Saccharine, superfluous, and sybaritic

One thing I noticed about book blogs lately, well at least in my part of the world, is how many of them appear to be twee. And almost all of them write about young adult books. Now I love YA, and a good number of my all-time favorite reads are YA (Neal Shusterman's The Schwa Was Here and Gary D. Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars come to mind), but sometimes I yearn for a bookish conversation about a book for adults that I've just finished. Just the other day, for example, I finished John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, which is his investigative report on Elizabeth Holmes and her startup Theranos. I was dying to talk about it with someone. Fortunately, there was bf who listened to me rave about the book. Also, I gladly sent him YouTube links about Holmes. Hey, I take what I can get.

It's one of the most painful experiences a reader could have, no? Not being able to talk about books to other people. It feels . . . lonely. But I'll prefer this kind of loneliness to wallowing in sickly sweet conversations. I'd much rather drink this loneliness than to engage in a discussion where we just end up heaping praises on a particular book. And it's not just about arguing because you want to pick a fight. Sometimes, you just want to have a damn good reason for bringing out your knives and sharpening them when you encounter someone who has a totally different feeling on a book. There's nothing like a polarizing book to get your neurons firing.

I guess being in a book club helps, especially when they get you to read diverse titles. I belong to two actually. One's a quite popular one that meets publicly every month. The other one is a whole different banana. We don't even bring out our gadgets when we meet. And people can't post anything on the 'gram (ooohhh, the 'gram, I feel like a millennial) or Facebook (yikes, Facebook, I feel so old). In fact, I may even be compromising my membership just by writing about it. 

And speaking of books written for adults, I've been reading a lot of gay romance novels lately. And these aren't the saccharine, being-swept-off-one's-feet variety. I'm talking about non-vanilla (pistachio? rocky road?) sex in every chapter. Surprisingly, I find some of them really good. What surprised me is that there are quite a number of a few raunchy gay novels that are written by women. I guess it's a thing now. Although I have no idea how they do their research on the "good parts" of the stories. I think I'll make a blog post about these novels, as I have a mouthful to say about them. 

Fur babies!
Totally random pic, much like this post

So yes, I'm looking for something totally different but still pleasing to my palate. Something that can sting or burn. Something that can make people uncomfortable when they see me reading it. Something that will make good conversation fodder. Not necessarily extraordinary, just not ordinary.