The Curator: two books of the year that you probably didn't read

do you like money or do you like earth? (circle one)

There are two novels this year that got buried in the publishing noise but deserve some reckoning with - they are Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. Orbital recently won the Booker Prize for Fiction, but before that award cycle, it was just one of many 2024 releases. Entitlement¹ was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, prompted by my love for Leave the World Behind, but it didn’t receive the acclaim I thought it would.

I love the dichotomy of these two novels - one, fully absorbed in class consciousness, the power of capital, and the morality of work; the other, literally and figuratively so far removed from the everyday that it becomes at once an existential cry for help and a love letter to the earth itself. I have a few ideas about why each didn’t get a whole lotta love and why they might be worth your time to read anyway.

Entitlement by Rumaan Alam

I tend to get caught up in the language and form of a novel. Upon reflection, my initial issue with Entitlement is that it feels like the scope of a short story with the length of a novel and does some weird things with character development that, while purposeful, are not gratifying. I also take umbrage with Alam’s prose style - stilted dialogue somewhere between wondering whose mind we are in to questioning if words are actually being said aloud (to say nothing of actually finishing a sentence). But there are interesting things happening under the surface.

Entitlement is about Brooke, a 30-ish Black NY woman looking to match her adoptive mother’s life standards by finding a career that “makes a difference.” She’s from a solidly upper-middle-class world swirling with friends and family, all who can afford fancy dinners and some who can afford million-dollar penthouses. When a prominent elderly philanthropist hires Brooke to help give away his money faster than he can make it, she proceeds to lose all sense of reality. I mean just really loses the plot. Everything about Brooke post-Asher is precarious and upsetting. Everything about the “philanthropy” makes me want to ban billionaires.

In a more straightforward novel about money, class, and power, we might see the typical struggles of living within a single social class, like the old money of Wharton’s House of Mirth or the elusive academics in The Secret History. An interloper may get near, but the groups are essentially closed off, insulated. Entitlement asks, what happens when two social classes collide? When one gets a taste of capital’s absolute power in American society and understands viscerally what it means to be protected by wealth?

I loved how this novel interrogates capital - both social and material - and how [perceived] lack shows up in unhealthy ways. For anyone who’s had a friend group with wildly differing bank account balances, you already know how difficult it can be to manage egos and expectations. I loved where Alam went on the morality of work, work under capitalism as a substitute for religion (“capitalism Sundays”), and whether philanthropy itself is amoral (Asher spends millions to “save the Oysters.” Right).

I struggle with how much I liked this novel versus how successful it was. Brooke exerts a significant amount of energy pursuing one potential beneficiary who steadfastly rebukes her offers. There is no real explanation for her singular focus - she could just pick another charity and move on! Her mother is disappointed in her new job - giving "it doesn’t mean what you think it means” vibes about the nature of Asher’s philanthropy². Brooke dissembles, teetering between realistic expectations and inexplicable choices with very little human emotion. She seems to realize it’s all a game and so why not her? Does her desire for money preclude her from being worthy? Her reaction is uncomfortable because we see our own potential for ugliness, for entitlement (!). No matter how smug one might be about it, the question remains - is anyone really doing “the right” thing here? Or ever?

Entitlement was unsettling, weird, and deeply thought-provoking. It didn’t surpass Leave the World Behind, and I don’t know that I would recommend it to everyone, but if you like uncanny valley vibes a la The Other Black Girl or Luster, you may really love what Alam is doing here.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

the small things are mundane and the rest is too astounding

I imagine - now correct me if I am wrong - that those who are unmoved by this novel have never thought deeply of the universe while high on marijuana. If you’ve never weirded out on how we covered the earth in tar or about the bugs living on our eyelashes then I can’t help you. Orbital is a challenge to all the external signposts that craft a stable life on Earth. I throw the word existential around a lot, but this plotless timeless shapeless day in the life is truly the definition of peak crisis. I was shooketh.

Orbital is a single day in the life of six men and women living on a space station. The astronauts circle Earth sixteen times, witnessing sixteen sunrises and sunsets before it is time to snap into weightless sleeping pods like bats on the ceiling. Nothing happens, really - no aliens or disasters or things to fix in the nick of time. There is little interpersonal drama, a lot of earth descriptions. They think about their families back on Earth, what they’ve given up, and what is happening to their bodies as they float, resistance-less. They track a super-typhoon. They study bacteria.

