A life of books . . .
So, February is ALWAYS a short month, but this year it felt like at most 10 days. A good chunk of this was because of a week-long cruise that’s been on hold in some version of another since 2020.
After weighing all of the pros and cons we finally decided to stick with it and I’m glad we did, we both came back 100x more relaxed (except the crazy FLL airport) and warmer than the cold weather and snow in Boston would EVER let us get this time of year.
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.
Continue reading “Book 685: A Gay Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – Bert Shrader”
If I ever write a novel I plan to write it like a lifetime. Super slow where every day feels like an eternity and have it evolve overtime into crazy fast super hectic chapters like how fast time seems to be going.
I remember when it used to feel like it took ages to walk the less than 10 minutes to my best friends house and now 10 minutes goes by in what feels like seconds. AKA once again where in the hell did June go.
Picking up immediately after the events of The Alchemyst, the second book in the series is just as action packed and full as the first!
The Magician again takes place over a period of days and this time moves us from San Francisco, California to Paris, France. The same cast of characters is here and this book introduces two of my favorites, Niccolò Machiavelli and Joan of Arc, and gives further insight into the strongest female character in the series, Perenelle Flamel.
As I re-read it, I was glad that some of my hesitancy about re-reading the series started to fade. I’m not sure if it’s because the story was becoming more and more intense, or that I was spending more time with some of my favorite characters, but I was glad my reservations at least took a bit of a back seat to the book. (It also could’ve been that I devoured this book.)
I picked up my copy of this book just 11 days before Maya Angelou died last spring. I’d always had this book on my list, but I’d never found a reason to pick it up and for some reason at the library book sale last year I finally added it to my pile. I knew I wanted to read it because it is one of those books that is mentioned by everyone and has such a place in American culture, but not as widely read as I probably assumed.
As I read the novel I was floored at the breadth of experience Angelou faced before she turned 17. At times the novel reminded me a lot of The Color Purple and Bastard Out of Carolina, but I have a feeling both Alice Walker and Dorothy Allison were inspired/influenced by this. That being said, of the three this is the most profound work. Perhaps because it is explicitly an autobiography (and Bastard is semi-autobiographical and Purple is a fictional novel).