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I heard this book was funny but the dialogue is like a Wes Anderson movie if the characters were even more crass and everyone important was a cagey woman doing very gay shit. (That comparison may be in part because I'm listening at x1.5 speed.) The ridiculous is almost impossible to parse from the bleak and either way it's visceral enough to occasionally startle you awake like the chirp of an urgent email notification from your boss obliterates a weird sex daydream or a stranger interrupts your Sunday morning walk by screaming nonsense at you on the street.
Feb 29, 2024
Related Recs
Ending 2024 and starting the new year with this perverted and overtly uncomfortable novel. Itās so good itās disgusting
Jan 6, 2025
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This novel from 1992 is being reissued by New Directions in May, and it is hilarious, very sad, and constantly teetering on the brink of being genuinely offensive. But it isnāt offensive! It depicts the fraught, competitive, and co-dependent relationship between gay men and women in a way that not many writers of either group have been able to pull off. I donāt know that many writers at all have attempted to depict this relationship as a primary goal in their textsāit does come up as a consequence of other plots and themesābut thatās what this book is āabout.ā I was going to add one of my favorite lines from the book here, but out of context it does indeed seem offensive, even if I promise itās narrated from the perspective of an Emma Bovary character, so you just have to get the book and see for yourself.
Jun 6, 2024
Top Recs from @bumbythefool
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Iām sick of feeling powerless so my new coping strategy is to not let a stupid system bully me into quiet despair. Iām learning how to use my stateās General Assemblyās online bill tracker and Iām subscribing to email updates for the agendas and the public hearings of the legislative committees Iām most concerned about. Iām memorizing all my legislatorsā names and emailing and calling regularly.
Also: Check to see if your stateās Legislative Library has Libguides that explain in laymanās terms what bills are passing in your state and other educational/legislative resources you have freely available to you!!!
Nov 20, 2024
Apr 16, 2025
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You will make about 60k if you're lucky unless you become a manager, and you will have 35k of debt or more from grad school (online grad school is cheaper sometimes and no one cares where you get the degree anyways). And sometimes you work for a university (which is essentially a corporation) or the government. But in general everyone in your field will believe in a code of ethics that raises the dignity of humanity above the mire of misinformation and censorship. And you help empower people with the information literacy to move through the world as confident capable individuals/professionals/scholars. Community college libraries are my favorite environment I've worked in so far because the students are cool, driven, and diverse in age and background. Public libraries also do amazing social work in 2025 to provide services to their communities like harm reduction, networks of resources for unhoused people, language teaching, professional development, basic technology training, literally just being a third space, I could go on forever. It definitely is a career that exists because of neoliberalism I'm not going to lie, like American public libraries only exist because robber barons in the 1900s donated a mind boggling amount of grants to towns across the country to build them (not sure about other countries' history with this to be fair). All that being said I decided I wanted to be a librarian when I was 16 and I've been committed to that path for 11 years with no regret.
To add a personal note to this rec and emphasize how meaningful this work really is, I'm going to indulge in a story because I could genuinely cry thinking about all the kind, interesting people I've met who have chosen to be vulnerable with me about their needs and goals. A couple years ago I helped an older man for multiple hours to remember his email login so he could get a copy of his birth certificate from his son-in-law who had emailed a scan of the physical copy which was in another country. The stakes were incredibly high and the task seemed virtually impossible because we didn't even have an email address to start. He was having trouble reaching his son-in-law to ask for help because of the time difference, and he needed the scan ASAP. We were together for so long I learned a lot about him. He talked to me about Islam and Christianity and angels. And then we got it! It's probably one of the defining moments of my career and to me is one of the most impactful things I've ever done.
So there's my job rec lol!
Mar 13, 2025