A life of books . . .
This has been on my Kindle since February 2013 and really it should’ve stayed there. UGH.
I distinctly remember purchasing it because it was about books and specifically takes place in Hay-on-Wye (Wikipedia link), the book lovers Mecca on the boarder of Wales and England where one of the largest book festivals in the world takes place and there are over two dozen bookshops for the fewer than 2,000 full time residents. How could you go wrong, right?
Well if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!
I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:
Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)
After reading this book, I feel like wherever coronavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!
Continue reading “Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard”
If you want to know how to piss me off when it comes to a book put the setting in Boston but don’t do your research and don’t have the book copy edited or proofread. That’s a guarantee to piss me off. This could’ve easily been a 4.5-star book because of the hilarious hockey kids trying to be matchmaker for their coach, but nope.
I apparently put this on hold when I was in the middle of my 12 Books of MM Holiday Romance binge, but forgot about it until I was notified on January 3 it was available. I went ahead and read it as I’m making my way through Timothy C. Winegard’s fascinating tome The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, because let’s face it as fascinating as it is, that book is dense as hell. Continue reading “Book 777: Ben’s Bakery and the Hanukkah Miracle – Penelope Peters”
For the 8th book of 12 Books of MM Christmas Romance 2020 we have N.R. Walker’s Tic-Tac-Mistletoe.
First, I have to admit that it took me way too long to realize the tic-tac-toe still worked with the damn Mistletoe, like mentally it was there, but I didn’t really make the connection until I was typing out one of the quotes and was like OMG I GET IT. So yeah these might be rotting my brain.
Continue reading “Book 767: Tic-Tac-Mistletoe (Hartbridge Christmas #1) – N.R. Walker”
As promised I am 100% leaning into the MM Christmas Romances. I would say I’m going to limit myself to 12 to parallel the days of Christmas (this is the 4th of six I’ve already read), but who knows what is going to happen. I have now found so many I want to read and every time I find one I truly enjoy I add the author to my list of authors to look into for other non-holiday books.
I was of course going to read this one after finishing The Problem with Mistletoe and Bring Me Edelweiss and thoroughly enjoying them. And, when you add in that in the front matter Baxter explicitly states the reason he wrote these was because there were no LGBTQ+ holiday romance movies when he was growing up, I am here for it.
Continue reading “Book 763: Mistletoe in the Marigny (Five Points Stories #3) – Kyle Baxter”