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brianreadsbooks's Reviews (820)
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I don’t typically love a Hollywood memoir, but I do love a big, funny gay man who has found a way to be famous in America. So I took a chance on Branum’s book.
He shares his personal story from a young kid growing up seeking his father’s approval in a small town, and graduating from Berkley and later law school in Minnesota, on his circuitous journey to becoming a successful TV writer and stand-up. I could relate to his beginnings – growing up gay in a small town sucks, especially with a father who doesn’t understand you and can be emotionally withholding. I enjoyed hearing how his particular version of blossoming out of that was to follow his passion for comedy.
While he shares a fair bit of serious life story, Branum never loses the comedy. Much of it comes through the (seemingly endless) footnote asides. There are also some over-the-top stories (did you know he “threatened” Chelsea Clinton and had the FBI descend on his house in college? Careful what you write in the school newspaper, kids).
This one gets rave reviews from other readers. I think I should stop reading this type of book, because I already know they aren’t going to get 4 or 5 stars from me. I always keep hoping for David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs when I pick these up. Branum is an inspiration for gay kids, and My Life as a Goddess was decently enjoyable for me. If you like light comedic memoirs you will probably love this one.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
He shares his personal story from a young kid growing up seeking his father’s approval in a small town, and graduating from Berkley and later law school in Minnesota, on his circuitous journey to becoming a successful TV writer and stand-up. I could relate to his beginnings – growing up gay in a small town sucks, especially with a father who doesn’t understand you and can be emotionally withholding. I enjoyed hearing how his particular version of blossoming out of that was to follow his passion for comedy.
While he shares a fair bit of serious life story, Branum never loses the comedy. Much of it comes through the (seemingly endless) footnote asides. There are also some over-the-top stories (did you know he “threatened” Chelsea Clinton and had the FBI descend on his house in college? Careful what you write in the school newspaper, kids).
This one gets rave reviews from other readers. I think I should stop reading this type of book, because I already know they aren’t going to get 4 or 5 stars from me. I always keep hoping for David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs when I pick these up. Branum is an inspiration for gay kids, and My Life as a Goddess was decently enjoyable for me. If you like light comedic memoirs you will probably love this one.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
I can honestly say this book is unlike anything I’ve read before. I wasn’t sure I would like this for the first quarter of the book, but once I sank into it I ended up LOVING it.
“When her taxidermist father commits suicide, Jessa-Lynn Morton takes over the family business while the rest of her family crumble with grief in bizarre ways. A dark and oftentimes comedic tale of love and loss.” Through a back and forth cadence of current and past scenes, Arnett slowly reveals the hidden, unspoken, and intertwined stories of this family of lost/confused/doing-just-fine-thank-you souls.
Fair warning: she gets graphic. There’s a lot of meat and innards. But it’s important meat and innards!
It’s out on June 4, and I recommend a preorder/add to TBR if you love darkly funny family dynamics, odd premises, lesbian protagonists, taxidermy, #onlyinflorida stories, or writing that’s so amazingly visceral you feel fully in the moment alongside the characters.
After I finished the book, I learned from Arnett’s twitter profile she’s a rad lesbian librarian from Orlando. And that’s why this book was written so well. She understood the characters and the setting. She used that to envelop the weirdness of the worlds of taxidermy and queer dating into a story about trauma and grief and family that left me feeling things. I just ordered her short story collection Felt in the Jaw because I want more!
This book centers queer women. The story isn’t about their queer identity, per se, but (from my gay male POV) reflects the importance of it in the larger story of their lives. I loved this. It’s the reality we live as queer people who exist in the world as part of families, jobs, and sometimes…taxidermied peacocks.
I received this advanced reader copy from Tin House (my first ARC – thank you!).
Follow me on Instagram for more #bookstagram reviews and photos: @brianreadsbooks
“When her taxidermist father commits suicide, Jessa-Lynn Morton takes over the family business while the rest of her family crumble with grief in bizarre ways. A dark and oftentimes comedic tale of love and loss.” Through a back and forth cadence of current and past scenes, Arnett slowly reveals the hidden, unspoken, and intertwined stories of this family of lost/confused/doing-just-fine-thank-you souls.
