Because I have been stuck in the book I was reading, I decided that some distraction in the form of light reading was in order. Which for me means that I randomly open a book of my gay romance collection. What people tend to call gay romance.
I say it's light reading for several reasons, the most obvious being that m/m books tend to be amazingly short. I'm not sure I'd call a story that is only 90 pages long - small pages with big font at that - a novel. But alright. (To be fair, only two of the 11 novels I've read last week were under 100 pages long.)
As for the other reasons...
Mostly, there seem to be two categories when it comes to 'gay romance': sex or schmoop. Or both. You can find lots of books where the sex scenes take up more space than anything halfway resembling plot. Or you stumble across those books that are so cheesy you might be in danger of clogging your arteries just from reading. It gets worse when you find something that's cheesy beyond belief and contains lots of sex scenes. And not even well written sex scenes, oh no.
As someone who has read tons of fanfiction over the years I have read enough bad sex scenes to not even really notice anymore. To be honest, I have read so many sex scenes, that by now I usually just gloss over them or skip them entirely. Believe me, there will come a point at which you've read it all, probably at least half a dozen times. The sad truth is: just because someone is a published author doesn't automatically mean they write good erotica. In fact, all of the best sex scenes I have read have been written by fanfic authors. Go figure.
Also, if you think that male authors would be better at writing m/m scenes you'd be sadly mistaken.
To get back on track with this post, between the bad/too many sex scenes and the schmoopy cheese, the one thing that usually is missing is the plot. And characterization.
All this means that reading these books may be fun (I would hope so, at least), but it sure as hell isn't something that requires you to think or even pay very much attention. Light reading.
What annoys the hell out of me and can take a lot of fun out of reading them, is the often bad editing. A whole bunch of these novels has only been published as ebooks. And a lot of ebook publishers don't spend money on editors. Spelling and grammar errors, continuity SNAFUs, sentences that just don't make any sense - it's all there. Better get used to it if you want to read these books.
There are exceptions of course.
The first books that always come to mind are Marquesate's Special Forces series. These books deserve to be called books by the page count alone. There's plot, there are fleshed out characters, there's development, there's a level of realism that's shaking at times. (Hint: you can download the books for free at her homepage.)
There's Sean Kennedy's Tigers and Devils, which is funny, intelligent, and doesn't contain even one explicit sex scene.
There are, of course, Josh Lanyon's books, which are mostly mystery and crime with a main character that happens to be gay. I recommend reading the Adrien English Mysteries and Holmes and Moriarity.
As for me, I'm still on this reading binge. Until I'm starting to overload, or until I read something that's bad enough to make me not want to open another of these books for a while. Let's see what happens first.
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