and aesthetic abilities, the commodification of every human thought and experience into mind-numbing artificial content, and the constant, exhausting exposure to mass ignorance there just seems to be too much negative happening to understand.

When I started using the internet and social media, it was because it was a place to hold all the deep, funny, niche conversations I couldn’t have in the conservative, religious real world circles I often found myself trapped in. The internet was one of the ways in which I found people I could speak with more freely, and how I found ways to learn and be and do so that I could engage with the world as a fuller, more knowledgeable, more joyful person.

It’s not that you can’t do that now. It’s just that you have to wade through considerably more bullshit to get there, and there are ideological landmines hidden in the muck.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that as an elder millennial, the internet is part of how I learned to really like more people. Now, it seems purposefully engineered to make me dislike everybody much more.

This has all made me think carefully about how I engage with the internet and what it is that I contribute. Nobody wants to be a grumpy, bitter fool online–or at least I don’t. With over 400 million terabytes of data being uploaded to the internet daily, I don’t want the 500 mb or so that I upload here and there to be part of the problem.

I don’t always achieve my goal of not contributing to stupidity (have you seen my Threads account? Ugh.) but I do my best, and I’m pleased that I get to commune with this little bookish, culturally diverse village that seems to have coalesced around mutual reading habits and curiosity. I’m proud that I’m emphatically not an influencer(I DON’T WANT TO SELL YOU STUFF!), yet an alarming amount of people still take the time to pay attention when I talk. I’m glad that I can still engage with so many different people about so many different things, that I can enjoy art from all parts of the globe with people from all over, and that I can have my own perspectives and understandings enriched constantly, even if I have to fight a little harder for the privilege than I used to.

But, full disclosure: I still kind of want to quit.

I’m tired, y’all. The world is in a harshly anti-intellectual phase at the moment (while folks will say it’s just America, don’t be fooled–everybody’s out here hating on critical thinking and curiosity right now). It doesn’t feel as safe to be a hapless nerd in public anymore, especially since the worst of us took over tech and higher ed and are making the rest of us pay for whatever their 6th grade bully said to them that one time. Fandom cults are repulsively parasocial, and ruining everything genre. A lot of people really just want to talk down to Black women (or worse, impersonate us for cash) on the internet. LLMs scrape my blog for wrong answers to people’s English lit exams. (I actually got an email from some poor undergrad about this. It’s not my fault Chat doesn’t understand nerd humor.) It’s all so exhausting.

But despite myself, I like talking to people, most of the time. Annoying folks are exhausting, but in the minority. While I’m getting a smidge more misanthropic as I edge towards middle age than I think I want to be (yes, my therapist is helping), I’m never going to stop believing entirely that more people want to be good than bad, and that we all have the essentials of human experience in common yet expressed in very different ways, and that books are a critical gateway to understanding that. At the end of the day, I’m a real, very unimportant human being trying to share a little bit of the best of myself in the wider world and hoping that people respond with the same.

But how do I responsibly, meaningfully continue to share in the vastly expanded, rapidly changing, negativity-breeding environment of what was once my intellectual safe space?

Well, first, I’m going to talk about it. Lots. On- and off- line. One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how isolated I may feel in moments of dissatisfaction and irritation, I almost never am. It’s just that nobody wants to talk openly about things in non-decisive ways. It’s either love or hate, never “how do I navigate this thing in ways that increase the good rather than exacerbate the bad?”

We’re not all having the same experience, of course, but I hope that talking a little bit about my internet malaise and how I’m handling it helps others understand and maybe address their own similar feelings.

In terms of the way that I engage in bookish spaces, there are 3 things I’ve been doing that have helped me maintain my sanity and sense of integrity.

I turned off the likes.

Meta lets you turn off the ability to view likes and shares on all of their apps, and I have. It’s a bit tricky, but I have it set up so that if I want to see likes or shares, I have to do so intentionally, taking a few extra steps. I can still see comments though, which for me is the whole point of posting on social media–the socializing part.

This has actually done a lot for my posting peace of mind. I like seeing how many people have liked a post and I genuinely appreciate when people do so, but checking occasionally instead of constantly means that I’m not distracted by notifications when a post goes viral. I know virality is the holy grail of engagement online, but as I’ve repeatedly said, I’m not an influencer or even an extrovert. Massive amounts of strangers yelling at me because I didn’t like Wicked or asked the wrong question about Heated Rivalry is never a good experience. It also means that I feel a little freer to keep it real and post honestly. I don’t immediately know if my latest thought got 100 likes or zero, so all I can go by is the comment discussion, and I’ve found that that doesn’t actually correlate as heavily with likes or clicks as I thought.