Fair warning: she gets graphic. There’s a lot of meat and innards. But it’s important meat and innards!
It’s out on June 4, and I recommend a preorder/add to TBR if you love darkly funny family dynamics, odd premises, lesbian protagonists, taxidermy, #onlyinflorida stories, or writing that’s so amazingly visceral you feel fully in the moment alongside the characters.
After I finished the book, I learned from Arnett’s twitter profile she’s a rad lesbian librarian from Orlando. And that’s why this book was written so well. She understood the characters and the setting. She used that to envelop the weirdness of the worlds of taxidermy and queer dating into a story about trauma and grief and family that left me feeling things. I just ordered her short story collection Felt in the Jaw because I want more!
This book centers queer women. The story isn’t about their queer identity, per se, but (from my gay male POV) reflects the importance of it in the larger story of their lives. I loved this. It’s the reality we live as queer people who exist in the world as part of families, jobs, and sometimes…taxidermied peacocks.
I received this advanced reader copy from Tin House (my first ARC – thank you!).
Follow me on Instagram for more #bookstagram reviews and photos: @brianreadsbooks
Lawlor did something in this story I’ve never seen before (and I *have* read another book with a gender-changing lead character). They created a fully realized character in Paul, with consistent thoughts, feelings, emotions even as he tries on roles and genders stolen or put upon him like clothes from a thrift shop. Almost to the letter, Lawlor explores what it means to come into LGBT adulthood. The result is an utterly enthralling coming-of-age for a single-yet-plural human in the pre-iPhone 1990s.
Also, this book has so much sex. All kinds of sex. Graphic, specific, deep, passionate, apathetic, full-on, hardcore sex. And it’s exciting, even when it’s not the kind of sex I’ve wanted or even thought about before. But it’s not about sex, it’s about the relationships and self-exploration. But it *is* about the sex, because you can’t untangle those things.
Read it if you’re a queer of any kind. This book is for you, to challenge you to think outside your letter. Cishet folks are welcome, but you’re a guest in Lawlor’s very queer house.
A taste (from the beginning – no spoilers here):
“He decided to break out the unopened European-style briefs his old sociology professor had inappropriately brought him back from Spain last summer. They looked enough like girls’ underwear and wouldn’t disrupt the line. He dropped his swishy loose army pants and his shoplifted French-cut boxers, and stared at his penis until it shrank, tucked itself into the tight little crawl- space of his former balls. He stepped into the black briefs and admired his smooth front with his hands and eyes, then found the red lace bra he’d borrowed from that girl in New York.”
I’m really glad I picked this up at Gay’s the Word book shop in London – it was a perfect read for Pride.
Follow me on Instagram for more #bookstagram reviews and photos: @brianreadsbooks
Also, this book has so much sex. All kinds of sex. Graphic, specific, deep, passionate, apathetic, full-on, hardcore sex. And it’s exciting, even when it’s not the kind of sex I’ve wanted or even thought about before. But it’s not about sex, it’s about the relationships and self-exploration. But it *is* about the sex, because you can’t untangle those things.
Read it if you’re a queer of any kind. This book is for you, to challenge you to think outside your letter. Cishet folks are welcome, but you’re a guest in Lawlor’s very queer house.
A taste (from the beginning – no spoilers here):
“He decided to break out the unopened European-style briefs his old sociology professor had inappropriately brought him back from Spain last summer. They looked enough like girls’ underwear and wouldn’t disrupt the line. He dropped his swishy loose army pants and his shoplifted French-cut boxers, and stared at his penis until it shrank, tucked itself into the tight little crawl- space of his former balls. He stepped into the black briefs and admired his smooth front with his hands and eyes, then found the red lace bra he’d borrowed from that girl in New York.”
I’m really glad I picked this up at Gay’s the Word book shop in London – it was a perfect read for Pride.
