A beautifully spare love story, giving just enough detail, and drawing the reader in with clever use of second-person pronouns - and never, so far as I can see, revealing the gender of the other party, the more readily to allow identification. To Levithan's great credit, the dictionary conceit didn't pall (and I say this as someone who's tired of ( Read more... )

The Noonday Demon consists of two interwoven threads ( Read more... )

I re-read only Troublemaker recently, but as it's the third novel (out of twelve) that features private investigator Dave Brandstetter, I'll introduce the first two novels, too ( Read more... )

A novel of gay life in New York, published 1978. The action spans the previous couple of decades, I suppose, and is book-ended by a series of letters between two onlookers - the nameless narrator in New York, and a friend in the South. These put me off a bit, being both lurid and confusing, but once I'd fought my way through them and got to the ( Read more... )

Having fallen shamefully behind, I'm going to chicken out and post a list of things I've read with some quick notes on what I thought. Then I'll be up to date and I can try to keep posting things that I finish when I actually finish them, good grief ( Read more... )

This left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I raced through it. On the other, I was distinctly underwhelmed when I'd finished doing so. It wasn't the laugh-a-minute the various celebrity endorsements proclaimed it to be, but who believes celebrity endorsements ( Read more... )

These two are sharing a post, because I read them both yesterday pm, and they have a lot to say to each other. Granted, they were written and are set over a century apart (1891 - 1997), and almost on opposite sides of the world (England - New Zealand), one was written by a man and features male protagonists, one by a woman and features female ( Read more... )

... and we're back to dead British authors writing about Italy and snobbery. (And, incidentally, earworming me something chronic.) Interesting clustering, given that in my head my ideal Big Happy Queer City is Paris, and nowhere in Italy at all. (Yes, I've already read The Well of LonelinessAs it is, we're back in Florence, perhaps twenty years ( Read more... )

I think four living authors in a row must be getting on for a record for me. (The next one is most definitely dead, but more on that later...)

Boy Meets Boy is unlike any other book I've read so far for this challenge. Partly it's the genre (teenage); partly it's the being by a living author and not being set in Italy. Rather, it is set in a high ( Read more... )

Of course, part of the reason that this challenge keeps throwing my past back at me is that I'm being drawn to the names I know. Names like 'The Happy Prince', or 'Clunton, Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun'. Names that have been part of my mind for longer than I can remember. Or names that I know because they've shown up on queerlit50Philip Hensher is a name ( Read more... )