Ironically, since I turned off the immediate like/share views, I’ve been repeatedly accused of clout chasing and engagement farming, on one occasion by a big content creator who has since left Threads. Perhaps my natural uncensored state is actually troll. Either way, I’m finding the bookish internet more engaging and meaningful

I stopped posting so much.

First, the living room pachyderm — I’m aware I’ve been gone from the blog for four months. I started this post in January and have had it open in a browser tab until today, taunting me while I tried to figure out what the hell I wanted to do on the internet from now on, if anything. The short answer is that I’ll be blogging and recording videos a bit more, social media-ing a bit less.

I’d built, I thought, a thoughtful algorithm across apps. Writers, publishers, book talk, and the occasional swirls of social justice and cultural education just to keep things seasoned properly. I was learning a lot, sharing and amplifying the kinds of things I wanted to see and furnishing a corner of the internet in a way that I thought would be inviting and restorative to like-minded folks.

Immediately after the inauguration of that guy in the White House last year, my feeds on all the US-owned apps went straight to hell. Overnight, everything shifted and my feed became a stream of unsolicited, force-fed bigotry, rage bait, and ignorance. It was genuinely upsetting, and I logged right out for a couple of weeks as a result, except for a couple of admittedly crazypants TikTok posts. When I logged back in, it was still terrible, and it took a lot of purposeful hiding and searching and intentional likes to try and get it back to normal.

Even with that, my feeds are about 50% terrible, and I don’t think people who are interested see my posts very often unless they come looking for them specifically. The reason for this is official behind the scenes meddling for the purposes of propaganda and data farming. The powers that be want us to be upset, miserable, and mean to each other online because that drives engagement, and engagement makes them money. Even if I can ultimately fix my own algorithm, do I really feel good contributing to human data for profit schemes? But on the other hand, do I want to disappear entirely, and let it remain a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

Just call me Luke Skywalker, I guess. I still get good and thoughtful things from social media despite the general atmosphere shift. Also, we’ve become internet friends and I don’t want to ghost you just because Mark Zuckerberg is a human pitcher plant, Elon Musk is the devil’s deformed right hand, and Shou Zi Chew forgot that senator, he is from Singapore.

So, for now, at least, I’m taking the third way. I’m posting much less, and focusing more on original thoughts and reviews and videos, less on reposting the best of what I find on my own feeds. There’s no way to really beat the tide of bot posters, hired trolls, and general weirdos but I’ll leave the light on just until we can figure out where we all go from here or I just give up on the internet entirely and retreat to real world spaces.

I’m trying to read more deeply

This is the big one. We all know now that the way social media and the general internet is currently structured is destructive to attention spans and critical thinking. I’ve noticed it in myself, and got caught out posting a few things that, upon reflection, were blatant misinformation. Also, I stopped enjoying the world of books because I got a little too immersed in the news and a little less involved in the actual words on the pages.

The antidote to this is to slow down a bit and look at things a little more deeply. Instead of reading to keep on top of what’s happening in the art world, I’m trying to also reflect on what the art makes happen within me. I started to love literature because of how it connected dots within the real world for me, and reorienting how I approach what I’m reading is helping me get back to that place of wonder and appreciation and learning.

I can’t log in, complain about how reactionary and derivative the internet is, and then continue to create lots of throwaway short content that diminishes the value of reading and thinking and talking about it. It’s not that I don’t want to do short content, it’s just that I want to make sure that whatever I do is meaningful.

It’s not that I wasn’t already thinking deeply about just about everything–I spend a little too much time inside my own head, to be honest. But being emphatically uncool and slow and long-form without being didactic on the internet seems to be more conversational and intentionally de-influencing, which is what I’m going for.

To that end, I’ve been guiding sort of an ad hoc book club across the apps, inviting readers to read books in weekly chunks. I’ve been recording my thoughts in weekly videos and will be posting written reviews of the ones we’ve already finished up here soon.

These books are selected in response to the times, not the trends. While I love a popular book just as much as everyone(and will continue to read and talk about that), I wanted to continue to challenge all our reading muscles a bit by going slightly off the beaten track by staying in the backlist, with diverse writers exploring timely themes.

So far, we’ve read:

February: My Documents by Kevin Nguyen, a speculative novel about Vietnamese-Americans being placed in internment camps after an act of domestic terrorism.

March: Dazzling by Chikodili Emelumadu, a Nigerian fantasy novel about two young girls touched by very different supernatural forces and how it affects the end of their childhood.

Right now, we’re reading:

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a critically acclaimed first novel by an Iranian-America poet about a Midwestern Iranian-American struggling with identity and the idea of martyrdom

Coming up, we’ll be reading:

May: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a speculative novel about 39 women and girls trapped in an underground bunker, translated from Belgian French

June: Jazz by Toni Morrison, a classic literary novel about cheating couples, death and perhaps revenge?

