Sometimes in July, I ran out of time to blog. I had photos to edit, trips to go on, stories to write, cosplay to plan…etc. I had life with Rainstorm to enjoy. In August, we went on vacation to London, eventually ending up at IneffableCon, all of which I’ll talk about in future posts, one day. I got back to Texas in late August, and have spent the time since then basically busy with a million other things. Enough so that, as you’ve seen, I’ve hardly even had time for reading my normal fanfic stuff.

Since July, I’ve listened to six audiobooks – one while I was editing photos in Europe, all the rest in the six weeks since I’ve gotten home. Audiobooks are great for errands and chores! But they’ve stacked up, and I’ll never get back to full reviews of some of these, so I might as well do another roundup post…

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (read by Julie Maisey)
Honestly? I barely remember this story. I liked it a lot. I remember that. I put the sequel, which releases next year, immediately onto my TBR. But I remember very little about it. It was a comfort-listen, great to not have to get so deep into while I edited all the photos taken in Berlin and at Berlin Pride. I wish I’d written something down about it at the time. Might have to revisit before the next one releases. In any case, this is Griffiths doing typically-lovely Griffiths. Love her work!

The Boyfriend Subscription by Steven Salvatore (read by Ellis Evans and Kirt Graves)
I swear, half of gay romance these days is Aziracrow fanfic. This one was soooooo GO-coded. One protagonist is a rich man who has distanced himself from his family and who is scared of love. The other protagonist is a redheaded poor man who just lost everything, including his gardening store. Enter a fake-dating arrangement, and you have the perfect strangers-to-lovers AU. It was great. Loved every second of it. Also, weirdly, I enjoyed the narration, even though one reader (Evans) narrated The Nightmare Before Kissmas and I detested his narration there. Huh.

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson (read by William DeMeritt)
Speaking of detested narration, this one was awful. Which was unfortunate, because this book is wonderful! Back when Sanderson released his four-secret-projects books, this was the one I most looked forward to. It was the last to release, in late 2023, and I was going to listen to the audiobook. It was the only audiobook that year that wasn’t read by Michael Kramer and/or Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. Given that the duo read most of the Cosmere novels, and they read the other secret projects (including a non-Cosmere novel), it would’ve made more sense for DeMeritt to read the non-Cosmere and for Kramer to read this one. But there you are. Anyway, I tried listening to this back in 2023, but couldn’t get past the narration. At the time, I was too busy writing and reading fanfic to read a physical book, so I put it off. And off. And off. Finally, late in Aug, I decided to just listen anyway. And I loved the book. Yet still hated the narration. Sigh.

Look Up, Handsome by Jack Strange (read by Laurie Kynaston)
Um, remember that whole thing about gay romance being Aziracrow fanfic? This one is even more so. One protagonist owns a bookshop. In Wales. Which he’s losing to a family member who cares more about “business” than kindness. The other is a famous writer who literally drives a Bentley and who rarely ventures back into town because of his family’s fall from grace. There’s a best friend who reads tarot and sees auras and makes predictions. There’s a TV presenter who is basically Jimbriel (no, I won’t explain further). There are lines in the book that are actual throwbacks to moments in Good Omens. If this book wasn’t originally a fanfic, or at least envisioned as one, I’ll eat my nonexistent hat. I devoured it. Not just for the fanfic aspects – the book was so cute and lovely and perfect.

Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner (read by Zim Avaltrades and Dana Varden)
Found this sapphic romance at random on a shelf at Half Price Books, and it was available on Libby from my library so I dove in. The good: This was a lovely story with interesting characters. The adhd and autism aspects were extraordinarily well-written. I was literally sending lines from the story to Rainstorm (who is audhd, while I’m autistic) that mirrored IRL conversations we’ve had. It was perfect. The bad: I don’t known if the smut was poorly written or if the two narrators were uncomfortable reading it, but one way or another, the smut parts read very wooden and cringey. Sigh. I’ve yet to experience sapphic smut that was actually hot, which is really fucking sad!

The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards (read by John Hopkins and Anna Burnett)
This is my third read by Edwards, and I quite enjoyed 99% of it. A dinner party, secrets, murder, and throwbacks to the summer of ’99, when all the attendees of the dinner party worked on a dot-com project together at uni. It’s a story about psychopaths, full of a number of twists that I sometimes saw coming, sometimes not. Everything unravels slowly between present/past storytelling. Loved that. The 1% I didn’t like was the last bit of epilogue, done, as usual, for potential twist. It could have been left off without any impact to the story, and mostly just made me roll my eyes and make this face: 😒 As for the narration, I particularly enjoyed Hopkins’ reading. My only quibble was that the two narrators read at wildly different speeds, so I had to change my speed settings each time the audiobook swapped narrators.