Books

Book 580: Freak Show – James St. James

Wow – there’s a lot to take in from this book and I’m glad I read it even though it definitely took me for a bit of a spin. And even though it took a while for me to get used to the writing, the characters, and the flamboyancy, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Unlike other young adult LGBT+ novels—emphasis on “G” (Out of the Pocket, Autoboyography, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Geography Club, Boy Meets Boy, Two Boys Kissing, etc.), this book has a character who doesn’t happen to be gay, who isn’t some jock that likes guys. Billy Boyd is loud and proud, even if he doesn’t quite know how to define himself just yet.

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Books

Book 576: Boy Erased – Garrard Conley

This was harder to read than I thought it would be. Not because of anything I’ve personally experienced, but because it kept hitting me over and over that what was happening in this book was not happening in the 60s, 70s, 80s or even 1990s.

It was happening in the mid-2000s, the same time I was coming to terms with my sexuality and learning about the wider LGBTQ+ world. It was also incredibly eerie how many of the thoughts Conley had mirrored thoughts I had myself and I did not grow up religious, just southern!

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Books

Book 533: Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

This is one of those books that has been on my metal list to look into since it came out. For some reason though, I had lumped it into the same sort of release period as Ender’s Game and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and boy was I surprised when I realized it was written and released in 2011. I knew I would get to the book some day, but the movie release in the next few months, preview embedded at the end of the post, my desire to read the book increased dramatically.

I didn’t read it quite as fast as I read some of the recent Jane Austen fan-fiction, but I did get through this one pretty quickly. I found the writing simple enough to breeze through and my vague familiarity with a lot of the 1980s pop culture helped (even if I did have to google quite a few). The strengths, for me at least, were the realistic vision of where we could easily end up as a society within the next few decades if something similar to OASIS actually becomes reality. The OASIS or, “The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation was a big place.” (48), is in essence an internet/game type situation that could include full or partial body immersion. Cline isn’t the first, nor will he be the last to write something like this. It’s a dystopian vs. utopian, good vs. evil, privacy vs. corporate consumerism story for the ages.

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Books

Book 443: The Magician (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #2) – Michael Scott

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.)

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Books

Book 442: The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #1) – Michael Scott

I first read this in the first six months of this blog! Unfortunately, I didn’t actually respond to every book so I only have my thoughts to The Warlock (#5) from that original read (and later The Enchantress (#6) when it was released in 2012). I picked up hard copies of these books back in October 2012 when I left a job and they gave me a bookstore gift card.

The series has languished on my shelf for the last four years, partly because I’d read it before, but mostly because I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it again. When I bought it, I definitely did, but then every time I went to re-read it I remembered what happened in the last book and the revelations in the last two books and questioned if I wanted to re-read the series.

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