I’ll announce books for the rest of the year in upcoming months. So far, it’s been an interesting experience. I’m doing it for the vibes more than anything–I actually don’t like books clubs much in reality, so I have no idea how to run one online and would rather just jabber about what I think about the book and hope that you all join in. So far, you have been, and I appreciate it!

But all that said…

…I still might quit the internet, eventually. Should I be fortunate enough to get a multi-book deal, the first thing I’m doing is retreating to a tower somewhere to write for a while, anyway. Eventually, the way our online social and informational spaces works has to change, and us first-generation hopeful Web 1.0 holdouts with it.

But until then, let’s read together. And talk about it. And share the things that the words connect to, and connect us to.

Peace, beautiful people. No post-script today, but a reminder that while I don’t want to sell you stuff, this site does cost a little money to run, and the Equal Opportunity Bookshop is where that money comes from. Peace!

[Last Year In Books] 2025 In Books: What I Read In The Midst of The Weird

Read time: 12 minutes

Man, 2025 was a weird year.

The weirdest thing, perhaps, is that I’ve been saying the exact same thing for the past five years. You know how history speaks of the Renaissance, the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment? Fellow readers, I fear that future generations may refer to our era as The Weird.

Not only are we in the throes of The Weird, but the Dark and the Difficult, as well. This year was hard on a lot of folks, not only personally, but culturally, socially, financially, and globally. I’d be lying if I said that some of this hadn’t affected me personally, and lying harder if I didn’t add that although things have been wild and messy and strange, I’m a very privileged person powered by luck, a lot of good choices, and sheer stubborn optimism, so it hasn’t been nearly as hard for me as it has for many others.

It feels a bit silly to talk about reading in the context of the past year, but a)that’s what this site’s about and b)even bookish habits can be affected by the Weird. Without further ado, here’s Equal Opportunity Reader’s 2025 in review.

What I Read, By The Numbers…

In 2025, I only read 52 books. That’s about a book a week, and while that may seem like a lot, my average is about 86. For four years straight I read over 100 books, so to read only 52 this year…what am I, eight years old?

Of those 52, 14 were fantasy novels, which surprises me. I don’t feel like I read a lot of fantasy this year but apparently I did–I just didn’t review much of it.(More on this later). The above image is from Storygraph, which allows books to be categorized in multiple ways, so I also read 8 books with LGBTQIA+ themes, overlapping genres. Some of these were obviously so, like the iconic memoir by trans icon Miss Major Speaks or the found family graphic novel Gaysians, but others in the category were simply casually queer, which I’m finding and appreciating more and more often. Dark academia thriller An Arcane Inheritance, which I wrote up for next month’s Lightspeed, has a cast populated by bisexuals and nonbinary folk. Workplace sci-fi horror Several People Are Typing is by a trans author, and the central love story is decidedly queer but also very unsensational–I didn’t even think to mention it in the review.

I only read 7 romance novels this year and that is not enough. I sorely missed the presence of meet-cutes, love triangles and genitalia euphemisms this year. Next year I must do better. Also 80% of my reading this year was fiction, 20% non-fiction. That’s pretty normal for me, but I also only read books in English and that felt a bit strange.

Demographically, I’m happy to say I lived up to my mission of diverse books for diverse readers, with one caveat. Almost half of the books I read were by Black writers, with a sizeable chunk of Asian and Latinx authors(some of whom are also Black) as well. That said, holy hell did I read a lot of white men this year, for a specific reason I’ll explain in a bit. I read a few Indigenous authors but didn’t talk about them much–including the first book I’ve ever read by a Marshallese writer, the graphic novel History Project by Kathy Jetnil-Kutner. That book has very little web presence and I only came across it by chance in the bookshop in The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I really should write a proper review so that more people know about it.

Twelve of 2025’s books were reviewed for Lightspeed Magazine, and only eleven for this site. There’s a few reasons why my reviewing has fallen off a bit this year. When Trump took office in January, I, like a lot of people, pivoted hard towards political action and aid. I posted about this vaguely back in January and got so caught up in everything that I didn’t realize I hadn’t been reviewing very much over here.

By the time I realized and attempted to refocus, the technocracy was rearing its ugly head and the generative AI con was beginning to piss me off. ChatGPT and other LLMs started showing up in the list of referrers for this site, Zuckerberg and co. openly pledged allegiance to MAGA fascism for money, and frankly, I didn’t want to be on the internet anymore. I still don’t, to be honest, but I didn’t spend my youth making memes, building long distance friendships out of pure intellect and vibes, and curating my algorithms to chef’s kiss perfection to give it all up just because a few assholes have tried to turn it all into a money-sharting operation. But I am more cautious about how I approach the internet now, and what I post. Not cautious enough to avoid using words like “sharting”, but whatever. Moving on…

On two final personal notes, this year I moved from Boston to Los Angeles, with an extended sojourn in New Mexico that rewired my brain wonderfully. I also wrote a lot, published a few bits, and became a Kimbilio Fellow, which kickstarted a new project. My 2025 writing journey, and the ways in which I’ve had to fit it around two day jobs, will have to be a separate post, but basically–I reviewed and read a lot less because I was busy and exhausted. I didn’t realize how much until a few days before Christmas when my brain crapped out, I posted a joke video on social media, then booked the next day off work and slept for 14 hours straight. I’m hoping next year’s a little less tiring and a little more literary.

