Bitch, Read! #1: Alternatives to Sex

Well, nurses, time has come to educate your cocktail-degraded minds. Now, for me, I get a lot of books come across my desk, but for the most part I only end up putting big 'ol photo books in my magazine - you know? The porny shots of bathroom faucets and hot photgraphers convincing celebrities to look like they have epilepsy?

So I decided, since I'm reading these literary works (master and otherwise), I'd share some of the good ones with you. This week's entry is a light, compelling read called, "Alternatives to Sex." A real estate agent who compulsively cleans and compulsively has sex with internet tricks attempts to abstain. With his newfound freetime, he schemes how to reconcile the marriage of a couple looking for an apartment in Boston, how to collect thousands of dollars in back rent from his new-age yogi tenant Kumiko Rothberg (read: not her real name), how to satisy an aggressive inspirational speaker who overprices her apartment in the extreme, how to finally convince a noted sex-authoress to finally make it all the way through a closing and how to keep his best friend (and possible love of his life?) Edward from fleeing to San Diego after years of being "just friends."

There's plenty to love about this book — it's plotted in a way that makes you want to turn the page but it's not overly intricate or dependent on one of those "big reveals" that so often falls flat. As you can probably already tell, the cast of characters is colorful and thensome (but also not overburdened with unbelievable eccentricities). But my favorite thing about the book, and this is what makes it kind of genius really, is the narrator's voice. Author Stephen McCauley (who also wrote "The Object of My Affection" which was adapted into a lovely, underrated film of the same title starring Paul Rudd and Jennifer Anniston) truly knows his narrator. He picks beautiful moments to remind us everything is being seen through one of his particular lenses — that of a gay man, an obsessive compulsive (not serious, thankfully!), and most hilariously, a man who knows his real estate and what people are really looking for.

And let me tell you, they are some lenses worth looking through! RATING: 4 out of 5 FagBags!