Matthew reads, I guess...

So, I recently had to clear a good chunk of books off my shelf because, as it turns out, I’ve managed to fill two entire shelves… Oops. But then, because I have no self-control, and found a gift card for a certain major UK book retailer, I ended up getting five new ones that I didn’t have room for, and The Outrage by William Hussey was one of those five. Also, if you want the video version of this post (CLICK HERE) I will mention now, the first page of this book is a content warning about how the whole thing is set in an alternate UK where there was a far-right government takeover, and consequently includes mentions of homophobia, homophobic language, mention of ethnic cleansing, self-harm, mention of suicide and scenes of violence. I figure, since the book mentions that so early, I should as well, and if those sound like things you don’t want to read, perhaps give this book a miss. But, to now continue as normal, the good bestie, the blurb, says that there are rules for everything, i...

 If you want the video version of this post (CLICK HERE) So, this is quite the tonal departure from pretty much all the other books I’ve written about thus far on this blog, and I suppose it’s to say that in a shock twist, I do actually read books that don’t centre around queer characters. It doesn’t happen very often, because why should I read about non-queer characters if I don’t have to? But still, I read Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky – the novel which inspired the 2009 video game of the same name. Now, I’m writing about this book because it’s one of those that I’ve had on my shelf, probably, for years – alongside a series of Dragon Age books. And it finally made its way off my shelf because I got around to playing the game, after having the game sat in my Steam library for years. For a quick review of the game: I was underwhelmed, and I don’t agree with the 81 it has on Metacritic. But ultimately, I figured that since the game was based off a book, the book would do the sto...

If you want the video version of this post (CLICK HERE) So, this post comes as the first recommendation I got in my YouTube comments, and it was on my Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun video. This recommendation came from Nadia Lampis, and it was for Glitterland by Alexis Hall. And I’ll give the content warning here at the beginning: This book has mention of suicide. Now, I read the e-book of this, because I wasn’t going to spend £30 on a physical copy (even though the price has since dropped), so I used the Amazon listing description in place of the blurb. So, to paraphrase it: Ash Winters used to be the golden boy of the literary scene, but now he’s kind of washed up. Then, at a stag party, he meets “Essex boy Darian Taylor”, who is an aspiring model who makes Ash laugh. And finally, Ash has been living in his own shadow so long that he can’t see the light for the glitter. So, the gig with this book is that Ash needs to get out of his own way to be able to fall in love – which h...