But numbers and excuses are the least interesting part of reading, in my opinion–I’m not the Equal Opportunity Mathematician, after all. It’s not how much you read but what it all means, so let’s take a look at that next.

What I Read, Word by Word

There were some very odd trends in what I read in 2025, looking back. First of all, I read two entire books about male sex workers, which is two more than I knew existed. The first was the Cuban sci-fi freakoff Condomnauts. The second was surprisingly from the later catalogue of classic Black romance and thriller writer Eric Jerome Dickey, who I still sorely miss waiting for new books by. The book in question is The Business of Lovers. There’s nothing in the blurb or the reviews that indicate it’s about a male sex worker but oh, boy, is it ever. I was surprised once I realized the subject matter, but it’s handled with Dickey’s trademark frank, affirming approach to sexuality. I’m not sure I like the book as well as some of his others, but it was nice to read and appreciate an old bookish friend again.

I also read a lot of weird queer romance, without realizing it. From Veggie Tales slash to packs of horny werewolves to the aforementioned Cuban space freakoff–I kept stumbling into all kinds of taboos, kinks, and explorations without trying to. I mostly chatted about these on TikTok to keep the site rating here more general, but as themes go, this was one of the more interesting unintentional rabbit holes I’ve fallen down.

In stark contrast to that, I intentionally decided to re-read the post-apocalyptic rapture fiction Left Behind series, originally published in the late 90s and early 2000’s. As much as I believe that there is no hierarchy in books and all reading is valuable, re-visiting these was largely a waste of time. These books are bad, and from a multicultural, multinational, racially diverse perspective they’re infuriatingly inaccurate about so many things. Not a drop of research went into these novels. And yes, I know–what was I expecting, exactly? I’m not sure. When I first read these, I was still deep in the church and much more adherent to evangelical thought that I realized. These books seemed interesting, then, food for theological thought and community debate. Now they’re just overtly offensive, and I’m mad I made it through five of them before remembering that a)I’m grown and don’t have to suffer at my own hands and b)I read a bunch of weird queer romance and therefore have no business thinking I’ll be anywhere near a rapture, if it happens.

I also read a few literary graphic novels, which is a genre I’m really developing a love for. I reviewed Gaysians and Wake! already, but want to briefly mention Ebony Flower’s Hot Comb. It’s a series of vignettes on Black girlhood, all featuring hair in some way–playing with grandma’s wig, the emotional roller coaster of a first relaxer, and the tyranny of the hot comb, among others. It’d make a great companion volume with Wash Day Diaries.

I mentioned reading way too many white men this year earlier. Part of that is because I read five of those brain-numbing Left Behind books, but I also read a lot of non-fiction, most of it political, some of it rage-baiting. Actually, most of it rage-baiting, when I think about it. And I didn’t review it then for the same reason I’m not going to talk much about here–it doesn’t really need a bigger platform. It certainly doesn’t need my attention. While I enjoy a good take down of a poorly positioned pile of platitudes as much as the next reformed academic, I’ve always preferred to focus on what I like rather than what I don’t. While I’ll read things I dislike or disagree with to keep the edges of my mind sharp and make sure I really believe what I think I do, I don’t think I want to discuss them much unless I really have something to say.

The Shortlists

Let’s keep it simple, here.

There are three books I read this year that I thoroughly enjoyed and think you might, too. They are:

  • Esperance, a time-bending sci-fi thriller about the legacy of the slave trade by Scottish-Nigerian writer Adam Oyebanji.
  • The Free People’s Village, an alt-history love song to all us old and crusty social justice warriors trying to age gracefully past the grief of failure by nonbinary anti-Zionist climate scientist Jewish writer Sim Kern.
  • The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, a moment of pure fun and adventure with a hilarious Caribbean take on elder gods by Trinbagonian-American writer P. Djeli Clark

There are five books I read this year that genuinely surprised me, either because of what they taught me or how much I enjoyed them(or both). They are:

