Books

Book 668: Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre – Glynnis Fawkes

I stumbled across this illustrated biography of Charlotte Brontë after one of my google alerts (“Boston” and “Brontë”) alerted me to this article in Seven Days, Vermont’s Independent Voice publication. I’ve been meaning to read an actual Brontë biography forever really, but specifically since the 2017 release of To Walk Invisible on PBS and my visit to the Parsonage in 2018.

I read The Mother of the Brontës last year which covered a good portion of this and some of the inspired works cover similar time periods because they were all so young. The downside of the Brontës and Austen are how short their lives were and we can only glean so much from the few letters and drafts of their works that exist, but there are instances where a little creative license and ingenuity can make these well known facts and situations seem new again. And that is the case with this Fawkes work.

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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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Books

Book 663: The Burning Page (The Invisible Library #3) – Genevieve Cogman

This is my final book of 2019, it took me a month to read (I got distracted with travelling and knitting) and two weeks to post about it—oh well.

Similar to The Masked City, this book starts off with a kidnapping, this time it’s Irene. Well it doesn’t start off with one, it actually starts off with a trip to another highly ordered world (think Nazi’s) and then when Irene has to take a quick solo trip to the Library she gets kidnapped.

This also wasn’t the Dragon companion book I was hoping we’d get after the last books deep foray into the Fae’s political underworld. Instead we were back to the big-bad Alberich for this story. That being said, it does sound like the Dragon’s are still coming with a side comment from one of Kai’s relatives (attendees?), but I won’t hold my breath.

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Books

Book 662: The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2) – Genevieve Cogman

Well that was an unexpected month hiatus. Sometimes I forget just how busy December is at my workplace and this was my first December fully in the job knowing what all I would be doing so I didn’t get to read as much or even post responses to books!

This is the second book in Cogman’s The Invisible Library series and it was pretty good. I didn’t think it was as good as the first, but it was a fun quick read. Instead of focusing so much on the workings of the Library (even though the first one didn’t really that much other than to say how mysterious they were), this book tells us a lot more about the Fae and gives us a glimpse at the Dragons.

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