Book 11: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series! This one just jumps right in, since we already know most of the main players, and this time the mystery has come directly to them. We get to see a lot more of Elizabeth's past, and Ron and Ibrahim's friendship (and relationship with Ron's grandson) is so lovely, and this series is just fun to read. There's just the right level of peril; I trust the author to do what needs to be done to make the story work, without being cruel just for the sake of it, but at the same time there is real suspense and real consequences. I don't really want to say much more about the story than that, but it's a sequel that builds on what was great about the first one and keeps running. 

Grade: A 

Book 10: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

It is always so nice when you start reading a book that a ton of people have recommended to you, and within the first couple of pages you're like 'oh yes.' This is the first in a series of English mystery novels set at a very nice retirement community in a small village by the sea. There's a group of four retirees who are all in the titular club together, reviewing old cold cases and files that Elizabeth brings for them to discuss, until suddenly there's a real murder in town and they have an actual current case to solve. 

Elizabeth is a delight; she clearly has a very interesting secret past that means she has all kinds of unconventional methods for investigating leads. We also follow the story through the journal entries of Joyce, who's the newest member of the club and just such a good voice for the novel. They end up working together with a young policewoman who had moved down there from London after a bad breakup, and it's very much a story that I had no idea how it was going to end until just before. 

It's not entirely a light book; while the person whose murder kicks off their whole adventure isn't someone we care about, the entire book is basically a rumination on what makes life living, and grief, and the specter of loss that is everywhere in a community like that. It really hits hard, but for me the balance is exactly what it needs to be. I am very happy that I waited long enough to read the first one that I can now immediately read the next two in the series. 

Grade: A 

Book 9: Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman

Man, this book should be a homerun for me. It's a Notting Hill famous/not-famous romance between a writer and the movie star she met when she was young and is now interviewing again, and the narrative goes back and forth between the present and ten years prior, when they first met. It should be light and snappy with an intriguing chronological structure that conceals what actually transpired between the two of them all those years ago, and instead it's just exactly the wrong kind of fantasy for me. The actor is getting ready to play James Bond for the first time, and that's fraught for a variety of reasons, and it's one of those things where I just know a bit too much about the reality of this topic to lose myself in this fictionalized version of it, and meh. I picked this up because it was recommended on a podcast I listen to, and I am honestly a bit perplexed. 

Grade: C 

Book 8: Christmas Wish List by N.R. Walker

Another gay Christmas romance novel! This one is...fine. It's about a guy who's a chef who gets hired for the Christmas season at a newly opened bed and breakfast that's owned by a guy who came out and ended his straight marriage and so is trying to figure things out in his forties. The story and the romance is fine; probably the most intriguing thing is that they acknowledge their attraction to each other and then are like 'oh no but we can't until Christmas is over!' That gives it a bit of tension at least, even though they in no way hold out that long. Definitely another entry in the 'this would have worked better as a novella' list, as there's not much in the way of a plot, but it was fine for what it is. 

Grade: C  

Book 7: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

First book club book of the year! I was very happy when this book got chosen, because I've been meaning to read something by this author and this was a great excuse for it. This book club focuses on novels that exist within the speculative fiction umbrella, and I would say that this one qualifies but is closer to literary fiction than the standard scifi genre novel. The story spans four or five centuries, starting with a remittance man in Canada just prior to WWI, then stopping off in New York right before Covid hits, and then a worldwide book tour two centuries after that. How are they all linked? Well that's what everyone is trying to figure out. 

I hadn't read anything else by this author, but I've seen the first two episodes of the miniseries based on Station Eleven, so I wasn't surprised at how much of the story is about a possible future and also pandemics and what they do to civilization. I was surprised by the writing; for some reason I went into this expecting it to be a challenging read in some way, and instead I found it delightfully crisp and engaging. I think I went in fearing that it would be all of the things I like least about literary fiction as a genre, and instead it was what I like best. It also has a ton of incidental queerness, which is something I always appreciate. I really enjoyed reading it, and individual images and characters from the story are going to stick with me for a long time. Looking forward to going back and reading her earlier novels now! 