Follow me on Instagram for more #bookstagram reviews and photos: @brianreadsbooks
My notes as I read this book: manhood/boyhood, fear/love, inevitability, loss and yearning and paralysis, hope-but-don’t-let-hope-get-you, glimpses of abuse and family (which is how you remember trauma, in pieces, non-chronologically), wild beautiful creature, survival looks like many things, stay/go/live/die, whiteboys have options, maybe this time.
Washington gives us a gift with this collection of interrelated stories set in QPOC Houston. This is some of the best writing I’ve experienced in years. Short stories are often intriguing but rarely feel whole. Washington shows the fullness of story and character that can be achieved in a short few pages. Every one was great and some just phenomenal. I’m an impatient reader, but each story here made me put the book down, sip my coffee, and *think* for a while before I continued on. It’s definitely in my top 3 for 2019.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
Washington gives us a gift with this collection of interrelated stories set in QPOC Houston. This is some of the best writing I’ve experienced in years. Short stories are often intriguing but rarely feel whole. Washington shows the fullness of story and character that can be achieved in a short few pages. Every one was great and some just phenomenal. I’m an impatient reader, but each story here made me put the book down, sip my coffee, and *think* for a while before I continued on. It’s definitely in my top 3 for 2019.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
I deeply enjoyed this book. There are multiple reasons I wasn't certain I would (matter-of-fact writing style, starts out in IMO overused war-time England, centers on a seemingly fairly "plain jain" character). But after the first couple chapters, there's a pivotal moment, and from then on I was sucked in–I read it all in just a few sittings.
Patricia Cowan is a very old woman who lives in a nursing home. She forgets things and gets confused regularly. Some days there is a lift in the home; other days it is not there and she quietly uses the stairlift. She also remembers the entirety of her lives before she came to the home. Lives, because she remembers two. She had 3 children. She had 4 children. She was married to a man. She was partnered with a woman. She lived in England her whole life. She spent half her time in Italy.
This book is like a dual epic: taking you through Patricia/Trisha/Trish/Pat's entire lives and the history of the world surrounding them. It offers up two distinct alternate histories of the modern world. But epics are usually quite long. Somehow Walton manages to accomplish this feat in an average number of pages, revealing an individual's thoughts and emotions and the expansive world backdrop in an equally compelling way.
What this book lacks in prose, it more than makes up for in the questions it offers up, and gets so close to answering (but doesn't - that's your job): Does a person's entire life change based on a single decision? Just one life, or history itself? Who's happiness matters - mine, yours, the world?
I'm on a streak of saying this, but it's true for this book as well... This one was unlike anything I've read before!
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
Patricia Cowan is a very old woman who lives in a nursing home. She forgets things and gets confused regularly. Some days there is a lift in the home; other days it is not there and she quietly uses the stairlift. She also remembers the entirety of her lives before she came to the home. Lives, because she remembers two. She had 3 children. She had 4 children. She was married to a man. She was partnered with a woman. She lived in England her whole life. She spent half her time in Italy.
This book is like a dual epic: taking you through Patricia/Trisha/Trish/Pat's entire lives and the history of the world surrounding them. It offers up two distinct alternate histories of the modern world. But epics are usually quite long. Somehow Walton manages to accomplish this feat in an average number of pages, revealing an individual's thoughts and emotions and the expansive world backdrop in an equally compelling way.
What this book lacks in prose, it more than makes up for in the questions it offers up, and gets so close to answering (but doesn't - that's your job): Does a person's entire life change based on a single decision? Just one life, or history itself? Who's happiness matters - mine, yours, the world?
I'm on a streak of saying this, but it's true for this book as well... This one was unlike anything I've read before!
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
The sleepy dreaminess of this book fits the narrator’s plodding remembrance of his past. The prose carries the reader slowly through the story of a teenaged boy who crashes hard into lust and love for the first time. Besson captures that feeling that nothing else in the world exists, the exhilaration when you’re nearby that one most important crush, the hours and days spent waiting and worrying that you may never see them again and that when you do, you won’t live up to what they desire. It’s a story about how we don’t forget these first infatuations/loves and how they can change our entire perception of the world forever. And it’s about the circumstances that allow us to open to the world or be closed to everyone, even ourselves.
