Oh, Have I Got A Room For You . . .

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, the tale of doomed gay love in 1950s Paris — also the namesake of the country's oldest LGBT bookstore — is a fantastic, taut sub-200-page romantic mystery — lyrically written and economic in its storytelling and universally loved by the book club (which is really, really rare!).

(That Room is written by a black author — actually, the quintessential African American literary 0voice — and does not touch on race was a thing; I think it detracts from the actual book to speculate on what isn't actually written there.)

Being a tale of doomed love, things die in this book: souls, actual people, etc. And I don't know if I've been watching too many Netflix series or whatnot, but as Room started to heat up and the intertwining stories began to come together, I had the nagging feeling that something very epic was going to happen: instead of Giovanni getting rung up for murdering Guillaume, David was actually setting Giovanni up to go to jail so he could escape the relationship — and David actually killed Guillaume! It went on like this until I finally dialed back expectations for every single goddamn story to circle back toward a third act of treachery and malaise. Which is to say, sometimes a tale of doomed love can be just that . . .