  • Rangikura, a poetry collection by Maori poet Tayi Tribble. There’s something very fierce and young and intense about this, and the prose poems that form the central section of the book are stunning.
  • How To Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, by Django Wexler. In the midst of everything it can be easy to forget that reading can be and is fun. This fast-paced, hilarious fantasy novel takes everything we love about the genre and uses it to make fun of everything we hate. It also reminds me that, weirdly, while monster romances written by women often have racialicious overtones, none of the ones I’ve encountered by men seem to, which is…odd. (That’s based on a sample of two, though–the other one is Legends and Lattes.)
  • Novic, by Eugen Bacon. I’d heard so much about this Afro-Australian writer that I wasn’t sure what to expect but Novic, at 90-odd pages, really kept me guessing. There’s so much nuanced work in the characters and themes that I’ve been trying to get another of Bacon’s books in my brain all year and will definitely do so next year.
  • Miss Major Speaks, by Miss Major(RIP). I’ve written before about how important trans women were to me in my difficult late teens and twenties, and Miss Major’s memoir in interview reminded me of those women. This book felt very much like a tight hug and a deserved cuss-out, and I’m very glad she was able to get it into the world before passing.
  • Several People are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke. Adequately and cathartically sums up the disconnected misery that is corporate work in the post-pandemic, with a little existentialism for seasoning. Need I say more?

If I had any reading disappointments, I’d list them here, but I’ve explored that enough above. Ultimately, all reading–even the disappointing type–is valuable, and I with I’d had time for more.

But next year is nearly here, and with it new books, new words, new writers–and plenty of old ones to discover, too. I’ll tell you all about my plans for 2026 in another post, but for now–Happy New Year, fellow readers! Here’s to another year of reading diverse books as diverse readers!

(Reminder: there are Bookshop affiliate links on this site, and if you click and buy, we get a kickback. Happy New Year!)

[Hear Me Out] Wicked Is Kinda Bad, Actually

So I finally saw Wicked: For Good, the second installment of the film adaptation of the stage adaptation of the novel by Gregory Maguire, which is itself a gritty reboot of both Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz novels and the 1939 MGM film.

I have a complicated relationship with all things Oz. I hated the 1939 MGM film as a child because even then, something about the place just struck me as fundamentally…off, despite the fascinating movie magic. I read many of the books but Oz was never one of my favorite fantasy worlds, despite how wacky and creative it was. It wasn’t until I saw the terrifying 1985 sequel Return to Oz that things began to make a little sense. When I found out, as an adult, that L. Frank Baum had written some literally screaming genocidally racist editorials (that modern-day fans are perpetually trying to excuse him for) some of the themes that always bothered me about his worldbuilding began to make more sense, in a way.

Then along came Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. I read it in my teens, liked the revisionist concept and its embrace of the psychological darkness lurking behind Oz, but ultimately found it a bit too nasty and mean in execution without ever really coalescing around its central concept enough to make the horrors in the text worth it.

When the stage show came along. I was fortunate to work at a theater that workshopped very early versions of it in the early 2000s. I remember being really furious at how all of the darkly rendered racial, political and cultural justice overtones of the book had been subverted in favor of a twee love triangle and some really basic pop songs. I especially hated how it whitewashed Fiyero, who was one of the more interesting book characters. I wanted some of the nastiness of the book to work its way into the musical–it would have been much more interesting if so.

Now we have the film adaptation. Two of them, in fact. And they’re alright, I guess?

Wicked and Wicked: For Good are still doing too much and not enough, just like the stage show, the book, and everything else built around the Oz concept except Return to Oz, in my opinion.

Let’s break it down a bit…but before I do, know that my guiding principle for engaging with folks on the internet is You Are Already Smart. I’m not here to tell you what to think, and I’m not even interested in trying to. This is not going to be a long tiresome exegesis in which I try to bludgeon home points about Wicked’s racial politics, literary themes, or whether or not the people who wrote it, star in it, or like it are good people. This is just a commentary post for folks who have experienced at least two iterations of this story(preferably the book and the movie). If I should happen to drop a few nuggets of intellect in between the jokes and strong opinions, then so be it. Don’t act a fool in the comments, because I’ll cry and then I’ll block you.

And so…

First, the Good Witch Stuff…

  • At first glance, both films look nice. They’re pretty, even when what’s being portayed is ugly. They have a plasticky, Barbie movie aesthetic that doesn’t thrill, but doesn’t offend, either.
  • Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande both sing and perform well.
  • The costumes are amazing. Great gowns. Beautiful gowns.
  • It’s nice to see how easy it can be to include accurate visual Blackness on film now, even when the film is not really about being Black. Um…can the flying monkeys microbraid? Cause how are Elphie’s edges always so fresh up under that hat?
  • I think that there is a large demographic of isolated little Black girls and other kids who are “different” in normative spaces who will get a lot out of this film.
  • The music is perfectly acceptable–even the new songs, which I’ve already forgotten.
  • It tries very hard to be about something, and expand on the original work’s themes in a relevant way.
  • If 72-year-old Jeff Goldblum tap-danced up to me in that green suit and crooned that I was a dark-eyed beauty, I’d have about 7 green babies for him.