I can’t help but compare this book to Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Especially since this book came out over a decade after, I think it’s fair. Both books are about a young man coming into his adult sexuality and discovering for a brief period “the one”. And both are reflections from an adult man, looking back on those years wistfully and lovingly and wondering. But while CMBYN explores a wild, sometimes unbelievable (though Aciman makes you believe it) series of adventures, Lie With Me paints a tableau, almost in grayscale, of a place and time that doesn’t move or change, where the protagonist exists and comes into himself but, critically, leaves and joins the rest of us in the revolving, changing, shrinking world.
While this wasn’t my favourite book this year, it was beautifully written and translated, and at a (generously spaced) 150 pages, it’s worth grabbing and devouring.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
I can’t help but compare this book to Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. Especially since this book came out over a decade after, I think it’s fair. Both books are about a young man coming into his adult sexuality and discovering for a brief period “the one”. And both are reflections from an adult man, looking back on those years wistfully and lovingly and wondering. But while CMBYN explores a wild, sometimes unbelievable (though Aciman makes you believe it) series of adventures, Lie With Me paints a tableau, almost in grayscale, of a place and time that doesn’t move or change, where the protagonist exists and comes into himself but, critically, leaves and joins the rest of us in the revolving, changing, shrinking world.
While this wasn’t my favourite book this year, it was beautifully written and translated, and at a (generously spaced) 150 pages, it’s worth grabbing and devouring.
Follow me on Instagram for more reviews and book photos: @brianreadsbooks
I was recommended this book after enjoying Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. I finally bought it for #APIcelebrasian this month. Both reflect on contemporary society in Japan. I have almost no knowledge of the culture and they made me want to learn more.
Synopsis:
“Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her…in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers…so she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later…she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations...”
My brief thoughts for this brief book:
I loved the character of Keiko, and found her extremely relatable. My uneducated assessment is she lives with undiagnosed autism, and the book does a great job of portraying her as confident in her own life. The store gives her an environment that gives purpose and helps her thrive. And she’s really, really good at her job! But her family and the world want her to be “normal” and as she gets older (36 really isn’t that old!) they begin to question her life and push her toward other paths.
While I loved Keiko, I hated the character of Shiraha. I can’t say much more about that without spoilers. I understand his purpose in the story, so I’ll accept it, but it made the second half less enjoyable.
While not my favorite read of 2019, it was decidedly different than anything I’ve read before, and I liked the lead and the message. I also know that this book may be received completely differently by a Japanese reader, who lives and understands the culture. So, I feel unequipped to give it a number rating.
Follow me on Instagram for more book photos and reviews: @brianreadsbooks
Synopsis:
“Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her…in the convenience store she finds a predictable world mandated by the store manual, which dictates how the workers should act and what they should say, and she copies her coworkers…so she can play the part of a normal person. However, eighteen years later…she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations...”
My brief thoughts for this brief book:
I loved the character of Keiko, and found her extremely relatable. My uneducated assessment is she lives with undiagnosed autism, and the book does a great job of portraying her as confident in her own life. The store gives her an environment that gives purpose and helps her thrive. And she’s really, really good at her job! But her family and the world want her to be “normal” and as she gets older (36 really isn’t that old!) they begin to question her life and push her toward other paths.
While I loved Keiko, I hated the character of Shiraha. I can’t say much more about that without spoilers. I understand his purpose in the story, so I’ll accept it, but it made the second half less enjoyable.
While not my favorite read of 2019, it was decidedly different than anything I’ve read before, and I liked the lead and the message. I also know that this book may be received completely differently by a Japanese reader, who lives and understands the culture. So, I feel unequipped to give it a number rating.
Follow me on Instagram for more book photos and reviews: @brianreadsbooks