ARC, Books

Book 831: Center Court (Order of Play #1) – Brooke Edwards

This book is a love letter to tennis and it was a gushing, effusive, adoring love letter.

When the review request appeared in my inbox I wasn’t sure about reading it, but it’d been a while since I’d read a MM Sports Romance and we were gearing up for vacation so I thought why not?*

Center Court is a split narrative work between Soren, the up-and-coming young tennis star who is poised to become a legend, and Elias, a fellow tennis player who has stayed on his heels and in the pack of the middle generation for years. There are many other minor characters (including the not-really-evil-but-I’m-still-calling-him-it Mattise) that kind of blend together because between Elias, Soren, and tennis there’s not a lot of room for anything else in this book.

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Books

Book 826: His Compass (His #2) – Con Riley

I was a little surprised to find that there were already two additional books released in Con Riley’s His series. I read and adored His Horizon this time last year and had kept an eye out for the follow-ups, but either missed the review opportunity or totally spaced on them.

So, when I realized they were on Kindle Unlimited I grabbed both for this up-coming holiday and am glad I did. His Compass is the story of Captain Tom, who we briefly met in the first book and Nick, the seemingly wayward irresponsible deck hand who has his own backstory that provides the crises of the novel.

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Books

Book 810: Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

This is the third time I’ve read this. I read it first in high school in my teens and HATED it. #obvi

I then read it in my early twenties in an intro to LGBT Literature course and tolerated it. The discussion was the most fascinating part and had a lot more to do with Woolf and her life than the novel itself, although there are plenty of scribbles I have in my copy about the story.

And now in my mid-30s, I won’t say I love it, but I definitely have a new appreciation for Woolf’s mastery of the craft as I re-read it. Some of the notes I scribbled reading it in undergrad definitely helped draw my attention to things and I picked up on a few more that I missed. And this is noting that my timing to read it was 100% wrong. This is NOT a pool book, I definitely fell asleep and got a slight sunburn because it’s a slow-paced dense book.

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Books

Book 792: Hallucinating Foucault – Patricia Duncker

I forgot how beautiful this novel is. That’s not surprising considering it’s been over a decade since I read it and I’m honestly not sure if this is my original copy or if I picked up a new one in the past few years. [Can now confirm this is my original – I brought it to Boston in December 2012.]

I remember when I first read this. I had spent a semester studying the history of sexuality in America and we read many passages from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and I was obsessed. Between it and the other readings we read that term, a whole new world around sexuality, gender identity, and philosophy had opened up to me. So, more than likely I typed Foucault into Amazon and this came up and I purchased it.

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Books

Book 788: Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1) – Hilary Mantel

I clearly was not in a hurry to read this one. It has been on my Kindle since I purchased it in December of 2011 and that was TWO years after it won the Booker Prize! I avoided it for some time because I was waiting for the remaining two books: Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), but I also avoided it because it’s a freakin’ tome. It comes it at just under 560 pages.* Thankfully the next one is shorter (436), but the last is 200 pages more coming in at 764 pages! OOF that is going to be a commitment when I get around to it.

I also actively avoided it because that was around the time that I came to realize that in general I find myself enjoying the runners up to the Booker Prize more often than the actual winner. There’s like a mental hurdle I don’t think I can quite make the leap over to fully appreciate and see the beauty in most of the winners. I knew this was long and I knew that it had A LOT of description and the formatting was weird (minimal quotation marks, the point of view), so I knew it would be a big challenge for me.

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