The Bad Witch Less Pleasing…

  • Turning a two-hour stage show into TWO three-hour movies is an egregious cash grab.
  • Hearing folks say “Shiz” out loud 700 times makes the Naming Problem that the book had all the more evident.
  • Fiyero is still a dull, nerfed character outside of the books, despite being played by Jonathan Bailey.
  • The political and social overtones are also dull and the inclusion of a few scenes of talking Animals lean a little too heavily on viewers having the back story. If I hadn’t read the novel, I wouldn’t have gotten a lot out of their story until the second film, and that’s far too late.
  • Whatever statement Wicked is meant to make is drowned under so much pink, soft-focus syrup that it really just feels…weak. That’s not an anti-pink statement, I love pink. I don’t like using pink as a softener rather than as a statement.
  • Speaking of actors doing their best technical work, the performances are good but everyone feels like they’re in a different movie. This is especially apparent in any scene including Jeff Goldblum(for whom I would have far fewer green babies for by the time we get to the end of the second film). They’re all competent actors but you can tell he’s the only one here who specifically learned on and for the big screen back when there were still blockbusters. Also there’s a scene where they briefly digitally de-age him and it’s weird because we all know what Goldblum looked like when he was younger and it wasn’t like that.
  • I love Michelle Yeoh down and I totally get why Jon M. Chu would want a legacy Asian actress in the cast. (And also Bowen Yang, the most elderly college student in Oz). But there are legendary Asian grand dames who can sing, though. Faye Wong is still working. Margaret Cho can sing. Hell, so can Lucy Liu. Just sayin’.

The Absolutely Bonkers…

  • Let us have a moment of silence for all the busy parents who are going to be putting a copy of the gritty, pessimistic, decidedly adult novel Wicked under the tree for their 10-year olds this Christmas because the movie tie-in cover is pretty and Ariana Grande’s Nickelodeon shows still pop up on streaming platforms.
  • The dialogue in this is stunningly bad. Bilious, even. Even though the actors do their best, it can’t be saved in a lot of cases. Even the bits that were lifted straight from the stage show really should have been reworked for the film. For example:
    • Fiyero: You’re beautiful.
    • Elphaba: You don’t have to lie to me.
    • Fiyero: (Big moony eyes) It’s not a lie. It’s just a matter of seeing things in a different way.
    • Me, in the theater: (vomits profusely) WHO SAYS THAT? WHO WROTE THAT? I wish a white boy would say something like that to me in bed. He’d never see my face again, let alone any other part of me.
    • Elphaba: I truly feel Wicked™!
    • Me: (barfs)
  • Don’t even get me started on “Guh-linda”. Ariana Grande gives a great performance, but that character is absolutely terrifying. The fact that she’s presented as a sympathetic savior who made a few oopsies makes her all the more frightening. You and I both know that six months after the Disney-fied scene where all the animals come out to play, Glinda makes a hard right turn and becomes a worse autocrat than the Wizard ever was, bolstered by her frantic need to keep her secret magical incompetence from being discovered and her inevitable bitterness towards successful Animals. (The books had the guts to get into this at least a littlee bit.) I know that her heroic arc and the Disney ending are both from the stage show, but there were some rather thoughtful changes to the Animals storyline for the film and I don’t know why that same care wasn’t given to Glinda. It was really jarring to see that ending survive the film unvarnished, especially now that Elphaba is both Black-coded and actually Black. Seriously, Glinda is deeply, disturbingly, Missy Anne level triggering.
  • Also, why are they friends, anyway? None of the relationships in this movie feel connected or even interesting except Boq’s, and arguably that’s only because they’re all tragic. Everyone else’s interactions are just there to set up the songs. The film is very pretty and excellent on a technical level, but isn’t everything, these days? Every major studio film looks good, now. We’re in a golden age of craft, technical proficiency, and visual execution, even when the CGI is kind of bad. Where modern film suffers, though, is in exploration of themes, plots, and relationships. Wicked, unfortunately, doesn’t stand out from the pack in this. It’s big and expensive and ultimately, very emotionally dull.
  • Above all, the film never does a good job of convincing me why Elphaba, personally, would care about being involved in anything going on in this film, or why anyone actually responds to her the way they do. Y’all got talking Bears, tall Munchkins, and your land is ruled by an actual wizard. Why on earth would anybody care about someone being green? Furthermore, why wouldn’t that green person, who can do magic and is smart, beautiful, and has 4 octaves as well as green skin, spend so much time around people dumb enough to loathe her instead of just Wicked-ing out from the start? I know why, but I honestly just don’t think that’s a very interesting story anymore. There are other, different stories about that kind of person in that kind of place, and the quicker we get to telling them, the better.

