David Boley > Recent Status Updates

Light-hearted, gay read. waiting for the plots to converge.

There are some really funny one-liners so far.

This author likes to write about “cock” and the opening chapter of this book is very enticing.

Oh my goodness! What a tale…

This author has to be one of this generation’s leading voices in blackness, queerness and the intersection of the two. You don’t have to be black or queer to take in the truths he exposes.

“One of those who assaulted him was Lenny Murphy, ringleader of the Shankill Butchers, a gang that lifted Catholics off the street at night, tortured them, then murdered them with butcher’s knives.“

I’ve learned so much from this book.

at times and in many ways, it’s as though I’m reading the story of my own life.

so far, so good. A letter written to explain the life that resulted in a broken man, living in new fear of his past actions.

“One thing that I’ve noticed about dreams is the way you have to stay with whatever strange task they set you… You have to keep doing these things until you wake and lie there, strung between worlds, your jaw aching, your T-shirt stuck to your chest with sweat.”

Instead of Puritan hard work and failed get rich schemes… life can be sequins and song.

i’m abandoning this book.

“Life is too long, despite the cliché. Too long, and sometimes too painful. But I imagine I have made it too far. I imagine, somewhere around some corner, the best part is still coming.”

“I understand what it is to be sad, even when everyone around you is demanding your happiness—and what are we to do with all of that pressure other than search for a song that lets us be drained of it all?”

This line from the essay “Under Half-Lit Fluorescents: The Wonder Years And The Great Suburban Narrative” gives the premise for the book and the collection of essays therein.

Why am I reading this? It might as well be a work of fiction because most of the references are lost on me.

So deep and provocative yet also very cute and very funny.

Oh the number of times I’ve had this conversation with myself,

“Fuck love and just get fat.”

“… you’re going to have to figure something out. You see all these men over fifty, these skinny men with mustaches. Imagine all the dieting and exercise and effort of fitting into your suits from when you were thirty! And then what? You’re still a dried-up old man. Screw that...”

Through a wide cast if characters, the author captures so many facets of my lived experience as a gay man. This book is required reading for any man on his coming-out journey.

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

“How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories: … The regret of Robert. The agony of Freddy. His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before. He tries but cannot let it go.”

Less in Germany - “At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile. At four and nine?”

“like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well.”

““How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting? ”

the author’s style is superb. The story… seems almost biographical in parts. Arthur P. Less is highly relatable.

Great Narration.

Damn... my loan expired. I am REALLY enjoying this book. This author loves to use his words and by doing so has created an epic novel that is, in turns, beautiful and grotesque. I can hardly wait to finish it.