Grade: A 

Book 6: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Man, this book. I started reading it about a week ago, and it's the sort of novel where I read the first section, about the first fifty pages or so, and I had to stop there and pause for the night because I could already tell it was going to wreck me. 

It's the story of two people from LA who became friends as children playing video games together in the eighties, and then find each other again as college students in a T station in Cambridge in the nineties, and live a life together and around each other and video games for the next twenty or so years. It's a book that has a lived-in quality of time and place; they live in Cambridge and Boston about five years before I was there, but it still has the feeling of being exactly right and I felt transported into my own memories. But the sections of the novel set in places I don't know at all well (K-Town in LA, Tokyo, a small video game company in the early 2000s) feel just as specific and devastating, and it's not a book that derives its power from the familiar references of either a location or of multiple video games. 

I read this book suspecting that it would be sadder than most of the books I choose to read are, and it is, but the sadness is earned and balanced in a way that these stories aren't often. Sam and Sadie aren't perfect characters by any stretch of the imagination; they both do and say and feel things that are deeply hurtful and pigheaded and occasionally awful and borderline unforgivable, but there's a thruline of truth and a heart to it all that makes me care about them and their lives and the games they create together. The author has such a light touch with narration - we see the story through multiple POVs, and it's always a story that's being told from a future that is waiting on the early years, but it's so beautifully done, even when where the story is going occasionally made me want to put the book done just so I could stop the next page from being true. I don't want to say more about it because I was glad to have gone in with as little knowledge as I did, but it fucked me up and made me think about art and friendship and storytelling and memory and starting over, and the last line made me spontaneously burst into tears, and if that's not a rec then I don't know what is. 

Grade: A

 

Book 5: Only One Bed by Keira Andrews

Another slightly delayed Christmas romance, this is another one that has a lot of elements I like a lot but doesn't quite know what to do with them all, in my opinion. This one is about Sam and his best friend Etienne, who's an ice dancer training in hopes of making his first Olympics in another year. Etienne and his dance partner moved away to work with a new coach, but Sam is able to join him at Mont-Tremblant, where Etienne and his partner are performing over Christmas. They share a cabin and a bed, and Sam begins to realize that he's bisexual and Etienne realizes that he and his partner should move back home to their old coach and where Sam still lives. 

It's...fine? There's just not a lot of either conflict or tension over whether they'll figure their shit out, complete with friends of both men who tell them how certain they are that the other one is in love with them. The whole thing feels like a prequel to another story about Sam's older brother, who's a singles skater, and his great rival. It has all of the elements but none of the spark. 

Grade: C

Book 4: The Wrong Rake by Eliot Grayson

Whenever I do my annual kindle unlimited read of various m/m Christmas romance novels, I also end up downloading a couple of non-Christmas romances to see if there are any new authors I need to add to my mental list of options. I'm not entirely sure this will be a permanent entry for me, but I did enjoy this enough to download the other historical romances this author has written. 

The setup for this one is pretty straightforward: Major Henry Standish has come to London from Bath to find the rake who trifled with his sister. He goes to a club called Perdition, which Simon Beaumont, the alleged rake in question, owns along with two friends. But it is a case of mistaken identity, because in reality it was Simon's brother, who often poses as Simon and runs up debts and generally gets himself into trouble. However, before they can go find Simon's brother and resolve the issue of Harry's sister, Simon allows Harry to "demand satisfaction" from him, in predictable (yet delightful!) ways. 

The resolution of the story isn't quite as, well, satisfying as the rest of it, but I did enjoy both the setup and the overall dynamic of the story, and I'm looking forward to discovering whether this continues in the author's other books as well. 