Wicked and Wicked: For Good aren’t vying for spots on my favorite film lists, but they were still entertaining to think and talk about. I can see why people love them, but they didn’t do much for me.

Even if you do love the films, I still think you should refrain from getting anyone under the age of 15 a copy of the book, though. There are Tigers in there. Tigers doing unspeakable things. Somebody dies. There is no softening syrupy pink overlay. Don’t do it, no matter how much your little one begs.

(Fellow readers! This article is an amalgamation of all of the posts about Wicked I’ve made in the past year or so over on Facebook. I know, I know, nobody’s on Facebook anymore. I still am, though, and if you are, feel free to follow for diverse book talk in slightly more real-time format. If you prefer faceless books, check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, but be aware that any purchases you make there earns me a little affiliate kickback. Whatever you do, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder

(Buy this book here.)

This book has been everywhere since last year’s election in the US–indie shops, TikTok diatribes, little free libraries and coffee shop share shelves with snarky messages inked on the cover.

Something about the idea of a little book of twenty short lessons on how to stem the tide of tyranny, based on historical precedent, seemed necessary but also somehow smug. Nice white people wave this at each other triumphantly while complaining about other white people. That’s usually a red flag.

But I read it anyway, and it’s not bad–simple, forceful, eminently quotable and much more hopeful about the average citizen’s ability to enact positive change than I’ve come to expect from pop-politics.

But Snyder’s only reference points for historical tyranny throughout the book seem to be Naziism and Sovietization, which is…narrow, to say the least. His academic specialty is European history, so that’s understandable, albeit disappointing. The brief anti-tyranny booklist in chapter 9, however, contains a long list of white Europeans and Americans of varying relevance–from J.K. Rowling and Philip Roth to Hannah Arendt and Vaclav Havel. No-one from the global south. No colonial tyranny. Way too much George Orwell. Understandable but also…no thanks.

So I went to Threads and asked the hive mind there to help me create a more global anti-tyranny booklist. A host of kind souls took me by the hand and led me down a rabbit hole, at the bottom of which was Snyder himself, being a blowhard crackpot at best and a white supremacist hypocrite at worst.

This is one of those times when I both wish I hadn’t looked up the author and am glad I did. Snyder’s super weird, y’all. He’s written that the Holocaust was somehow Hitler’s response to climate change. His takes on racism have an overcompensatory hysteria to them (like how that one overly sincere white person you know sounds just before saying something highly racist. Precise, heartfelt, and just around the corner from some ol’ BS.) To top it off, after writing a list of lessons on how to stop tyranny from happening in the US, Snyder and his family relocated to Canada. How do you write a book telling us all how to calmly, steadily, do the work and then leave?

In a vacuum this is a good starter text. The info seems good, if noticeably narrow. There’s nuggets of hope and clear calls to action. But there’s also a lack of depth, many missing perspectives, and the author seems to be having a day in the sun more for reactionary reasons than for what he’s actually about.

A giant grain of salt and a little global perspective to On Tyranny.

One more thing: here the list of anti-tyranny recommendations from myself and the good folks on Threads:

Human Acts, Han Kang

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, Alaa Abd El-Fattah

How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Paradise of the Blind, Duong Thu Huong

The Prince of Mount Tahan, Islam Hani Muhammad

Babel, R.F. Kuang

Glory, NoViolet Buluwayo

Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire

Chain Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

All of these books can be found in a handy-dandy booklist here.

(Fellow readers! This is a good example of a book I didn’t like that still managed to teach me a lot. I’d still recommend it, but not as much as the books on the list that my Thriends helped me put together. Speaking of—I’m on Threads and Tiktok much more than any of the other socials these days, so if for some reason you have a burning desire for random snotty book thoughts from your favorite neighborhood diverse book reviewer, that’s where they are. In the meanwhile, I have to remind you for legal reasons that if you purchase anything from a link you find on this page or from the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, we’ll earn a small commission. Thanks for visiting! Now go read something good! Peace!)

[Last While In Books] Short Fiction, Actually

Read time: 3 minutes

Fellow readers! I had a short story published this week over at Strange Horizons. It’s called Palimpsest, and it’s a look at the silences that cause strain in close relationships and the hidden injustice of women not being deeply known by their own families. There’s also some climate change, (poorly understood) A.I., and a little bit of near-futurism, too.

Anyway, I’m pretty proud of it (I started writing it back in early 2023 and it took a lot of revisions to get right) and wanted to share it with y’all. But sharing it alerted me to the fact that I have been woefully neglecting my own short fiction reading lists, so I got back into them and found some really good stories in the virtual stacks.

As a result, this week instead of bookish news you get a short list of notable speculative short fiction and poetry that I enjoyed, and hope you will, too.

