ARC, Books

Book 972: His Last Christmas in London (Christmas Collection #1) – Con Riley

Con Riley is one of those authors who has a really great sense of place. When I read their “His” series, I legit wanted to buy a bed and breakfast or a pub and hotel and move to the southern coast of England. So, when I saw this MM Holiday Romance pop up from Gay Romance Reviews I jumped at it.*

This is the story of Ian, a struggling photographer whose gotten out of an abusive professional/personal relationship and has realized he can’t make it in London no matter how much he’s tried and his roommates have helped out. He agrees to one last job at 3x his rate with his old boss/lover and meets Guy, a restaurant critic with a huge overshadowing persona. And even though it’s not love at first sight, it’s definitely confusion and lust.

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Book 971: The Christmas Leap (Festive Fakes #2) – Keira Andrews

We all knew this was coming . . . the MM Holiday Romance extravaganza. Honestly, I thought it’d be later but realizing just how little reading time I have these days and how quickly I got through these when they started to arrive on Gay Romance Reviews of course I started looking.*

I grabbed this one because it’s set in the same universe as Andrews’ The Christmas Deal that I read last year and thoroughly enjoyed. We get a brief check-in with Seth and Logan who offer some savvy advice to Will as he’s figuring stuff out because he works with them and they encourage the fake boyfriend caper.

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ARC, Updates

October Recap 2022

It’s weird writing this a week into November. I was doing so good about keeping up but the end of October and the beginning of November has been long and exhausting. School is picking up with shifting from fall one to fall two classes and midterms and the reading is no joke. And that doesn’t even take into work ALWAYS picking up around this time.

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Book 970: Heartthrob (Honeywood #1) – Noah Steele

OMG, ya’ll this is an author to keep an eye on. That’s not something I usually say when it comes to a self-published author I come across via Gay Romance Reviews.*

More often than not I’m complaining about the quality of either the story, the writing, or the editing (or all three or some combination), and don’t get me wrong there were a few issues with this one but Steele can definitely write and I’m already looking at his back catalog to see what I want to read next.

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 969: The Art of Communicating – Thích Nhất Hạnh

I had to read this for a course I’m talking about the art of brave communication. We only had to read the first couple of chapters, but I found it to be an approachable and relatively easy read so kept going.

Where Hanh excelled was in his simple writing. For the most part, there were no overwrought metaphors or awkward analogies. There was one at the end that I’ll get to, but I think it’s a religious thing and it just fell flat for me.

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