Everybody is going to ask what I did on vacation. Aside from seeing some friends in San Francisco and eating, the honest answer is “not much.”
One of my favorite ways of killing time is to visit bookstores. (Legitimate bookstores, boys) In San Francisco, I visited A Different Light and picked up a copy of Michael Thomas Ford’s Last Summer. It’s got everything a gay novel should, including a gay man with a cheating boyfriend, someone coming out, someone being outed, a transexual, an AIDS scare, a hunky straight-ish handyman, and a pair of old queens who have been together forever. It was a page turner and I finished it in about two days.
As soon as I got to Portland, I picked up his next book, Looking For It. Going from one to the next probably wasn’t the smartest idea because the stories had very different paces. It was a good story, but it took a little longer to get into.
As one of my readers suggested, I visited Powel’s City of Books. Let me tell you that I spent a good four or five hours in their main store and probably another hour in their Technical Books store. The Technical book store was like a big geekgasm and I loved it. I picked up a book about Boeing jetliners while I was there. The book is a little out of date and was pretty cheap. Their main store was just incredible. I browsed all kinds of subjects for hours. I fed my Star Trek geek appetite with a couple of books I’d been meaning to pick up but never had. So I bought the first two in the series and will pick up the third one in the near future.
By the time I got back to my hotel to pick up my luggage, which they kindly stored for me, my backpack was getting heavy, even though the two Michael Thomas Ford books had been put in my luggage.