I was worried Orbital would become too preachy, too Tuesday’s With Morrie, but it found the right balance of directness and insight, mundanity and significance to keep me engaged. The prose is gorgeous and intimate in a detached sort of way since we hop lightly from character to character. There are a lot of metaphors and inversions - the spaceship as mother, the spaceship as womb, space travel as reverse birth, Earth as mother, astronauts as aliens, astronauts as fortune tellers. Time is timeless, space is weightless, the earth is now heaven, and everything threatens to “fold like a paper crane.” We turn and rotate and fly past continents and oceans. We stand there gaping.

Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves?

I see the drama of Orbital winning the Booker, especially in a year of James. I loved James. However, that novel reimagines a past that certainly informs our present but says nothing of the future of this miracle flying rock. Not even our storied past will matter in our new age of climate change, of civil unrest, of the end of empires. Perhaps I’m extrapolating what I want to hear from this story. Perhaps I am just a sucker for novels that mess with form³. But I found a lot of genuine awe and wonder in this story of humans flying through space in a skin of metal.

Further Reading 💾

• Entitlement by Rumaan Alam review – meandering study of money’s corrupting influence (The Guardian)

• 'Entitlement' disappoints — 'Leave the World Behind' was a tough act to follow (NPR)

• Circling the Planet, Looking for God (The New Yorker)

• It’s Harder to See the World’s Problems From 250 Miles Up (The New York Times)

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reading 📖→

• Say Nothing is more riveting than any manufactured thriller I’ve ever encountered. If you are hankering for true crime meets historical thriller, please give this one a chance. It is astonishing that one man crafted this story from real life (and a ton of research).

• After 70 pages, I am sending The Book of Love back to the library. I honestly do not know why I keep picking stories about teenagers when I simply have no interest. I’ve heard that it gets addicting around page 200 but I don’t have the patience at this moment. Someday, I may return.

• I gave up on Crime & Punishment for now, too (theme is knowing when to quit?). I will pick it back up perhaps during the bleakness of January, when all the lights have been dimmed and the pie has been eaten and there is nothing left but to wallow in the remnants of our own holiday excess… C'est la vie!

• Up Next: Unknown. I want to end the year with a fat chonky novel, so here are some I am considering: Lady Joker, Kavalier & Clay, Greenwood, and Purity. Further crowdsourced suggestions include Lonesome Dove, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Pachinko, Middlemarch, and Les Miserables. Help!

consuming📽️🎧→

• Always Be My Maybe - a very funny movie that you should watch just for the Keanu Reeves cameo and the “dishes that play with time” scene.

• Netflix is killing it with the teen-dramedy-to-Christmas-Hallmark pipeline takeover. Highly enjoyed Hot Frosty, Our Little Secret, and Love Hard. (Also Ian Harding reminds us he was always too good for PLL. IYKYK).

• And our annual rewatch of the best holiday movie ever created - Just Friends. I will try to sell this one to you every year because forgiveness is more than saying sorry.

book news and restacks📰→

• Petya K. Grady
  has some great 2025 reading intentions for reading authentically (Substack).

• The 15 Best Movie Posters of 2024 because movie posters are the equivalent of book cover art (

  Scott Tobias
  via Substack).

• I try not to read hot takes before I consume art, but inevitably, something like this shows up in my inbox, and I have to click it: Say Nothing Says Too Much and Shows Too Little (Vulture). This may be a case of adapters assuming anyone actually interested in the history will have read the book first.

and cats 🐈‍⬛→

after every shower, Minnie wants to sit in my toweled lap, so well, I let her

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let’s chat 👻→

• What 2024 books do you think deserved more hype??

• What books are you planning for the end of the year?

• What are you reading currently, and is it any good?

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in case you missed it 🖤

The Curator: on becoming an author completionist

The Curator: bookish gifts to get yourself this holiday season

The Curator: a book for remembering this is all made up

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See you around the bookshelf!

1. Thank you to Riverhead Books for the advanced reader’s copy ✌️

2. It is wonderful that people give money to charity. It is not wonderful that one person gets to amass all the wealth and then decides where and how to use that money

3. the PPT in A Visit from the Goon Squad, the footnotes in Jonathan Strange, the titles in In the Dream House, the circular writing in House of Leaves