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Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Beautiful You’ is 240 pages of what the whaaat?

As a woman and/or literate person, it’s difficult to finish Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel without wanting to throw it across a room. Without scoffing audibly while reading on a packed subway car. Without texting your friends context-less lines from the novel’s more ludicrous moments, linguistic gems like “blazing dildos shrieked across the sky” and “‘Hear me, my sister women! You must quit abusing your loins.'” As a woman and/or literate person, it’s difficult to read Beautiful You without having to willfully remind yourself that it’s all satire.

At Comic-Con, Palahniuk told an interviewer that Beautiful You—whose working title was “Fifty Shades of the Twilight Cave Bear Wears Prada”—is “kind of a mash-up of the most popular chick lit novels….comparable to something the Marquis de Sade would have written.” In an interview with Curious Animal, Palahniuk said he’s “hybridized the ultimate chick-lit novel” and wanted to pack BY “with as many tropes as possible, from the ‘almost-as-pretty’ best friend, who’s always a person of color, to the designer label fashions, the quest for a primitive mentor and, finally, a big wedding scene.”

Beautiful You has all of those chick lit tropes, as well as some, well, rarer ones, like the aforementioned flying dildos, and a 200-year-old sex mystic who lives at the top of Mount Everest. The novel—to the extent that I can summarize it without a) giving away spoilers or b) laughing—centers on Penny Harrigan, the kind of spineless female lead that does feel at home in books like Fifty Shades of Grey and The Devil Wears Prada. Penny is your typical errand girl at a high-profile law firm, and is on the hunt for meeting chairs one day when she stumbles across C. Linus Maxwell—quite literally; she falls through a doorway and lands at his feet. A billionaire with a reputation for courting soon-to-be powerful women (see: the first female president of the United States, a young queen, an Oscar-winning actress), Maxwell strikes up an affair with Penny, which consists primarily of his taking dutiful notes while giving her mind-blowing orgasms with an endless procession of proprietary sex toys. Penny soon discovers that she is the guinea pig for Maxwell’s forthcoming line of “feminine products”—named Beautiful You—and when said products are released, finds herself to be almost the only woman alive capable of resisting the compulsion to abandon her life for 24/7 “me time.” And I mean literally: Women stop leaving their bedrooms; husbands are ignored; children left motherless. Meanwhile, Maxwell’s intentions with respect to the Beautiful You empire are revealed to be far more sinister than previously imagined—this is a spoiler but I’m sorry I just can’t resist: NANOBOTS ARE INVOLVED.

Lena Dunham, GamerGate and [insert SEO keyword here]

A few weeks ago, after handmade pasta and a few too many specialty cocktails, my friends and I got into it over Lena Dunham. Empowered by that special brand of self-righteousness unique to personal opinions about popular things, we loudly and enthusiastically debated the merits of the Dunham Phenomenon—two of us against and one (me) in favor, with a fourth maintaining a wishy-washy neutrality that belied the definitive nature of Dunham’s fame. Indeed, if we’ve learned anything from the post-Girls age, it’s that one is either pro-Lena or against, impressed by her or annoyed, on the same page or reading a different book entirely. There is no Switzerland when it comes to Dunham.

Without even touching on the specifics of her body of work—wry stories of self-involved 20-somethings fumbling their way through adulthood—it would be hard to overstate the size of Lena Dunham’s zeitgeist footprint. She became a household name seemingly overnight, at first because of the critical reception to Girls—both good and bad—and later because of the critical reception to Lena herself: Why so whiny? Why so frequently naked? When clothed, why so much like a toddler? Over time, Dunham’s fame became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and talking about being so over talking about Lena Dunham morphed into the cultural high ground, like hating Uggs or giving up on post-1990 Saturday Night Live.

Putin, the Pope, Jennifer Lopez and Shaq all disappear in The Leftovers

On Sunday night, HBO will continue a long legacy of book-to-it’s-not-TV-it’s-HBO adaptations that includes Sex and the City, True Blood, and [kinda] The Wire. The Leftovers, premiering after enough hype to kill an elephant, is centered on a Rapture-like event that causes roughly two percent of the world’s population to suddenly disappear—one second you’re sitting next to your best friend, the next second she’s gone, without so much as a bang or a zap or even a courtesy puff of colored smoke.

The Rapture/Not Rapture (depending on who you talk to) prompts Reactions—emotional, political, religious—and it’s those reactions that form the core of The Leftovers, insomuch as they affect residents of Mapleton, an unassuming suburban town that serves as a microcosm of the global post-Rapture malaise. Three years after the event, Mayor Kevin Garvey is trying to rally the wary townspeople into a sense of normalcy, even as his estranged son gets involved with a dubious evangelist, his daughter goes through a head-shaving rebellious phase, and his wife leaves him for the Guilty Remnant, a cult of sorts whose members don’t speak, dress all in white, travel in pairs and constantly smoke cigarettes ( ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), all ostensibly to remind people of October 14th, and to prove themselves worthy for, you know, “next time.”

Things I would never donate: sleep

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After a brief and mildly unintentional two-week break, I am back in action, and ready to talk about sleep.

My first tour with Karen Russell wasn’t that long ago; I read Swamplandia! (exclamation point included, like Yahoo!), her debut novel, back in September, and enjoyed its eerie blend of oddball setting and vaguely supernatural plot (bonus fact: the book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer in 2012). I also loved the concept: a struggling family-run alligator-themed amusement park in the Florida Everglades—whose chief attraction is a one-woman “I swim with gators!” show—comes upon hard times that try its quirky owners. Like a Geek Love/Big Fish/Heart of Darkness mash-up (jungles! ghosts! competing theme parks!), Swamplandia! had a lot to offer, and Russell’s ability to turn a phrase is impressive, even when some of the novel’s more fantastical moments failed to enthrall me.

Laline Paull’s The Bees: Honey doesn’t buy happiness

As highly functional and exceedingly authoritarian societies go, bees are legit. One need only skim some of the mass bee death headlines of the last few years to understand that for animals so small, seemingly innocuous and unwelcome at picnics, bees basically run the world. Or keep the world running.

Given their propensity for hierarchy, bees also seem an apropos topic for the ever-growing canon of dystopian fiction. After all, they’re an all-natural example of the kind of social order foisted on humans in books like 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and Brave New World. Bees have a ruler, a class system, and a directive (however innate) to stick with the program lest the whole hive suffer for an individual’s absence of industry. Needles to say, I could never be a bee, or any other animal whose entire existence is synonymous with hard work and constant activity. (Given the choice, I’d be a house cat; their lives are 70% sleeping, 10% eating and 20% knocking things off tables.)