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2024 reads, #5. DID NOT FINISH. Up to this year, I actually didn't know anything about French writer Sidone-Gabrielle Colette, who published professionally under just her last name, except that she's considered a feminist icon by some people, and that she apparently wrote a series of novels during the Jazz Age that were considered scandalous at the time. So that made it exciting when the Chicago Public Library announced the other week their acquisition of a brand-new translation by Rachel Careau of two of Colette's better-known novels, 1920's Cheri and 1926's The End of Cheri, because it represented a rare opportunity for me to pick up a writer this old and famous without knowing even a single thing about them, an opportunity I didn't want to pass up.

And indeed, one of the most shocking things I discovered after starting this is that the Cheri of the books' titles is actually the most flaming, prancing queen I've ever seen in any book ever published before 1970 (think Sean Hayes' "" from the 1990s sitcom Will & Grace, but with even his over-the-top antics cranked up to eleven); and I have to give Colette a lot of credit for the mere act of getting away with it, which she seems to have pulled off by giving him just the flimsiest, most transparent romantic dalliances with a series of dimwitted young women within the high-society circles he travels in, even though Cheri very, very clearly has a much bigger obsession with these dimwitted young women's rich, eccentric, sharp-tongued middle-aged mothers (think Megan Mullaly's from Will & Grace).

Unfortunately, though, I personally can't fucking stand Will & Grace, and I find this kind of literary character to be much more annoying and exasperating than charming, so I myself didn't last very long with this book. Certainly, though, your experience might be very different than mine, especially if you loved Will & Grace (it's hard to emphasize enough just how uncannily similar it is to this book, written 75 years previous), so by all means take this on if you think you're the kind of person who would enjoy it.