@jayritchie:
Yup, although, oopsie, I realized after this post that one of the authors is actually a man. If you read it, you will likely comprehend my wrong-minded assumption.
The first is of the new genre known as STEM Romance, "Love, Theoretically" by Ali Hazelwood.
The second is "Entitlement" by Rumaan Alam, and would be found shelved in Literary Fiction.
My stacks and lists are a bit of a mess right now, but I have been reading through an assortment of Best of 2024 lists, and some of my other recommendations would be:
"Good Material", Dolly Alderton (Very fun light read. I recommend it for members of this forum, because the stand-up comedian protagonist is a young man with ESFP-ish personality type, so the way he approaches life and love is pretty much the opposite of strategic masculine INTJ approach/perspective. HINT: He just gets lucky and unlucky quite frequently.)
" All Fours", Miranda July (this is the one everybody is reading, I actually had to put it aside halfway through, but happy I picked it up again, because it's one of those novels that only wraps and weaves together into something grand towards the very end, I think maybe I found it a bit disturbing, because it approaches sexual and relationship issues from the perspective of a woman with an experience/perspective that is kind of 50% very similar to my own and 50% very different from my own. )
"The Familiar", Leigh Bardugo (magical historical fiction, not one of favorite genres, but I found this novel to be a highly compelling read, setting is the Spanish Inquisition, protagonist is a lowly scullion with magical powers)
"Creation Lake", Rachel Kushner (this is the novel I would most highly recommend for members of this forum, because the protagonist is an uber-rational female approaching issues related to the metacrisis from a very unusual suspense novel perspective, towards the high-quirky brow, in my top 3 in climate fiction category)
"Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows", Balli Jaswal (this was actually published in 2017, my library doesn't have her newest novel yet, easy, enjoyable mid-brow read with some interesting flavors.)
"Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers", Jesse Sutanto (fun, cozy mystery with Asian-American grandmother as protagonist)
Frita wrote:Could this book discussion be metaphor?)
Seems likely, although maybe the pattern qualitatively changes up a bit once you interject concepts such as "cultural capital"? I'm just confused about why/how I am simultaneously admiring Robin Greenfield's recent video in which he is sitting naked on the grass after giving away all of his belongings, but also trying to rekindle some of the spark of my Modern era youth. I mean, there is no way to get back in touch with my 3 year old, 10 year old, or even 13 year old energy without that energy being set dead plumb in 20th century Modern.( By 14, I was already veering a bit more Post-Modern, so that is a different problem, not requiring deconstruction of "shopping") Barbara Sher suggests that best way to approach how to spend post-mid-life -> retirement years is to forget about all the sex/romance/family-formation hormonally-driven angst you were subject to from puberty to menopause (or similar for men) and focus on what you enjoyed when you were 10 years old, but if you were 10 years old in affluent U.S. suburb in 1975, what you enjoyed when you were 10 is almost certainly going to be reflected on archival consumerist-era documents such as Your Xmas Wish List, even (true story) if one of the many gifts you opened on the shag-carpet of the family room of your ranch style home in new upscale subdivision for Xmas 1975 was a brand spanking new copy of "The Foxfire Book: hog dressing, log cabin building, mountain crafts and foods, planting by the signs, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, moonshining, and other affairs of plain living." I may be off by a year or so, but likely my other gifts were Cotton Candy machine, Boggle,realistic size and appearance toddler doll (my last doll), electric race track (my father always gave us some boy toys he wanted to play with), 100 in 1 electronic experiment kit, record player, matching sister pajamas, a great deal of candy, and several other books, maybe "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret", "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" and "There's a Decorator in Your Dollhouse!"
My point here being that I think Barbara Sher is mostly right, because I can remember what/why I liked about all of these gifts, but to bring those "like"s forward to reinvigorate my 60s, I have to first "grow them up" and then also "un-consumerize" them. For easy example, if I simply "grew up" what I enjoyed about "There's a Decorator in Your Dollhouse!", I could easily spend $500,000 on the project, even though it was a DIY book for making your own dollhouse furniture and accessories. In order to somewhat "un-consumerize" it, I could, for example, choose to "frivolously" spend the $100 gift I received on redecorating the "room of my own" I am currently occupying in my mother's senior community apartment, or use it towards a cute camper conversion of my Smart Car. At core, the desire is "Create objects/display in alignment with my aesthetic." which theoretically could also be achieved for $0, but that becomes a bit trickier, sometimes to the extent that I simply wouldn't do it, which would also be a shame/loss,
particularly if I were to project this upon others. Maybe the problem is just my perception that a fairly large percentage of frugal men of my acquaintance possess highly limited aesthetic. For example, the year my parents were separated, my frugal father bought all of us butt-ugly old lady robes from some weird old-fashioned department store or the man I dated who had a hockey poster push-pinned to the dirty wall over his dining table video game center or the multiple horrors of my mega-millionaire semi-miser friend's house of dust, hoard, and sputum ("Yuck, is this a penis squeezing machine!" screamed the woman with whom I co-operated towards his post-death Swedish Death Cleaning.)