Alternatives to Sex (2006)
I would like to preface this review by saying that since classes started on August 30, I have read exactly zero books for pleasure (actually, I have read exactly zero books, period, since I didn’t bother to read my assigned materials-who has the time? That’s what notes are for.). Therefore, I was so excited just to be reading an actual, fictional novel that even if I’d hated Alternatives to Sex, I would probably give it a decent review-at least a couple of stars. I’d find something about it to like, if only that it consisted of words on a page that did not begin with “According to recent findings…” or “As Dr. So-and-So asserts in her groundbreaking work on [insert mind-numbingly dull topic here]…” Hell, I’d probably have given it half a star for being printed in a nice font.
That said, I didn’t hate Alternatives to Sex at all. Quite the opposite, in fact: it was delightfully funny and charming, with actual substance, believably likeable characters, and a genuinely intriguing plot (or, more accurately, a genuinely intriguing lack-of-plot). There were moments when I actually did laugh out loud, as the book jacket promised I would; there were even times that I would stop just to read a particularly great passage aloud to whomever happened to be in room with me at the time. I devoured the whole thing in roughly four-and-a-half hours, which is not too bad for a 287-page book.
William Collins is a middle-aged (“I’d recently turned forty-and more recently than that had turned forty-four.”) gay man living in Boston in 2002 who realizes one day that the series of semi-anonymous trysts he’s been setting up through an internet dating service is not the most productive-or healthy-use of his time, and he resolves to give up sex. The “alternatives to sex” mentioned in the title include cleaning, more cleaning, real estate, and immersing himself in the life of a married couple he’s just met, as well as obsessing over the safety of his best friend, a flight attendant named Edward, with whom he is very definitely not in love. By the time Alternatives to Sex reached its climax* (if you can call it that-the book strolls to completion, rather than sprinting), I felt like I was hearing a friend tell a story-I knew what was going to happen, but I enjoyed hearing it anyway.
Will it make my list of Top 5 Books? Certainly not. But it was a great way to return to the world of reading for pleasure.
4 out of 5
* teehee.