** Hey guys! **

It's been a good run (close to ten years now, whoa), but my interest in keeping the booklist up to date has waned over the past few years, and rather than pretending like I'll get back to it Any Day Now, I think it's time to call it to a close. Partly it's because that I'm not reading as much, most of my time going into my leatherworking business, and partly because I'm finding it increasingly difficult to write fairly about the books I read.



I started this site when I was a voraciously-reading undergrad who had inexplicably just realized that there were real, existing books that had both fantasy settings and queer protagonists. That I could actually have both, rather than having to choose between straight fantasy and gay boring shit bildungsromans. There weren't many, but they were out there, and by god I was going to find them.



Ten years later, the publishing scene is rather dramatically different. Queer protagonists are still less prevalent than straight ones, of course, but they are no longer the Outliers Who Should Not Be Counted that they once were, nor do publishers and back-cover summaries try so hard to hide it when they are. YA lit in particular has witnessed a boom in openly gay characters, possibly due to the many fanfic writers who are turning their energy to writing original fiction in the YA genre. More people are talking about gay fiction, and sites like tumblr make it incredibly easy to signal-boost book recs (and anti-recs), and get them seen by massive numbers of the people who will want to read them. (There was no tumblr when I started the booklist.) Gay fiction is coming out of its queer little ghetto and into the mainstream, making sites like mine less necessary than they once were.



I'll still write about the books I read -- you couldn't stop me if you tried -- but I'll be archiving them over at my books blog instead. Moreover, they're not exactly book reviews, as in "summarize plot, give star rating, help you decide whether this is something you want to read," it tends to be more "Gabriel rambles about something in this book on which he had Opinions," which can range from stylistic devices to sexual politics, as viewed through a queer lens.



Lastly, there turned out to be a lot of books that I'd read and rambled about on my blog, but never got around to posting on the booklist. It's a bit late to go back and write proper reviews for all of them, but I rounded them up and gave them an entry on here that links back to the relevant blog entry. (See left sidebar.)



So I won't be adding anything more to the booklist, but this site will stay up for as long as I own the webspace. My thanks goes out to everyone who's read me over the years and written in with recs and opinions of their own. May you read and enjoy many more gay books to come. :)