Sex With Strangers

Rating:
Summary: Have you ever considered "Sex with Strangers?"
Review: Geoffrey Rees' first novel attempts to not only answer that question in the abstract, with many off the cuff thoughts ranging from lustful to winsome, he also uses his lead character Thomas to address the issue. Rees allows Thomas to lead the reader through a whirlwind of exploits, both personal and sexual, involving people that the audience must define as strangers or friends. A recurring question in the novel is one of how well anyone on this whirling dervish of a planet really knows one another. Sex is one form of knowing, but as Thomas and his Chicago cronies Jane and Michael (not the adorable brother and sister from Mary Poppins) point out, the best relationships for Post Modern Homosexuals to become involved in (or Pomo Homos as they call themselves) are those that employ "lust without love; love without lust."

For anyone who has ever fallen in love with a city or a group of people on the first meeting, this novel will hit home. Rees describes both Chicago and New York City with love and affection, as though he is remembering two long lost lovers--recounting each of their most breathtaking and disheartening points. The relationships that define Thomas as a man emerging from the cocoon of adolescence are immediate kinships between himself and people he would not have considered befriending if given the choice--their attachments to one another defy explanation and are therefore stronger than those which are sought out.

Thomas is a character for all seasons: he experiences total abandon, confusion in the face of new attractions, and is as hopeful as the next wide-eyed romantic that love will eventually find him.

Pick up this novel with a glass of wine, a sense of humor, a love of adventure and an open mind and you are sure to enjoy this playful romp through one young mans first collegiate year.

Rating:
Summary: Speaks for itself
Review: The best possible way to review this book is allow it to speak for itself. Take, for example, this passage, from page 174: "I looked at my watch and wondered where he was at that exact moment, what he was doing, whether he was thinking of me, missing me, suffering as I suffered, counting the minutes until we would be together again, the intervening time, like Zeno's paradox, seeming somehow insurmountable, each passing second nothing but a painful reminder of all the other seconds which must yet come to pass, the possibility of his return requiring the invention of a whole new calculus, a mathematics of love and desire and obsession and anxiety to describe the sick geometry of feeling where our lives intersected, to explain my own future survival, understanding like death, inevitable, yet grace somehow always intervening, four days left, two, one, twelve hours, six, three, one, thirty minutes, fifteen, ten, five, one, twenty seconds, ten, five, one-fifth, one-tenth, and on and on and on into an eternity of darkness. Would it ever end?" Funny--just what I was thinking.

Rating:
Summary: "Sex w/Strangers" is just the beginning...
Review: This book struck me as something that most books strike me as, a straight person, just being "skanky"... just by reading the title... but, this book isn't like that... if your "homophobic"... this isn't for you... but, i found this book great... one of my favorites... i'm proud to be a "Pomo-Homo"...

Rating:
Summary: Speaks for itself
Review: This book struck me as something that most books strike me as, a straight person, just being "skanky"... just by reading the title... but, this book isn't like that... if your "homophobic"... this isn't for you... but, i found this book great... one of my favorites... i'm proud to be a "Pomo-Homo"...