Grade: B 

Book 3: Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian

The second entry in the Cabot books, this story is set a few years later than the first and focuses on Tommy's nephew Peter, who has just graduated from Harvard and doesn't know what to do with his life. His family (a very very very thinly veiled fictional version of the Kennedys) expects him to join his father on his presidential campaign before he heads to law school, but when Caleb Murphy, a classmate who has always avoided Peter, discovers he doesn't have enough money to get to LA from Boston, Peter offers to drive him there. And then the rest of the book is a pretty delightful roadtrip romance that blossoms between two frenemies who begin to reveal their true selves to each other over the course of nine days. It's a beautiful early 1960s travelogue as well as a romance, and it was just a real pleasure to read - a great summer romance to read while under a blanket or two in the middle of winter. 

Grade: A 

Book 2: Tommy Cabot Was Here by Cat Sebastian

After a bit of a break, I'm catching up with this author, and this first novella made me very happy I am! It's a 1950s prep school second chance romance between the school's former golden boy Tommy Cabot and his best friend (and more) Everett Sloane, who's now an instructor there. When Tommy's 12 year old son becomes a student there, they meet again after 15 years of silence. I absolutely loved the angst and tension in the first couple of chapters, and the hurt that resulted from Everett leaving for England immediately after Tommy's society wedding in order to protect his own heart. I could have actually done with more of that before the inevitable reconciliation, which felt a bit too pat when it finally happened - I wanted the pain to be ratcheted up even further first. I thought the story threaded the needle between realism about how gay culture existed in the U.S. at that time and creating a happy ending for them, and I'm very excited to read the next two books in this series!

Grade: B

Book 1: The Christmas Leap by Keira Andrews

Well, it may be January, but I've still got Christmas m/m romances to read! This one is like a mash up of three different plots - it starts with former best friends Michael and Will, whose estrangement was caused by Michael realizing that he was never going to get over his crush on his straight friend Will unless he ghosted him. The story kicks off with Michael getting dumped by his boyfriend of six months and calling Will when his car breaks down in bad weather, because even after two years of not talking, Will is still the person in his life he trusts the most. Then it veers into a fake boyfriends story when Will brings Michael along with him to his company holiday retreat, and then they both go to Australia for business last minute (???) and confess their feelings for each other and it all wraps up neatly and somewhat bafflingly? It takes place in the same universe as The Christmas Deal, and in some ways I liked it better - the angst level was more my speed for a Christmas romance. But it did also feel like a narrative retread, and in some ways it rushed through the best parts of a fake boyfriends narrative, even one between two (former) best friends. Fine but not more than that. 

Grade: C

2023 Master List

Here we are again! Last year was an odd one for me, certainly for reasons beyond my reading list but it showed up there, too. I read 36 books in total, but 12 of those were in January and another 16 were in March-May, so for most of the year I read very little. A lot of the year my focus was on other kinds of media, or on writing, so looking back on my list wasn't particularly surprising, but it definitely clarified how I had approached different parts of my year, and what I spent my leisure time on. 

A couple of days ago I was talking with friends about annual reading goals, and the desire to actually read through our entire 'to be read' piles, and the fiction of how satisfying that would be. I said that sometimes I think I could actually do it, I could actually read the 2.5 books per week I would need to in order to make it through all of the books that are on the list below the count. But of course, in order to do that, I would also need to not add any additional books to my list in a year. Which inevitably means that even if I got to 'book zero' by the end of 2023, it would be a lie, because I know there are books coming out in 2023 that I will want to read! The list is always repropagating itself, because even if I somehow managed to read all of the books out of the millions and millions that have already been written (a task that I will obviously never complete), there are always new books to be added, and thank god for that.

However! I do still find value in both the overall attempt, fruitless though it always is, and also in the satisfaction I do genuinely derive when I finally cross off a book that's been on this list since I started this blog almost seven years ago, or when I end up adding five new books to this list because I read one book by an author and realize I want to read everything else they've written, too. And that, in the end, is the real reason I continue to keep this list and blog, because I love reading and I want to have a nice time reading things that are worth it to me to read. The first book I started reading this year already feels like a great one; here's hoping that continues through the year. Let's see where I land.