Books

Book 688: Level Up (#gaymers #4) – Annabeth Albert

Who doesn’t love a meet cute involving a mistaken identity and shock factor? If you don’t, then don’t read this book 😀 This is the final book in the #gaymers series by Annabeth Albert following: Status Update, Beta Test and Connection Error.

The protagonists of this book are Landon, a bisexual university professor who is tangentially related to the characters in the series (and is mentioned in passing at a LAN party or two) and Bailey, a photographer from Portland, OR, donating his services for a nude calendar for charity.

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Books

Book 687: Connection Error (#gaymers #3) – Annabeth Albert

This year may just end up being the year of a million questionable romance novels. They’re so escapist, so wistful, and in general I really like Albert’s writing style and characters.

This is the third book in the #gaymers series after Status Update and Beta Test, and it was just as adorkable. I won’t even pretend I remember the other two. I mean I remember bits and pieces, the good and bad, but mostly I just remember they made me smile and I was able to recognize the characters when they made brief appearances in this book of the series.

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Books

Book 685: A Gay Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – Bert Shrader

This has been sitting on my shelf for almost three years ever since I read the Rolling Stones’ article “How One Publisher is Rescuing 1970s Gay Porn Paperbacks”. I finally got around to this as I was looking at the shorter books already on my shelves. And after the emotional drain that was Ethan Frome I thought I should try and get a little further away and a smutty gay porn novel from the 1960s checked all the boxes plus some.

Let’s just say, not a lot has changed in erotica novels. I mean sure the large portion of MM romance/erotica novels are now written by women, but the few that I know for a fact were written by men are pretty damn similar to this one. The big things that have changed is that in general the toxic masculinity and hetero-toxicity in general seem to have been tone down in the more recent books and there are some overt racist scenes and comments sprinkled throughout the novel that were horrible.

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Books

Book 666: Beta Test (#gaymers #2) – Annabeth Albert

I managed to restrain myself to only reading two squeal-inducing pretty much swoon-worthy MM romances this go around, and it has nothing to do with the library not having #3 available right away, so you’re welcome.

Seriously though, why are these things like some sort of drug? They’re not rocket science, they’re well written but they’re not going to stay with me forever (I’ll forget them within weeks if not days), and they’re definitely not anywhere close to high brow, but they’re SO DAMN GOOD. Now I’m off on a tangential internet search on studies of what romance novels do to people’s brains. [There appear to be plenty of studies but mostly on women and mostly, it seems, derogatory.]

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Books

Book 665: Status Update (#gaymers #1) – Annabeth Albert

This is totally going to be one of those years (ahem, like most recently) where I cram in as many rom-com M/M romance novels as I possibly can. I had every intention of making a dent in my ARC pile and TBR shelves, but I needed a grin-inducing, wistfully gazing off into the distance misty eyed read. (100% blaming Schitt’s Creek here, but that’s a different story.)

And that’s exactly what I got out of it. Were there any earth shaking revelations or any literary grandiosity? No. This was a sappy, goofy, meet-cute filled oh-shit-there’s-drama-let’s-make-up story that was a quick and enjoyable read.

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