Tag: Science

Books

Book 688: Level Up (#gaymers #4) – Annabeth Albert

Geoff W

Who doesn’t love a meet cute involving a mistaken identity and shock factor? If you don’t, then don’t read this book 😀 This is the final book in the #gaymers series by Annabeth Albert following: Status Update, Beta Test and Connection Error.

The protagonists of this book are Landon, a bisexual university professor who is tangentially related to the characters in the series (and is mentioned in passing at a LAN party or two) and Bailey, a photographer from Portland, OR, donating his services for a nude calendar for charity.

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Book 686: Enter the Aardvark – Jessica Anthony

Geoff W

This was a weird ass novel. I should’ve known it by the title when I requested it from NetGalley, but it was even weirder than I expected.* I’m sure I requested it because the blurb mentioned the modern protagonist was in deep denial about his sexuality, but that’s all I remember the rest was a weird wonderful surprise as I read it.

This is another dual narrative novel, authors really love those lately, with one portion taking place in modern America and the other taking place in the late 19th century England, and what ties the two together is a preserved Aardvark that arrives/is created at the most inconvenient time.

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Book 664: The Cost-Benefit Revolution – Cass R. Sunstein

Geoff W

What. A. Doozie. Seriously, why do I decide to read the densest books EVER at the holidays and the beginning of the year? Really, I should’ve read this last year when I requested it from the publisher after seeing an advertisement for it on the train, but I kept pushing it off until now.* I requested this because having read Nudge, I assumed all his works were super approachable, but that wasn’t the case for this incredibly dense book.

Honestly, this compares more to last year’s kick-off read, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. I mean just reading that title makes me exhausted again (it was 700+ very dense pages). This year’s kick-off, though roughly 1/3 the size, was just as dense and basically tried to look at how to make government regulation more even and effective by removing politics and opinion and replacing it with cost-benefit analysis. It’s no wonder it took me roughly three weeks to actually get through this one.

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Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

Geoff W

I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*

There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.
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Book 572: Tip of the Iceberg – Mark Adams

Geoff W

I REALLY want to go back to Alaska. Like really really want to go back and reading this book is almost enough to make me want to LIVE there. And that’s just crazy for me who has a love/hate relationship with cities. I received a copy Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, The Last Great American Frontier from the publisher* and I really wish I would’ve read it earlier.

Adams has a way with words and really putting you into the place he’s visiting. I remember when I tried to recap our Alaskan cruise I struggled (and still struggle) to talk about the beauty and the sheer immensity of everything you see when you’re there. We only visited the panhandle (the furthest north we went was Skagway) and I cannot even imagine visiting some of the places Adams visited during his trek.

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