They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but oh man the psychology of color really gets me over here. I added it to my Goodreads back when the longlist was announced because I was compelled by the cover. I have not read Sally Rooney nor do I particularly care to in my current mindset. I think it was longlisted for some big book prize? I don’t remember which one exactly (editing me now confirms that it was the Women’s Prize in Fiction over in the UK), and it was often compared to the work of Sally Rooney.

There’d been a lot of hype around this book.

But, to be quite honest, Zauner’s and Ferrante’s works had much greater success in capturing my attention compared to Exciting Times. So while prepping for my vacation to Tennessee, I downloaded the audiobook and added it to my rotation of audiobooks for the week: Exciting Times, Crying in H Mart, and The Lying Life of Adults kept me intellectually fed the entire trip. This article contains affiliate links, PinkNews may earn revenue if you click through and purchase products through the links.I found this book through Libby, which, surprisingly considering how new it was, didn’t have a waitlist of people wanting to read it for themselves.

Her debut novel Exciting Times was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize, and was shortlisted for the Waterstones Book of the Year. It tells the story of a young Irish woman as she navigates relationships and her sexuality while teaching English in Hong Kong. Naoise Dolan is a queer, autistic novelist from Dublin, Ireland. Well, I’m in that audience, and to me it’s gay as hell. More recently there’s been a shift towards arguing that the play itself isn’t inherently gay, but it might become so when the audience associates it with Wilde. The play’s shifting reception perhaps illustrates trends in literary scholarship: the majority mood was first one of eliding gay connotations, then of finding gayness on every page. English aristocrats Jack, Algernon, Gwendolen and Cecily untangle, retangle and detangle their love lives under the reign of Queen Victoria and the haughty gaze of socialite Lady Bracknell. No-one in The Importance of Being Earnest is explicitly gay, but they’re all camp to the hilt, full of heavily stylised role-reversals and value-flips. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wildeįine, it’s a play, but I prefer Wilde’s plays to his novel.

Naoise dolan