Tag: Sports

ARC, Books

Book 689: The Play of His Life – Amy Aislin

Geoff W

I honestly didn’t plan for April to be full of MM Romance novels, but that’s how the world works. Plus in this new world of coronavirus stay-at-homeness they’re the only thing I want to read. So in the words of Jonathan Van Ness, buckle up queen (YouTube video; watch the first 10-15 seconds) there are more to come after this, thanks to the library coming through on a few that have been on hold.

I read this as part of the Gay Romance Reviews publicity push for The Play of His Life‘s re-release later this month. I was intrigued when it landed in my inbox because I love second chance romances (oh hey Persuasion), and let’s face it MM romance sports stories are usually pretty hot and heavy. I did have some hesitations about accepting it because it is self-published, but it did come from a publicist rather than direct from the author so someone had to vet it at some point, so I figured why not?

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Books

Book 685: A Gay Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – Bert Shrader

Geoff W

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.

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Books

Book 673: Fence Vol. 3 (Fence #3) – C.S. Pacat, Johanna the Mad, and Joana Lafuente

Geoff W

I wasn’t obsessively looking forward to this since I had issues with my timing of reading the first two volumes, but when I went to grab Go for it, Nakamura! from the library and saw this was available, I grabbed it too.

This picks up right where Fence, Vol. 2 left off and there’s no recap or anything as these were originally being released periodically and read as periodic comics. Like I said in the last review about the timing between Fence, Vol. 1 and Volume 2. I should’ve just waited and read them back-to-back. It would’ve been a more rewarding experience and I doubt I would’ve been quite so disappointed in this one.

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ARC, Books

Book 658: The Children of Harvey Milk – Andrew Reynolds

Geoff W

I’m not sure how I stumbled across this one, but when I did back in May I requested a copy from the publisher and they kindly obliged.* I was interested because of the subject matter, but also because Reynolds is based at UNC Chapel Hill (my undergrad) and his name rang a bell because he’d chaired the Sexuality Studies program there at some point in the recent past. And then with my master’s degree focusing on the Civil Partnership Act (2014) in the UK, of course I was going to want to read this book and see what he had to say.

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Books

Book 648: Honestly Ben – Bill Konigsberg

Geoff W

This one was pretty forgettable for me, which is sad because it’s actually a good book. I think the problem is that I read Openly Straight, basically the first half of this book/story a little over five years ago. If I would’ve read these back to back I would’ve probably had much stronger feelings about this one.

Let’s start with what didn’t work: the swimming analogy. The book opens with Ben, the protagonist, going to swimming lessons for the first time and sinking to the bottom of the pool. Konigsberg uses this as a very clunky metaphor for Ben’s life and thoughts at the start of the book. I was honestly hoping it wouldn’t resurface at the end of the book—which isn’t totally fair because I would’ve been more pissed if he didn’t complete the metaphor—but it did and it just made me sigh and shake my head.

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