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If I see a holiday-related book before the holiday, I may read it if it looks interesting, but I don't go out of my way to read them on purpose. I may save a Christmas-related book for December when I'm more in the mood to read about trimming trees.

Now to my books!

The A-List:

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig (A): What a book! And written in 2019. A group of people start sleepwalking through the United States right before a pandemic. It’s been compared to The Stand a lot, which I agree with. However, this book predicted a lot of the past few years while being completely fiction and gets political, although all the political people are fictional…you know who they represent. Still, this was a book I couldn’t put down even though it’s 800 pages. I’m about a third of the way through the sequel, Wayward, which is playing out like a second season of a show that should have remained a limited series, but it has potential to pick up.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (A): A white woman writer is visiting her Chinese-American woman writer frenemy (race is important to the plot), and her friend chokes and dies. The woman grabs her frenemy’s work in progress on the way out the door, makes some few edits and presents it as her own work, despite it being a very Chinese story. It raises so many good questions, and I am sure it's being adapted into a film or limited series as I type this! Very unreliable and unlikeable narrator yet I couldn't put the book down.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper (A-): As I’m getting into birding myself, I found this book fascinating as Cooper recounts his adventures while seeking out birds and being Black and gay. He does detail the incident in Central Park, which I vaguely remember hearing about but had forgotten about. I wasn’t familiar with his work with Marvel though, but it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book.

Moby Dyke by Krista Burton (A-). In 2021, there were only around 23 bars for lesbians, and Burton decides to visit them all to find out why they are disappearing and what the clientele and owners are like. It’s a fun book, and the good news is that several new spaces for queer women have opened since she started her project.

The B-List:

Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style by Paul Rudnick (B+): Nate meets Farrell Covington, the son of a rich conservative family, his freshman year of college, and the novel tells the story of their relationship through 40 years. Trigger warnings: It does go through the 1980s AIDS situation, so there are sad parts. However, this is the guy who wrote Addams Family Values, and it’s a loose reimagining of his own life. 

The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch (B+) YA gay fiction that doesn’t focus on romance! (It’s there though). The main character gets outed in a viral moment of his secret plans to Prompose to his crush, and he deals with the aftermath as the crush (straight) helps him. It takes place in small town Michigan and deals with that world too.

The Jolliest Bunch: Unhinged Holiday Stories by Danny Pelligrino. I loved Pelligrino’s first book, and his second is focused on holiday (includes Halloween and Thanksgiving) adventures in his life. It’s not quite David Sedaris, but it’s still pretty good.

Teacher of the Year (B-) and Mistletoe & Mishigas by M.A. Wardell (B): First two in a quartet (the second two haven’t been published) featuring gay male romance among educaters. They’re a sexualized version of Hallmark movies, but there is a lot of romance and fun. Wardell had improved his writing by the second book, but I prefer the story and characters in the first.

The C-List

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll (C): Apparently this is based on the Ted Bundy murders, but I never really got that (but I also know nothing about the Ted Bundy murders. Maybe it would have helped me enjoy the book more). It’s about two women, one already murdered, the other one dealing with the aftermath in her sorority and trying to help the mysterious woman who is saying it’s connected to a crime in Colorado. It just didn’t grab me at all.

If You Would Have Told Me by John Stamos (C): While I enjoyed his stories of his years on GH, the book became incredibly tiresome as Stamos name dropped and made him come off as an arrogant, egotistical jerk. Have mercy on us readers. (He did have a good ghostwriter who was credited...barely.)