Is an age gap romance May / December if the lovers are twenty years apart? Or is that more like May / August? The romance starts as a one-night stand. College senior Cassie sees 38-year-old Erin in a bar and immediately Wants. Her. Erin, recently divorced from her husband goes with it, and a very good time is had in the back of Erin's car.

The next day, Cassie and Erin meet again when Cassie joins her friend, Parker--who turns out to be Erin's daughter--to breakfast. It's parents weekend! Thanks for the welcome wagon, Cassie! Parker is a first year student, so at least Erin isn't fucking someone her own age?

Speaking of fucking, there's a lot of sex in this book, as there is with the last book I read by Wilsner, Cleat Cute. I liked that the climax (lol) isn't exactly what you might expect. 

This book starts out like a light reality dating show romp, but it goes to a dark (and kind of funny, maybe?) place pretty quickly. 

The cast and crew are on a remote island. The former are staying in a B&B run by a seemingly benign, widowed lesbian named Maggie. 

The whole thing kind of doesn't make sense, but it's fun and is over quickly. Justice for Patricia!

This is a sweet, fun memoir by a trans teen who knew who she was from before she could speak. And her parents believed her! They were solid advocates. 

Jennings is an enthusiastic narrator. Nickelodeon vibes, but not in a creepy way. 

College sophomore Sav's transformation from closeted party teen to full-time queer is well underway until it hits a snag: her hometown bestie is getting married. Izzie is a 20-year-old sorority girl. Her betrothed is an ROTC senior about to be deployed (or whatever), and Izzie is doing the whole thing: the wedding party with all the heteronormative bells and whistles. 

That's not who Sav is anymore, but the real problem is Izzie's brother, with whom Sav has a [spoiler] past.

In the midst of all the drama, or maybe at the heart of it, Sav is taking Intro to Gender Studies, a seminar class (with a hot nonbinary person, Wes, who only wears green, a detail that is never explained. Is it a Great Gatsby literary allusion???). 

I fully enjoyed reading this book and upon finishing it immediately looked for others by the same author. Also, the cover makes me think of the hair chop a lot of girls do in college. I did! And lol:

Tate and Penny's moms are BFFs, so they've been in each other's lives since before they were born. They were as close as sisters when they were little, but diverged a bit as they got older, each having their own universe of friends. And yet, each was always fully aware of what was going on with the other. Tate was present for Penny when Penny's dad died before her eyes in a rafting accident, which was good because Penny's mom Lottie sure wasn't. 

Now the moms have brought the girls into one household because Lottie is donating part of her liver to Tate's mom, Anna, and while they're alone in the house, they have to deal with their attraction to one another, as much as they seem not to want to. 

The will-they-or-won't-they, as you might guess from the title, goes on for a long-ass time. Folks who like a slow burn won't mind, but I did. 

The Pairing pairs Theo and Kit and food and wine. If you're a foodie or a wine enthusiast you might be as obsessed as the will-they or won't they again lovers. Theo is a member of a Hollywood family and a sommelier-in-training. Kit was Theo's boy next door and the guy who broke Theo's heart. He now lives in France and works as a high end pastry drudge. The two already did the friends-to-lover thing, having lived together and everything. Their total separation happened on their way to this very three-week European food tour four years ago. They both happened to have rebooked. Theo literally runs (falls) into Kit on the tour bus, causing a nosebleed. The rest of this book, which takes its sweet (or tedious, depending on your perspective) time with their inevitable reconciliation / unreconciliation / conclusion. 

It went on too long for me, but I still liked it. The lovers are both bisexual and as adventurous sexually as they are with their other appetites (remember they're both foodie drinkies). Their queer lives are matter of fact front and center, just as McQuiston's other characters' are. The rest of the cast also consists of folks who seem like they might be boring, but can surprise you. I wouldn't mind reading novels from other pairs' points of view. 

Super enjoyable fake dating enemies-to-lovers story in the same universe as Part of Your World, which I read last month. The lovers are ER doctors Briana something and something WASPy that starts with a J. J has social anxiety, and Briana is super cool about it. J is otherwise perfect. Both have recent exes, but J's is worse because the ex (Amy, I think?) feel in love with his brother a few months after their breakup. Or Briana's is worse because her ex started hooking up with his new chick while he and Briana were still married.  

This was my homie's favorite book as a child, but I just couldn't get into this story of a tween who thinks her 14-year-old sister and their neighbor lady are witches. 

Author/narrator Carrie Sun isn't the most likable narrator. She makes poor choices, at least in her own life. As the executive assistant to a billionaire hedge fund founder/manager, her work is unimpeachable. I've read a few memoirs of women of color who seek their fortune in fortune 500 companies and ultimately leave to save their lives. There is an undeniable appeal to making a gazillion dollars, living luxuriously, and taking care of one's immigrant parents (and giving them something to brag about even while they criticize and disown you on the regular, in Sun's case). However, Sun ultimately realizes that helping billionaires and the billionaire business is pretty much the same thing as fucking over the poor, and she wants out. Plus she's depressed, in poor physical shape, flirting with an eating disorder, and goes back to a controlling ex-fiancé. 

This slim, elegant work is like a book report by a cultural studies PhD on a topic they were randomly assigned. Kate Eichhorn is a brilliant genius who can go deep on anything and explain it to you like you're 50. The book's title, Content, refers to digital content--user generated, automated, fake, etc.

She mostly concerns herself with the WWW, dating back to the early 1990s. 

She points out how hard it was to find information in those days, but that at the same time as discoverability tools improved, so did efforts to game the system using search engine optimization (a term possibly not coined yet, but that I'm using to describe what Eichhorn reports). 

Eichhorn references Writely, which became Google docs a year after its 2005 launch, and which I used back then! I'm not usually an early adopter, but I was in early on that one! (This has nothing to do with the book; I'm kind of just bragging.)

I bookmarked a page that engages with the theorist Lyotard, information as commodity, and "payment knowledge," but I'm not sure what in particular I had in mind to share. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She goes on to discuss the greater access "amateurs" have as creators, not necessarily coming down on the side of credentialism or popularism. She focuses on Instapoet Rupi Kaur, whom I hadn't heard of, a Canadian who rose to fame on Instagram at 17 for her performance poetry. 

Oof--the chapter on bots, including the Macedonian teens who contributed to Donald Trump's 2016 win, treats us to information on how Google's AdSense was (is) weaponized in the fake news industry. Many fake news purveyors are just in it for the money. They don't have to have a horse in the American race for the presidency. 

Eichhorn ends on a despairing note

Published in 2022, this book could use a generative AI addendum. Eichhorn told me she was forced to cut AI content that, when the book was in production, seemed too outrageous to be believable. Lolsob.