Books

Book 760: Bring Me Edelweiss (Five Points Stories #2) – Kyle Baxter

As promised, here’s the next in the Christmas/Holiday MM romances 😀 I read this one immediately after the first even though I had every intention of crossing at least one of my outstanding nonfiction ARCs off my list. I was smart after finishing this one and made myself finish a nonfiction before I got to read the third in this series!

As much as I enjoyed The Problem with Mistletoe, this one ramped up the cheese and I am here for it. It was less about Christmas than the first (and I’m assuming the last, Mistletoe in the Marigny), but between the super nerdy tall guy (Joel), the beefy veteran prince of a small European nation (Freddie) it worked for me.

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Book 658: The Children of Harvey Milk – Andrew Reynolds

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this one, but when I did back in May I requested a copy from the publisher and they kindly obliged.* I was interested because of the subject matter, but also because Reynolds is based at UNC Chapel Hill (my undergrad) and his name rang a bell because he’d chaired the Sexuality Studies program there at some point in the recent past. And then with my master’s degree focusing on the Civil Partnership Act (2014) in the UK, of course I was going to want to read this book and see what he had to say.

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Book 588: Crashed – How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World – Adam Tooze

What a tome. I requested a copy of this from the publisher back in August 2018 after reading this review from the NYTimes.* It took me three months to get to it and another month-and-a-half to actually read it! And it was worth the read, now I just need to read the “Framing Crashed” posts on his website to see what else I missed!

There are some mixed reviews on Goodreads, some people think it’s boring (uh duh – hello finance, politics and history), some think they’ve written better books or articles (get out of here self-promoters, nobody wants you), and others, like myself, appreciated the staggering amount of ground covered by Tooze in this work.

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Books

Book 584: The Eagle of the Ninth (The Roman Britain Trilogy #1) – Rosemary Sutcliff

I picked this up on our July trip to the UK. Multiple places along Hadrian’s Wall sold it as a souvenir and I thought why not?I wanted something that wasn’t a usual souvenir and the cover of the omnibus version I have (Goodreads link) kept catching my eye, and so I bought it, along with way too many other books that trip to the UK.

I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect with a historical fiction young adult series originally published in the 1950s. How different from today’s young adult literature would it be? The closest in publication that I’ve read were L’Engle’s Time Quintet and O’Keefe Family books comprising the Kairos series.

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Books

Book 539: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Guide #1) – Mackenzie Lee

After seeing this over and over being the darling of the book blogosphere and reading the rave reviews of it I figured I should check it out. I read a lot of LGBT literature, a lot of young adult literature, and quite a bit of adventure literature so I thought why not. And although I wasn’t completely disappointed, I was genuinely underwhelmed and for once it wasn’t the mood I was in. I’ll start with the not-so-great and finish with what I enjoyed.

I’m a finicky reader at best and have curated a pretty good system of choosing the books I read, including taking into account books that fellow bloggers who have similar tastes to me read, but this one just didn’t click for me quite like others have. I kept to my usual style of not reading anything about the author or the book after I decided I want to read it. [Generally I get excited about a book/author and purchase/reserve something by them and then I let it sit for a while so that I can clear my palate.]

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