I was thinking I hadn’t read as much this week, but … . Check out the links if you’re interested in any of these, and buy direct if you can.
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1. ‘Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art’ by Gene Wilder. A decent memoir in the sense of telling his life story illuminated by significant personal and professional relationships, but feels oddly detached, as if filtered through the lens of his long psychiatric relationship. Planning to watch the GW documentary on Netflix in hopes of a higher creative joy quotient. Edited to add: watched it (Remembering Gene Wilder) and it was fun, plus featured audio of GW reading his own memoir. I suspect the audiobook is the way to go.
2. ‘Slavery and the African American Story’ by Patricia Williams Dockery, in the ‘Race to the Truth’ series for teen readers. A great little book with voluminous bibliography.
3. ‘The Greening of Thaddeus Grey’ by Jay Hogan. A solid New Zealand-set MM kicking off with a terrible breakup. Slowish burn, a reasonable amount of sex, character-true mistakes & conflicts. Part of the plot turns on a small community being seduced by a tech company that wants to build a data center, and I’ll happily spoil that plot: the techies are foiled in favor of saving a river.
4. ‘Felix and the Prince’ by Lucy Lennox. I was enticed by description of nonroyal MC as a glass artist/scholar and the setup at a Renaissance castle on a North Sea island,. We do get to see the glass guy doing his thing, but I found the royal MC mostly a dick. This is in the Wilde universe, works fine as a standalone.
DNF at 3% ‘Van Alone’ by Patrick Doyle, MM rare books romantic suspense. I mean, rare books! But the POV character, tone, and recurring word-choice errors turned me off before I could begin to care about the plot, which was supposed to involve inheriting his father’s house. I might go back to this sometime now that I know what tone / characterization to expect. Because … rare books!
5. ‘The Lost Lovelies’ by Vanora Lawless. Similar world to her WWI duology, this one’s set in the last months of WWII; magic is a known thing and used in the wars, but practitioners are considered suspicious and if they’re queer, doubly so. MC1 is a war journalist, MC2 a private investigator in Halifax; they were teenage lovers but parted badly. 17 yrs on, second chance via trying to locate MC1’s brother and sister-in-law who’ve gone missing in scary circumstances. High conflict, high angst, considerable mayhem.
6. ‘That Rat, Carter Janson’ by Amy Spector. Novelette, art crimes, MM set in Chicago. Second-chancer. MC1 as a young man was reluctantly involved in his father’s art fraud career (dad is now in prison) has changed his name and runs a legit antiquities gallery. MC2, coerced forger and former lover, is in a different line of art-related business, also legit, except he does a job to get the money to pay for medical care for a friend … and they meet again. Quite a bit of what they need to actually do to achieve HEA is left up in the air, but the caper is a success. Could happily have read a lot more of their story.
7. [re-read] my own MM novel ‘A Little Turn,’ the one about the LA sports agent who realizes, at the age of 36, that he’s gay; and the Hollywood stylist who coaches him through resetting his entire picture of his life. Find links on my NOVELS page - the ebook is discounted everywhere June 1-30.
8. ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong’ (2nd ed) by James W. Loewen. What a great / infuriating book. Looks huge but don’t be scared, 30% is notes. Highly recommended.