ARC, Books

Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

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!

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Books

Book 763: Mistletoe in the Marigny (Five Points Stories #3) – Kyle Baxter

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.

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Books

Book 750: Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Darius the Great #1) – Adib Khorram

As I mentioned in my monthly recap I discovered this when Sarah from Sarah Reads Too Much sat on an awards committee of some sort and they really liked this one (can’t remember if it won or not). I added it to my list then, but when I saw her talk about the sequel I knew I needed to bring it forward on my list.

I thoroughly enjoyed my very slow read of this. I probably wouldn’t have read it this slow, but life got in the way. I read a chapter or two at a time over two-ish weeks and it allowed me to luxuriate in Khorram’s rich descriptions and characters.

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Book 739: Solitaire – Alice Oseman

I honestly have no clue how to respond to this one. I enjoyed it for the few glimpses I got of Charlie and Nick and am now both looking forward to and dreading the next two volumes of Heartstopper because of knowing some of their future. But, it was a weird book in that it is very much a tribute to angsty teenage-ness.

I like to think that I was an angsty teenager, but really, I was a toe-the-line don’t draw attention to yourself closeted teenager who was boring as hell. I’m sure I had a touch of anxiety, I always have, but I never let it take over my life so I couldn’t really relate to Tori losing all control over everything to her depression or Charlie to whatever he faces (it wasn’t explicit).

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Book 712: Action (Murmur Inc. #2) – Quinn Anderson

This woman knows how to write a MM romance, or at least the sex scenes. I wasn’t so sure after reading Hotline which suffered from over description and somewhat stilted (non-sex) dialogue, but between that first book and this one Anderson vastly improved in my opinion.

Action takes us back to Murmur, Inc., but instead of the phone sex operators, we’re now on the porn side of the business. The bad ass sassy Collette is still in charge and still demanding the most/best from her employees. We have Pete, an adorkable power bottom in the porn star closet who meets Kyle, a daring rising porn star, and when they meet on set fireworks ensue.

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