I’ve been reading a lot in the last few years. Since the start of 2022 I’ve been posting potted reviews of each book on Twitter and giving it an unreliable and inconsistent rating out of 5. Now that Twitter is even more of a raging bin fire than it ever was, I’m going to move these posts to Threads from the start of 2024. And I’ll also put the 2022 and 2023 lists here on my blog.

Here are my 2022 reviews…

1 The Order of Time 3/5

Why do we have past and future? Time is weird. Everything is weird. Poetic and philosophical, Rovelli lays it out well yet never compellingly enough for me to lose myself in the narrative. Enriching but oddly disappointing.

2 Will Grayson, Will Grayson 5/5

Yeah, late to this one. Entirely not what I expected and better for it. Alternating narratives, strong characters, funny, true, plus twists and a deeply implausible and fabulously over-the-top musical.

3 The Long Game 5/5

Engrossing, definitive story of how Doctor Who regenerated from 90s disappointment to 2005 triumph. First-person accounts of the stars aligning. False starts, chancers, and a core who always believed – plus RTD, ready and waiting.

4 Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun 4½/5

Terrific debut from @JONNYescribe. Believable characters. Authentically chicanx/latinx, fresh air in a genre painfully white. Sprinkles Spanish liberally. Tackles homophobia and long-distance sensitively.

5 Here’s to Us 5/5

Albertalli/Silvera successfully revisit the characters of “What if it’s Us” two years later. Didn’t want it to end. It did. I cried. Happy, bittersweet tears, lamenting the life I never had.

6 Jay’s Gay Agenda 3½/5

Sex-positive, with a genderqueer character and an inclusive, open, modern setting. Lots to enjoy, and I did, but a little by-the-numbers. Needed more focus on secondary characters – some interesting stories untold.

7 Golden Boys 3½/5

Enjoyed this more than Stamper’s others. Four narrators – took a while to sort them out in my head. I liked the concept: interlinked stories of friends spending a summer apart but connected. Missing a spark to lift it.

8 Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) 4/5

Sex-positive. Genuinely good advice. Unashamedly femme protagonist. Believable relationships. A plot I didn’t expect that felt very real, especially the protagonist’s reaction to it. Well written, enjoyable.

9 Out of Time, Into You 3½/5

You had me at inter-racial sex-positive time-travelling same-sex romance. Interesting premise, explored well. Faltered slightly near the end. Always worry about resolution of these stories: fine, and it fit.

10 Wranglestone, 4/5

Zombies, gays and romance – sound familiar? Terrific post-apocalyptic setup, and more twisty-mystery than I was expecting. Sweet central characters. Great chapter cliffhangers. Ending fine but felt a little abrupt.

11 You Asked for Perfect 3/5

I wanted to like this more than I did. The protagonist struggles to balance his school and personal lives – fine, but that’s about as far as it goes. Needed less focus on minutiae and more plot/character development.

12 Red, White & Royal Blue 5/5

Not flawless but an easy 5. Leaving aside the bittersweet alt US history of 2016+ and idealised politics, it teeters on the right edge of plausibility. Well researched. Not embarrassingly wrong about the UK. Expect an awful movie adaptation.

13 The Prophets 4½/5

A difficult, necessary read. Raw, bleak, devastating at times. And still beneath it all an undercurrent of joy and love that can’t be quenched. Beautifully written, but hard-going.

14 Gay Club! 4½/5

The always-reliable Simon James Green delivers again. Part love letter to LGBTQ+ school societies, part polemic, full awkward. With an unexpected turn near the end, and a barnstorming finish. Perfect for a TV adaptation IYAM.

15 In Deeper Waters 3½/5

Sweet fantasy M-M romance where *spoiler* meets *spoiler*, with pirates and ramshackle ports and draughty royal castles adding to the atmosphere. Rather heavy-handed on the “not like other boys” metaphors.

16 Yesterday is History 4½/5

Another time-travelling same-sex romance (they seem popular right now). Likeable, complex main characters; underused BFF. An unexplored backstory intrigues, helping to build a deeper world. Well-written, no padding.

17 All That’s Left in the World 4½/5

Great debut from @WriterikJB. Alternating narration by two companions (tricky) in a fractured post-apocalyptic USA. Rising tension, genuine peril, vivid and memorable scenes. Hate, hope and love.

18 Memorial 3/5

Took a while to finish this. Well-written, tender, but I struggled to get into it. An awful lot of not very much happens; that’s fine, it’s about character and feelings and all that good stuff. Not, though, a page-turner.

19 This Winter 4/5

Heartstopper novella #1. As you’d expect, effortlessly blends joy and love and sadness. Great to get inside the heads of Tori and Oliver as well as Charlie. And Nick and Charlie are wonderfully Nick and Charlie. Too short.

20 Boyfriend Material 5/5

Full of wit, realness and madness. Characters that pop. Dialogue that fizzes. Awkwardness that bites. Loved it.

21 Nate Plus One 3½/5

Disappointing after the sweet, warm wish-fulfilment of van Whye’s earlier Date Me Bryson Keller. Decent premise. OK but barely 2½D characters. Felt padded with travelogues. Lacked surprises.

22 Boy Meets Hamster 4/5

Aimed at the younger teen, a fast-paced and chaste junior romance with warm, likeable central characters. Comedy ranges from gentle to farce, never getting silly. Unexpectedly touching in parts.

23 Tiepolo Blue 3½/5

Great writing, some lovely touches and a recognisable slice of 90s Cambridge. But I struggled. An ever-present hum of bleakness, the volume slowly rising, was not a good incentive to keep reading.

24 The Glamour Boys 4½/5

Non-fiction: how secretly queer and queer-adjacent MPs in the 1930s knew what Hitler was doing and tried to convince the establishment. A fascinating history, all new to me, from one of today’s openly queer MPs.

25 Paris Daillencourt Is About to Crumble 4½/5

Alexis Hall is fast becoming a favourite author. This Bake Off take-off is full of laughs even as it reveals the painful, dominating, sabotaging inner thoughts of its narrator.

26 The Language of Seabirds 4/5

A sweet and slight almost-teen first love story. Nicely written and evocative of those unsure, what-am-I-and-what-is-he times. But the main character tends to react rather than act.

27 Solitaire 4/5

Alice Oseman’s first novel (written aged 18) focuses on Tori – the sister of Charlie from Heartstopper. Its implausible plot sits uneasily alongside Tori’s all-too-believable teenage life. Dark, angry, sometimes despairing. I enjoyed it.