  • Speculative poetry is…not really my jam. Despite the fact that I’ve reviewed a collection of it before, a lot of it feels kind of like hearing a friend shout at me in a language I don’t know very well from several rooms over. It’s welcome and familiar and I feel like I should get what’s going on, but it doesn’t quite coalesce. I say all of that to say that Angela Liu’s poem “The Language of Fireflies”, published in Psychopomp, was absolutely enthralling and I loved the way the language spun such vivid images despite my understanding gap. [Psychopomp]
  • I tend to prefer a long, loving epic myself, but I notice an uptick in publications that specialize in flash fiction(usually under 1000 words) and drabbles(under 100 words). It’s hard to write something short, sweet, and coherent, but Nico Martinez Nocito hits us with all of that and a good creepy scare in the 100 word tale “Thirteen Hours”. Fun fact–the author gives us a whole story in 100 words, and I’ve gone through ninety-three to try to get you to read it. They do a better job, so check it out.[Rat Bag Lit]
  • Ruth Joffre’s Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is simultaneously one of the most heartbreaking, timely, and creative things I’ve read this year. It’s climate change fiction with a fantasy feel. It also hit me in the gut and made me feel remarkably sad and remarkably appreciative of what we have now, as well. You should definitely read it, and as a bonus, there’s an audiobook version as well. [Podcastle]
  • When I finished reading A.L. Goldfuss’ “Drosera regina”, I literally shut my laptop, sat back in my seat and said “Ay, yooooooooo!”, out loud. It’s about a woman whose body operates much like a carnivorous plant. I’ll let you read the story to fully understand what that means, but as a woman who has always struggled with the heartbreaking and seemingly inverse relationship between male desire and male respect, this story is horrifying, yet resonant in so many ways. [Lightspeed]
  • Neon And Smoke is a brand new magazine specializing in half-genre/half-lit flash fiction. They’ve only got one issue out so far but there are some good stories on the TOC, including Xavier Cole’s “She Peels A Soul”. It’s a creepy little gremlin story set in the confines of a truly bad marriage, and I enjoyed it. [Neon And Smoke]
  • Let’s finish off this list with a classic–Naomi Kritzer’s “So Much Cooking”, which is all about cooking during quarantine caused by a deadly pandemic, told in the form of a blog. No, really. In case you’re wondering, it was written in 2015, and despite being enormously triggering now, is still a story I re-read often.[Clarkesworld]

That’s it for this update, beautiful people. There are no affiliate links on this page, and all of these stories are free to read, so enjoy and share with your friends. Now, go read something good(I just gave you a whole list!). Peace!

[REVIEW]Several People Are Typing, by Calvin Kasulke

(Buy this book here.)

Read time: 2 minutes

Gerald is trapped in his work Slack chat. Literally.

While his body sits dormant in his New York apartment, his consciousness has been fully uploaded to the worst thing about every remote job in America. If he doesn’t find a way out, he’ll be in danger of staying there forever. His attempts to convince his coworkers it’s not all an elaborate joke are only slightly more successful than his attempts to get them to care. Only the AI-powered Slackbot offers to help, as it slowly gains consciousness…if not a moral code.

This book is formatted as one long series of Slack messages, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little triggering at times. It’s also hilarious, cleverly skewering all of the passive-aggressive two-tongued dishonesty and pointless unproductive dialogue that fuels many modern middle-class workplaces. Gerald’s coworkers are all struggling with keeping the right facade for their career’s sake, some more successfully than others. The brutal truth of Gerald’s predicament brings out a variety of responses, from disbelief to mockery–but they all start with an awkward inability to really engage on a human level, made worse by distancing technology and respectability-driven corporate politics.

This was a fun read with a sweet romantic twist at the end and a lot of genuinely funny moments, but I can’t help but feel miserable about how realistically bleak and emotionally nihilistic Gerald’s workplace feels. I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes at annoying coworkers and their annoying messages, and I enjoyed the story. But there’s a point in this book where a character gets done dirty in a really disturbing way and then is promptly forgotten about by everyone else. Amidst all the witty takes on corporate upspeak and Slack subchannel drama, that one dark moment stayed with me and tinged the book with a Monday morning layoff kind of darkness.

Free my girl Lydia.

Paid time off and full benefits to Several People Are Typing.

(Fellow readers; interesting trivia about the author of this book, Calvin Kasulke. In addition to being a self-described “transsexual menace”, he’s also an associate publisher at LitHub, one of my favorite bookish sites. Which means his name is on the email newsletters I get every week, and when I first saw it I had a bit of a deconstructed Spider-man meme moment as I held up my copy of the book to my email inbox like…ohhhhh. Cool!
Anyway, Happy Halloween and welcome to the holiday season, in the US anyway. If you click on any links in the post and buy a thing, I get paid a commission. If you want to peruse books in the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, same thing. Thanks for being here–now go read something good! Peace!)